DECEMBER 31, JOIN US, RIING OUT WILD BELLS!,

POETS, WRITERS, LISTENERS, LOVERS OF LITERATURE AND HISTORY, ATTEND: Lend us your eyes, your ears, your radiant and attentive presences! Come to Areopagitica Book Store, 3510 North High Street between 730 and midnight, on December 31, 2007 and ring in, or almost ring in, the new year of 2008! as Lord Tennyson so ably put it: Ring in the good that is to come. SPEND THE EVENING IN THE PRESENCE OF THE GREAT WRITERS, PAST and PRESENT. Punch, tea, coffee, cookies , conversation and lots of good solid literary work by writers living and dead, yet all alive. literary quizzzes, book raffles. Books to savor and to buy.
Suggested donations of five dollars or more will go to the Poets and Writers Guild of Central Ohio. Celebrate their upcoming publication, made possible through a Greater Columbus Arts Council grant,for War, Peace, Earth. Honor the Guild and its founder Dotte Turner. Words by your favorite authors read by YOU Your original prose and poetry welcome too. Bring cookies or snacks if you wish. C ome dressed as your favorite author if the spirit moves you..If you insist upon more information call 267 3085 and ask for Robert or Elizabeth Browning and leave your phone number.--And remember, "Marley was dead to begin with."--Ring in the good that is to come!

EDNA THROWS A PARTY

One of the most delicious exhibits anywhere in the U.S.A. is bound be be EDNA BOIES HOPKINS which will glimmer at the Columbus Museum of Art to March 2nd 2008! Edna died in 1937. She was, and is, a woodcut artist supreme. She's one of the supremes! The Hopkins often vacationed in France before and after the First World War. Like her some-what-contemporary Zelda Fitzgerald, herself no stranger to Paris night life--Edna loved parties, and some of her block prints are party invitations. I first met Edna at Keny Gallery, 300 East Beck St. You can read about her in a previous ArtScene, Women & Art: EDNA, March 21,2007.

TRIBUTARIES

TRIBUTARIES AND GILDA. Whenever I can I visit the National Galleryof Art in Washington D.C. There, around the time of Gilda Edwards' death in 2000, I saw an exhibit of paintings by artists who used to visit Monet on the river. The Impressionists, a few of Monet's close friends and their families, came there to paint and to visit, and, "kit and kaboodle," they stayed in Monet's house! They liked to paint the river, and they liked to fish on the river. They liked to eat the fish! A grocer's cart passed by each day. There was an actual green studio boat with an oil lamp in it. Sometimes Monet stayed on the boat all night. Sometimes it rained.. . . Somehow, the studio boat at night presented me with the image of a woman artist near death in a hospital.--In my poem the studio boat became a hospital bed, and Monet became the spirit of art which strengthens the woman. The woman is not actually Gilda Edwards, but Gilda's vivid imagination inspired me, and I dedicated the poem to her, and it was published and received an award from Flashpoint magazine.(I can't find the issue!)

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST IN INTENSIVE CARE
for Gilda Edwards, 1955 --2000.

Needles spring from her arms, tubes
meander the esophagus into what's left
of her stomach.
She knows the cool "port" of morphine.
"I'm tripping,"
she whispers. "It's raining
behind this screen.
My steel beds rockin!"

Distanced from bodily pain
she is able to imagine
somewhere else. Monet's bleached-green
studio boat, the sides hooked down.
"A tub," she giggles. A man sits beside
an oil lamp in the boat. She can sense
his being, solid, yet the color of charcoal dust.
Bowed above the thick paper while he tries
to explain in French, "this morning painted . . .
light, water, pure sky.
Now, a chalk study. . . One day
the Zambesi River."

He unwraps dry bread and a mango.
She manages a whiff. Ripe fruit. Brie.
Anaesthesia. The cavity of her stomach
fills with orchids and lilacs. She exhales
knows in her own way the painter will remain
beside her until day break. She hears
a series of bleeps, raindrops
from the monitor. She's unafraid. For years
this has been her strength. Breath.
The focusing . Images.

*******************


The Lure of Giverny is a tone poem of connections. Langston Hughes wrote: "I have known rivers, rivers as ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep with the rivers."
gs.

TRIBUTARIES: Monet, Gilda, and Edna

IN MONET'S GARDEN: THE LURE OF GIVERNY

Like a pond. With as many twists and turns as Langston Hughes "Rivers." --That's the way
Claude Monet's gardens and ponds will meander thru the upper realms of The Columbus Museum of Art, 480 East Broad Street, until January 20, 2008.
The show contains evrything from geometric abstraction to romantic impressionismto inventive garden scenes. Wall charts, audios, and photos, present and past present the chronology and connections of Monet's life and art! The melange of art and events works very very well.
Will Cotton's brazen "Flannpond " (New York, NewYork, 2002) attracted a lot of attention when I was there. --Monet did love cooking, you know--And over the years the ponds and the gardens and art groupies and Impressionism itself have gone through various phases of dishab ille and rejuvenation. Not to mention two world wars. Flannond shimmers with double entendres, many meanings.--Andthis is a marvelous show to look at!
Monet's colors--as in "The Artist's Garden, 1900," --are earthy, but not of this world.
Monet's brush strokes bear the chalky warmth of Degas'pastels, yet they are oils.
Monet's Field of Irises,-- they are Yellow Irises--is flat, layered, like farmland strung with jewels.--Some of Monet's lovely scenes become less abstract when you step back from them
and more abstract when you stand up close! And, of course, you'll see the legendary water Lilies, the Nympheas, which shimmer, float, and threaten to disappear.
Some of Han Xin's work is exhibited close to the Monet exhibit. Han Xin is a world class painter. A few years back I asked him, "how are you able to make your Giverny tributes shimmer without using gold or silver?" After some thought he answered:
"I was trained to draw. I can draw fountains. Light, shadows. With a pencil, graphite.
I think that has something to do with the way I can make my paintings seem to shine. Like water. "
The Giverny exhibit includes photographs of Monet and his blended family. In one tiny photograph we see Monet's earnest step daughter who, with her stepfather's guidance,
became a painter too! In a lovely painting, La Debacle, painted in 1892 by
Theodore Robinson, we see a well dressed, straw-chapeaued woman resting on a low garden wall. We know by the length and breadth of her hobbled skirt , that she has paused, letter in hand, to think of a lost love, perhaps, before the First World War.
Monet's history at Giverny blossoms with water lilies, flows like a river, and gleams like a pond. The Columbus Museum of Art is at 480 East Broad Street,614-221-4848.
www.columbus Museum.com
Transcribed on December 13, this post will continue with
"Tributaries and Gilda Edwards " and "Edna Boies Throws a Party!"