Walking Childhood
Mixed collage. Childhood photograph and image of artist’s foot.
Learn to walk in your own feet
and be in your own skin
and then unlearn how to be in the ideas of skin
and walk in another realm
- By June Perkins
First shared in Archives in the Land on line exhibition.
This is from my Pearlz Dreaming blog Archives & is a Review of ‘Archives in the Land’ my first online exhibition. Ron Price a poet and essayist residing in Tasmania, but world travelled, had this to say.
Diligent Indolence
a poetic review of Archives in the land a blog
By Ron Price
So often, when I go to art galleries, I get sleepy and all the talent, all the art is wasted on my eyes as I fall asleep in a chair leaving my wife or perhaps a friend to walk around the said gallery by themselves. It could be some visual disability that I possess; perhaps it is a problem with spaces. I’ve never really figured it out. The main function of TV for me, sad to say, is as a mild sedative. My brain begins to shut off while my wife is getting turned on. That’s okay for after many hours with print my brain wants to turn off. The affect of my poetry on many others often induces sleep. I understand that. Different horses for different courses. Sleep is as essential to life as art.
One must write, one must engage in artistic work, with one’s eyes on something inner as well as someone outer. I find visuals on the internet, at sites like June’s, much more stimulating. I don’t have to walk anywhere and try to enage on a distant painting. And I don’t get sleepy. I can breathe the fresh Tasmanian air coming in my window beside my computer here in Australia’s oldest town. I can read some words, see some photos, some art, some colour. I can spend 5 minutes or an hour at the site. I’m in control, well, at least partly. The mix is good. The mind can engage.
The following prose-poem is a description of my engagement with June’s artistic collage some four hours ago.
Diligent Indolence
Perhaps this is some of that
diligent indolence that Keats
said was necessary for poetry
to emerge in gentle self-surrender
to the savouring of days past,
days to come and thought’s gold.Sitting, standing, breathing
here at this online gallery
letting the space, the photographs,
the forms, the varied shapes,
the words, bounce off my
sensory emporium like art
works around the walls
of an art gallery: people
I hardly know come to life:
a beauty, a freshness, a newness.
I try to get eye to engage mind,
but without much success.
Worlds are here but still-born,
to my mind, my tabula rasa.
What can I say? think? do?
Surely this is not just to enjoy?
”Just enjoy”, said the muse:
the smoothest of smooth worlds,
beautiful people, young, very young,
they pop up and up and down and down
and I stroll by with my eye trying to catch
with some of my quiet moments
some of their vitality from their young,
persistent faces bubbling over with life.
She is so beautiful, a thing unto herself,
something magic, deserves at least
a nomination for this work in this place
at some future Internet Academy Wards.
Created, partly, by genetic evolution,
DNA , in a process we are just beginning,
just, to understand. Such beauty, real life,
can be transferred to a wall, a website
and to your heart, that is usually slow.
So much space, order, regularity here,
evenness. I hesitate to send my “little”
poems onto these bright pages, my pieces
with their own regularities and evennesses
where the eyes, too, must engage the mind.
Who will stroll by my work?
who will try and sit and read?
Smiling with “what do you think
of this dear?” Who will sleep,
as I sleep, with my poetry laid out
before me on my bed of ease?
Who will read and watch these
images fly by in gay profusion?
Someone said there are several
trillion sites now for all of us
part of the unparalleled character
of the coming world civilization.
Well, here is one part,
one small part, sweet and young
and so very beautiful to defy
definition or description.
Are my words over the top?
Perhaps.
Ron Price
February 1st 2006
Ron Price has a strong interest in publishing on the internet as well as other forms. A couple of collection of many links is provided below.
http://www.writers.net/writers/36722
http://www.buzzle.com/authors.asp?author=805
