Words and Images

Hi everyone —

A cold week in January in Hamilton — and over much of the east coast.

Please check out the beautiful and haunting images created for my poem “Water Children” by Steven McCabe, on his site, www.poemimage.wordpress.com.   This poem was published in 2002 in my book Water Children, and it is one of those poems where I knew there were images behind the words; Steve has now caught the watery, ghostly-yet-alive spirit of the poem in his artwork.  I have just begun to fathom the submerged images Steve saw in my words.

Also on his site are several other “poemimages” by this talented visual artist, who is also a poet in his own right (write).

This leads me to think of the connections and links between different art forms — music, words, visual images, sculpture, dance and theatre.  A friend and I were talking recently about how Picasso’s huge painting Guernica, created in response to the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, is full of sound and movement — screams of horses and wounded people, bombs exploding, feet stamping, children crying, people running and falling, horses galloping — even though we “see” only oil on canvas.

Similarly, a piece of music can fill our minds with visual images, naturalistic or abstract.

The creative spirit speaks to us in many ways, and across time and geography, and it is good to feel we are connected in this way, nourished by the work of others in creating our own images, which in turn might inspire or touch more people, an infinite “web”.