Painting Poetry 

DENIS MAIR  

Denis Mair is very successful translator from Chinese language to English, thus recognizes Eastern and Western artistic emotions at same time. He is also a strong poet. I saw him writing poetry on the paintings and sharing those on Facebook some times.

Painting poetry is very interesting medium, but here specialty is that most of the paintings are abstract. The poet is watching a whole story in those abstract lines, He could watch a person dosing in the boat, a furious sky thus he is expressing these in his poems in his own way, at the same time expanding the artist vision. Poetry is about what is not seen by everyone, and painting is also about expressing in unknown language. Thus painter and poet both communicate in the way that painting and poetry both get vast meaning. Let us see, how he is creating Painting in poetry, sky pressing down on the spine of our earthly theater or Wayside plants catching sunlight. These poems are not only interesting but also give a new way of expression.

TRITON’S MANE, SEEN FROM BEHIND

(—my response to an image by Nico Vassilakis, posted March 14, 2024 on FB, in which I try not to overuse the word “fizz”)

it’s a fantabulous iteration… an implicate co-location…
and the flux is hosting an interplay among waveform ratios…
a default mode network (DMN) is hosting a circumambient swirl…
now this tarantella commandeers the DMN as its pinwheel pivot…
we watch it congelating and constellating in a Walpurgisnight of forms…
Triton must have commandeered a motorboat, and now he dozes at the tiller…
we watch the wake stretching behind his head like long silvery locks…
and underwater it appears as a bubble trail…
it’s a combinatoric entrainment of motor routines…
an emo-kinetic knack keeps it fluid and proportionate…
and the backwash spits out eternal objects into hidden lagrangeries…
and the dross of the churn is flung into concrescent serendipities…
and expiring foam offers bubble-hearts at the foot of Aphrodite’s shell
and the gnarl of letters is set a-fizz by a clash of incipiencies.

SWIRLS OF CLINGING FIRE

(for a painting by Chaled Res, posted March 14 on FB)

So much conflict unfolding against the backdrop of sky…

so much fear arising out of the darkness…
darkness even more foreboding than the sky’s hellscape…
sky pressing down on the spine of our earthly theater…
theater possessed by the madness of its dramaturge…
smoke that drifts on the wind in fire-reddened swirls…
the swirls appearing to cling to each other’s shapes
like ghosts of the passion that once held things together…
the agony of so many is the redness of this season’s backdrop…
at the moment of dissolution the sky becomes their theater…
wherein is performed the passion that they exist for..

SIX MEN OF THE DESERT

(—for Abdelhaq Djellab’s painting, now being shown at Alexandre Roubtzoff Gallery)

Across the sands of time they came, to arrive at teeming forms of knowledge….

textures splayed like galaxies are inner vistas of their enclosing forms…
light that created living things projects their souls as shadows…
within them the earliest imaginings offer shoulders for abstractions to stand on…
when the tower of shoulders turns rickety, we pine for a sturdy clavicle…
and relive our fascination for the most innocent figments…
we go halfway to greet those primal figures….
in hopes they will inspire flights of proto-abstraction.

THE WAY PLANTS CATCH SUNLIGHT
(for Natali Wienstein’s painting, posted Nov.24, 2023 on Facebook)

Wayside plants charm my attention with their way of catching sunlight.
Hidden in their outlines and details, they have a plan to go on living.
They arrive in this moment and proclaim their succulence,
greeting me with their green fuse that won’t burn out.
They draw up moisture to endure the midday heat;
in one morning I see them reliving all generations.
I go through my morning moods and daily trials,
bearing the buoyant imprint of their reticent presence.
I meet them on common ground, living forward and leaving death behind.
They live in the dream of themselves, and their lines are aurified by sunlight.

Denis Mair, American poet and translator, is a co-translator of Frontier Taiwan, an anthology of new poetry from Taiwan. His versions of works by Chinese poets have appeared in Literary Review, Chicago Review, Trafika, Kritya, Melic Review, Poetry Sky, Point No Point, The Temple, and other journals. His book of poems, Man Cut in Wood, was published by Valley Contemporary Press.