A published poem! (Barcelona Notebook #4)

Happy Valentine's Day! I've had a poem published in Vox Mom (Mom Egg Review) in a collection on the theme: LOVE OF IDENTITY/IDENTITY OF LOVE, curated by Sharon Dolin. If you would like to see the poem without further introduction, head right here (mine is number three).

My poem, Face card: Queen of Shadows, is a Barcelona poem from June 2015. On day eight of the workshop, we went to the Museu Picasso to see Picasso - Dalí   Dalí - Picasso, which paired works by the two artists at various stages of their careers. Sharon Dolin had sent us off with the suggestion to write a poem in a form. She offered the cinquain as a starting point. Five-line stanzas with the following syllable counts: 2, 4, 6, 8, 2. Here's a self-explanatory cinquain.

Syllable Game

first two

then double that

another pair makes six

now stretch the line way out to eight

and back

I was taken by an early Dalí portrait, paired with a somewhat earlier one by Picasso. Dalí reworked his portrait after meeting Picasso for the first time in 1926. To see the effect of Picasso on Dalí, follow this link and scroll in EXHIBITION until you find a page that looks like this:

There you will see Dalí's Portrait of My Sister (1923) on the right, as I saw it in the museum in June, paired with Picasso's neoclasical Portrait of Olga (1917).

The primary gesture of the poem "wrote itself" as I stood in the gallery, making notes and sketches. I turned it into a cinquain. My poem has four stanzas of five lines and follows the syllable pattern (with one change inspired by the portrait's shape).

Dalí's painting is owned by The Dalí Museum of St. Petersburg (Florida). Interestingly, this museum presents the painting on its website the other way around, with the "older" face on top. While the frustration of the mentee/mentor relationship between the two artists may be at the heart of the aggression I sense in the painting, it may also come from tension between the two siblings, as the St. Petersburg site suggests.

I've learned a bit more about the cinquain. The originator of the 22-syllable stanza was Adeleide Crapsey (1878-1914). Her cinquains are one stanza long and have a quality of the tanka or haiku. My poem is its own version of the cinquain, an enjoyable syllable game.