Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Melissa Lemay in Poetics invites us to write an Ekphrastic poem selecting from a number of paintings (unidentified as yet) before revealing who the artist was and something about his career. Emil Nolde, it turns out, was an ardent Nazi who attempted to climb the ladder of art success at a time when the tide was turning against his expressionist style in favour of the insipid efforts to which all propaganda are likely to produce.
Melissa asks us whether, upon learning about Emil Nolde’s unpleasant politics, we feel differently about his art. I think a man’s politics are separate from his art unless he is using his art as propaganda and then as I say above, the quality will suffer because it doesn’t come from the heart. Nevertheless, I can think of people, still alive today, whose work and life I don’t want to support because their politics are abhorrent. Emil Nolde no longer needs our support and I feel no different about the work – only the man…
There should clearly be a falcon on my outstretched gauntleted arm but alas I am just a convenient perch for pigeons.
I don’t even know why I am here They call me the Black Prince but my titles, Edward of Woodstock Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall give the City of Leeds no claim to my fame and famous I was in the Fourteenth Century A fierce and feared warrior on behalf of my father King Edward the Third though I died of dysentery before my king and father so never inherited the mantle…
Larger than life as a soldier I will say this representation In bronze doth suit me too large for any British foundry I was cast in Belgium brought by sea to Hull and sailed stately by barge up the river air to Leeds.
I have been joined in City Square by other statues, some with genuine claim to local fame John Harrison – cloth merchant and school founder Doctor Hook – a vicar of Leeds Joseph Priestley – chemist and theologian late of Leeds and James Watt though not of Leeds he did his fair share to increase its wealth with his steam engines I never saw one myself though the railway station is right before me but I saw the smoke and steam smelt the stink of the things and my plinth has to be navigated by commuters rushing to catch theirs
Statues of John Harrison, Doctor Hook, Joseph Priestly and James Watt – see Wikipedia article on Leeds City Square statuary.
I cannot see those good gentlemen ranged as they are behind me but I do look with some affection on the comely rears of eight naked nymphs I have sadly never had the pleasure of seeing their faces and the rest of their scarcely concealed modesty they are two lots of quadruplets named “Morn” – carrying a bunch of flowers And “Even” whose head droops And, I hear from passersby has her eyes closed in anticipation of the coming night
“Morn” and “Even” in City Square, Leeds – see Wikipedia article on Leeds City Square statuary.
It is a bleak existence in this civic space myself fully clad and armoured if not against the foes of England at least against the Northern cold but many’s the time I’ve seen poor Morn and Even and their six sisters shivering in the rain, the frost, the snow. One night a group of “knitting guerillas” as they mysteriously styled themselves surreptitiously reconnoitred the eight Art Nouveau sisters with a view to knitting dresses more becoming than their wisps of cloth for those benighted maids – they measured them up found them to be some two-thirds scale (I always thought them a little picayune) but never returned with the promised gowns and so the sisters shiver on in winter or garner both sly and envious glances from males and females respectively the former admiring the petite but fulsome figures the latter wishing they could be as unencumbered come the sweltering heat of a city summer – whilst I still suffer the indignity of pigeons…
The Black Prince – City Square Leeds – see Wikipedia article on Leeds City Square statuary.
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Dora in Poetics invites us to Reimagine the Familiar with a wealth of prompt poems to inspire…
As I explainbelow in reply to the comment from Dora, I fictionalised the Guerilla Knitting Group but searching for them, I find that Knit a Bear Face did in fact yarn-bomb some of the above statues in an action called “Wating For Winter” – photos below… The group seems to be defuct – perhaps another casualty of the great Covid pause…
If you are stirred to action and wish to become a Yarn Bomber or even just a group with whom to knit – search the internet for a group near you… The Truth Yarn Is Out There…
It is 18 months since my last essay exploring AI back in 2023 and there have been many developments since then – certainly more and more people, from poets of my acquaintance to businesses, have explored and made use of AI in one form or another and the industry is full of startups offering AI solutions in all sorts of areas such as creating training videos in which you prime the AI with the content you want delivered and the AI concocts slides with a voiceover or even a fully imagined video trainer to articulate your training needs.
Public awareness has continued to grow, the alarm over AI taking away jobs, or taking over the world and eradicating humans is perhaps less hysterical and the debate more focused. One way in which this is happening is that writers and artists have challenged the AI companies for the currently unregulated and voracious use of their (the creatives) material in training the AI’s LLM’s or Large Language Models. These are the vast bodies of existing work, written and visual, that are fed to AI’s and from which they both learn and plagiarise when prompted to generate an image or a piece of writing “in the style of”. When I first started exploring Generative AI, these ethical battlelines were not so apparent. Still, now we must seriously consider the ethical questions raised by how we choose to use AI – especially when we reference existing artwork or literature. You may feel that the damage is already done, the genie already out of the bottle and that there is no point in bolting the stable door after the horse has bolted, but the laws need changing to protect the copywriter issues advanced by creatives and perhaps there will emerge a statute of limitations so that older work, out of copywrite is usable whilst currently, copyrighted material is either out of bounds or attracts a fee for the use of… Below is an illustration I tried and purely for experiment, I asked for it to be “in the style of” Studio Ghibli – a Japanese animation studio based in Koganei, Tokyo. The exact prompt was “Alice in Wonderland at the Court of the Red Queen in the style of studio ghibli directed by Hayao Miyazaki“
As you can see, Alice is there, in a dining room sumptuous enough to be that of the Red Queen but there are no other characters present and the AI (Midjourney) has become fixated on the Fly Agaric toadstools that Alice found the hookah-smoking Caterpillar sitting on. Does this image owe much to Studi Ghibli and Director Hayao Miyazaki – it certainly could be an animation style – I don’t know his work well enough – I just saw the style in a list of things you could prompt AI with and decided to experiment – but the fact that the AI recognised the name of Studio Ghibli means that it was trained, at some point, by looking at the studio’s work…
So I have decided, for three reasons, to be more circumspect about my use of “in the style of”. Firstly out of fairness to current creatives, secondly because it remains as difficult as ever to get AI to produce the image exactly as you have in your mind’s eye, and lastly I have made less use of AI images to accompany poems – in part because the brilliance of them, not only illustrates the poem but threatens to eclipse or distract from it. However, whilst I am a competent artist in some respects, I am not an illustrator with a wide range of drawing skills and so below, I am going to show you the blend of AI-generated image elements and their combination in PhotoShop to arrive at an image I had in mind for a commissioned illustration. My friend Melissa Lemay, is launching an online journal called Collaborature to showcase collaborative poems and works of literature as well as interviews with authors – she sent me her mission statement and gave me carte blanche to produce an illustration for the launch…
My idea is to have a woman absorbed in reading a book with a “thought bubble” rising up into a night sky showing the moon, and a rocket on it’s way to the moon – all inspired by her reading…
To begin with, I decided on a black-and-white illustration with “drawn” elements combined, which made it slightly easier to achieve consistency. Firstly I wanted a young woman but drawn “in the style of” the E.H.Shepard illustration from “Now We Are Six” by A.A. Milne. – or rather, I wanted her in the pose below, which is not quite the same thing…
The results below, despite what I thought to be a very detailed prompt describing the young woman, her clothes and her pose, was not right…
Black and white line drawing of a young woman wearing a sleeveless dress with hemline just above the knee lying on her stomach elbows stretched out and head supported by hands reading a book propped up in front of her legs bent at the knee and bent upwards in the style of E.H.Shepard
Cetainly I think the style has little to do with E.H.Shepard and in the lower left picture, the young woman, far from being excited, her imagination fired by reading, has fallen asleep! I tried making variations but nothing worked any better so I then decided to try for a picture of a young girl instead and got the result below.
Black and white line drawing of a young girl wearing a sleeveless mini-dress with hemline just above the knee lying flat on her stomach head supported by hands reading a book propped up in front of her legs bent back and over her knees in the style of E.H.Shepard
Once again we have a sleeping beauty, but I decided I could accept the top left image. Next I wanted to have a thought bubble form the girl, featuring a rocket to the moon inspired in the girl’s imagination, by her reading. I was remembering the Moon face in the 1902 film A Trip to the Moon (French: Le voyage dans la lune) by pioneer film director Georges Méliès.
And so I used the prompt “Black and white line drawing of moon against a black background in the style of Georges Melies” to obtain this:-
Nothing like George Melies’ image so no qualms about using the quite straight forward “drawing-style” moon. Next to a rocket, and I have always loved the rocket (was it inspired by the German V2 rockets?) from The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé.
And so using this prompt “Black and white rocket against a dark grey background in the style of Tintin Explorers on the Moon” I obtained these images from Midjourney.
Once again, I don’t think the similarity of the rockets warrants the term plagiarism so much as “inspired by…” and I was happy to go with the bottom right image.
Now that I had all the elements, it was time to start assembling them in Adobe PhotoShop – this process is essentially like building a collage except that you can go back and work on each layer ad infinitum, resizing, adjusting the tones, cropping etc. even rearranging the order of the layers – so what hides what…
Having decided on the size and proportion of the Background, I placed the girl before adding a Gradient layer for the night sky. Then, having pasted multiple copies of the Mission Statement text, I placed a text layer in white text so that it fades out at the bottom of the picture but is readable against the black of the sky. I then brought the girl to the front again as the white letters were going over her.
The white letters looked too strong so I increased their transparency to tone them down. Next I added the thought bubbles giving them white edges to stand out and then placed the moon into the large bubble.
I could have added the rocket within the thought bubble, like the moon, but I thought it added to the portrayal of the act of imagination if it came from outside the thought bubble – as if it had come from a different bubble perhaps… Lastly, the rocket looked too static and so I added some “motion streaks” to complete the picture.
So there you have it – each element of the picture was produced by Midjourney generative AI, yet I could never have got an AI to see and conform to the design I had in mind and so I had to assemble them in the way I wanted, after the event and this is one way in which I think AI can be used to aid the graphic designer – after all, collage of existing print material is a very old tradition…
The shepherd Attis who killed himself for shame because the Goddess Cybelle forbade him to look at anyone other than her – but he was weak – lay with a nymph – died beneath a pine Cybelle brought him back to life, now faithful – pine log now holy…
Andrew Wilson, 2024
Attis died by castrating himself beneath a pine tree following the awful wrath of Cybelle, a Roman Goddess of Fertility whereupon she had a change of heart and brought him back to life – needless to say he did not stray again… But this myth was celebrated by Romans (strange but true) by the bearing of a Pine log through the streets – Pines now being sacred to Attis. Christianity often subsumed old festivals into itself and this is one possible origin of the Yule Log… I wrote more about it here.
or Conifer/Fir tree(s) imagery, mythology, memories etc
must be an unrhymed poem
no specific meter
one stanza only
10 lines with no paragraphs
graduating from 1 to 10 syllables
[add lines 11 & 12 with just 2 syllables per line – my optional extra]
Thus the first line is monosyllabic; the second line has two syllables, and so on, until there’s ten syllables on the tenth line (then reverts to 2 syllables for lines 11 & 12 if you want this optional extra). The outline of your poem takes the concrete shape of a fir tree. Centre it on the page else left or right aligned it’s only half a tree! (X=syllables not words)
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, msjadeli in OpenLinkNight, invites us to submit a poem and since we are, in Lisa’s words “just a week away from the spookiness of All Hallow’s Eve”, I have chosen one that references magic and ghosts…
Hell’s bells and buckets of bloody blood! My mother used to say and after Australia she said it every day
It used to be just Hell’s bells and buckets of blood but bloody was a word oft heard in the land of Oz you see
Hell’s bells—an apt description for news now from everywhere it would have given her conniptions were she still here
Hell, I’d even use the cuss she bequeathed me except I don’t accept religious geography and know that Hell is here on Earth and not some seven circled place beneath
Hell’s bells – the cuss abbreviated hardly reflects the place we’ve come to climate change, genocidal wars from decency and democracy we’ve deviated
Hell’s bells and buckets of blood for greater impact our world is in the toilet and that’s a fact
So still I hear my mother’s voice raised in exasperation uttering her curse of choice Hell’s bells and buckets of bloody blood!
Is there anyone who does not love the display of Autumn colours that nature puts on each year if you live in the latitudes where deciduous trees flourish? A love that is, tempered by the knowledge of the meaning which this colourful transformation signals – the end of Summer and the advent of Winter – only young children are blissfully unaware of the message and thoughtlessly kick their way through the ever-deepening piles of fallen leaves. The change begins on the edge of some leaves on a certain side of some trees and gradually creeps across the entire tree, to be joined at differing rates and with subtly different palettes by other species until whole stands of woodland are ablaze save for the odd patch of evergreens. But this extravagant show, which has us humans travelling to see its most spectacular examples, is not some random quirk of nature, but a necessary part of the plant’s process – one without which the trees would not survive the coming cold of Winter. The green, chlorophyll-filled engine of energy conversion which is a leaf, exchanging liquid food from the tree and using sunlight to power the tree, now switches its production to producing a kind of anti-freeze which the tree reabsorbs into its twigs, branches and trunk to protect itself against frost damage. Once each leaf has done its job, sucked dry by its parent, it shrivels and falls to the ground where it will rot down and feed the tree through its roots and complete the cycle of its life but the byproduct of its transformation in Autumn is a breathtaking, spectacular, partial rainbow from yellow to rich reds…
The greatest feat of the Washington Witches Coven was to remain in plain sight as this rare photograph from the 1960’s reveals. Gathered together outside the premises of their leader, a veterinarian by trade, the members of the coven are each accompanied by their witches’ familiars – black cats each and every one of them. In any other age, such an unprecedented number of black cats in one place would undoubtedly have rung alarm bells and resulted in a witch-hunt, but this group of fashionably dressed (for middle-aged women) were merely perceived as slaves to the growing trend of pets as fashionable accessories and their predilection for felines of a noir colouring, merely a fashionable affectation.
Under the election and presidentship of renowned misogynist Donald Trump, the words “witch-hunt” found renewed currency, though not, ironically, in connection with actual witches! By now a little more discreet in their public gatherings, the Washington Coven played their part in fighting the menace of arse-trumpeting but just as all right minded people had been staggered by the election of the great, orange baby, so too, the matrons and even the younger members of the coven had found themselves wrong-footed and at a loss as to how best to combat the orange menace. The audacity of Trump madness fuelling false news such as baby-eating, paedophile rings operating behind Pizza restaurant fronts, beggared belief! By the time the coven were getting their ducks in a row, lining up the most potent spells to use on His Orangeness, he failed to be re-elected and a huge celebration ensued under full moon in the Washington Woods and much debate was had about the extent to which the power of the coven’s spells had contributed to the orange downfall.
But Trump is back, once again riling up his base with the same tired tropes about “draining the Washington swamp” – if only he knew the real powers ranged against him… Go! Black Cats!
I read a book by a Serbian revolutionary sharing his experience of nonviolent action to bring down dictators and even military juntas his greatest tool – laughter poking fun utterly defeats them imagine trumpety-Trump the big, inflated, orange baby wouldn’t he just hate it…
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Mish in Poetics invites us to write about laughter and since I have little time before work, and as I am getting into the whole Quadrille thing, I have written something in just 44 words. As a child, one of our favourite records to come on the radio, because it inexorably activated our audio mirror brain cells and had us giddily joining in – I give you “The Laughing Policeman” by Charles Jolly/Penrose…
