Wednesday, July 25, 2018

What is it About Shoes?





by Bacopa Literary Review Editor in Chief Mary Bast

I've written before about ekphrasis, the intersection of verbal and visual arts. Not included in that post are Marianne Moore's poem "Nine Nectarines and Other Porcelain" and Elizabeth Bishop's poem "Large Bad Picture" (based on George Wylie Hutchinson's "Seascape," right).

As Bishop's title implies, creating ekphrastic poetry can be enormous fun.

In the same Melanie Almeder workshop that inspired my Bacopa 2012-published "plummet" (imagining Icarus in Brueghel's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" as a woman), Almeder also asked us to to make a list of terms describing something ordinary in our lives, and then to write an ode to that item. My most ordinary and also cherished possession, after years of corporate-consulting-required-suits-and-oh-so-uncomfortable-high-heels, were (and are still) my Birkenstocks:

ode to my birkenstocks 
(from "Eeek Love")
sole-mates I am barely
clothed in you
so easy to slide into
walking me
away from suits
you've taken me
to places high-
class shoes would fear
you relish luscious mud
& sand & bits of twigs
that hang on tightly
to your treads
I am besotted birkies
with the child in you
who tastes & smudges
oh you messy shoes
this simple-minded
search for ground
may wear us down
you mortal stumble-bums
Then, just this morning, I read a a friend's post about a Poetry Workshop on Ekphrastic with Pauletta Hansel [Cincinnati Poet Laureate Emeritus (April 2016-March 2018)].

Barbara Sliter's ekphrastic poem "The Red Shoe," much like mine, remembers "a time . . . / before the guy selling lettuce / said "I don't think of you / as an old person. . . a time before / shoes became practical. . . ."

I'm still smiling.


Saturday, July 21, 2018

Yamaraja Das, Back to Godhead

Today we learned that Yamaraja Das (born Robert Wintermute II), who created the layout for Bacopa Literary Review since its inception in 2010, passed away on June 22. A Krishna devotee, Yama (as we knew him) was, indeed, "a quiet hero."

As one of his friends said, "It irked Yamaraja to see badly produced books. Even after many years of working with him, I continued to be impressed by how he always produced attractively designed articles with extremely limited resources."

We join Kesihanta Das, who visited Yama in his final days, in imagining Yamaraja Das "already Back to Godhead."