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.