Alfred Hatmal

Eqbal Mehdi

Richard Crookes

Lance Austin Olsen

Kshitindranath Majumdar

Ibrahim Zaman

Konya - Sema

Bolu - Gölcük

İstanbul

Balıkesir - Ayvalık

Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008)

From With the Mist So Dense on the Bridge

I gaze at a rose in the distance
and the charcoal catches fire.
I gaze at my birthplace, farther out,
and the grave expands.”

I said, “Gently, do not die now.
Life is possible on the bridge.
The metaphor is wide enough:
it is an isthmus between this world and the next,
between exile and a neighboring land.”

He said to me, while the hawks hovered above us,
“Take my name as companion,
tell it about me, and you live
until the bridge brings you back to life tomorrow.
Do not say, ‘He lived or died aimlessly marginalized.’
Say, ‘He looked down on himself from above
and saw himself clothed in a tree.’”
And he was happy with that greeting.

If this road is long
there is work for me in mythology;

I was alone on the bridge on that day
after the Messiah withdrew to
a hill in the suburbs of Jericho, before the Resurrection.
I walk, and I cannot go in or out.
I turn like a sunflower.

At night, I am awakened
by the voice of the soldier on night watch
as she sings to her lover:

Promise me nothing,
do not send me a rose from Jericho!

Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher
Nissim Ezekiel

To force the pace and never to be still
Is not the way of those who study birds
Or women. The best poets wait for words.

The hunt is not an exercise of will
But patient love relaxing on a hill
To note the movement of a timid wing;
Until the one who knows that she is loved
No longer waits but risks surrendering -
In this the poet finds his moral proved
Who never spoke before his spirit moved.

The slow movement seems, somehow, to say much more.
To watch the rarer birds, you have to go
Along deserted lanes and where the rivers flow
In silence near the source, or by a shore
Remote and thorny like the heart's dark floor.
And there the women slowly turn around,
Not only flesh and bone but myths of light
With darkness at the core, and sense is found
But poets lost in crooked, restless flight,
The deaf can hear, the blind recover sight.

Of Paintings and Poetry

In his 1918 review of the Imagist movement, A Retrospect, Ezra Pound discusses, amongst other things, the difference between painting a landscape and writing a poem about it. He argues that the difference is that the painter describes the landscape while the poet presents it.

It's a nice distinction, and one that you (or I) might care to argue with. However, whether or not you accept Pound's position, it does raise an interesting question about the differences between the two arts. It also raises a number of considerations regarding the whole area of those poets who write about art and artists, a group that includes Pound himself, regardless of his proscriptions.

More here..

Paul Guiragossian (Lebanon, 1927-1993) Untitled

Paul Guiragossian (Lebanon, 1927-1993) Untitled

Khosrow Hassanzadeh (Iran, b.1963) Ashura

Ayesha Mariam Durrani (Pakistan, b. 1975) Mannequins

Youssef Kamel (Egypt, 1890-1971) Cairo street scene

Francis Newton Souza (India, 1924-2002) Houses in Hampstead

Ram Kumar (India, b. 1924) Untitled (Landscape)

Sohrab Sepehri (Iran, 1928-1980) Kashan

Beacons
Charles Baudelaire

Rubens, garden of idleness watered by oblivion,
Where quick flesh pillows the impotence of dreams,
Where life's affluence writhes in eddying abandon
Like air in the air, or water in streams.

Leonardo da Vinci, deep mirror of darkness,
Where angels appear, their smiles charged with mystery
And tenderness, within the shadowy enclosures
Of pines and glaciers that shut in their country.

Rembrandt, tragic hospital re-echoing round a sigh;
A tall crucifix for only ornament
Traversed obliquely by a single wintry ray
Through which prayers rise, exhaling from excrement.

Michelangelo, no man's land where Hercules and Christ
Are at one; where powerful phantoms in crowds
Erect themselves deliberately in darkening twilights,
With pressed, rigid fingers ripping open their shrouds.

Rage of the wrestler, impudence of the faun;
Puget the convict's melancholy emperor,
Caging the lion's pride in a weak, jaundiced man,
Deducing beauty from crime, vice and terror.

Watteau, carnival where many a distinguished soul
Flutters like a moth, lost in the brilliance
Of chandeliers shedding frivolity on the cool
Clear decors enclosing the changes of the dance.

Goya, nightmare compact of things incredible:
Foetuses fried for a witch's sabbath feast;
An old woman at a mirror, a little naked girl
Lowering an artful stocking to tempt a devil's lust.

Delacroix, blood lake haunted by evil angels
In the permanent green darkness of a forest of firs,
Where under a stricken sky a muffled sigh fills
The air like a faintly echoed fanfare of Weber's.

Such, O Lord, are the maledictions, the tears,
The ecstasies, the blasphemies, the cries of Te Deum
Re-echoing along labyrinthine corridors:
A dream for mortal hearts distilled from divine opium,

The watchword reiterated by sentinels
A thousand times, the message whispered from post to post,
A beacon burning on a thousand citadels,
A call of all the hunters lost in the great forest.

For is this not indeed, O Lord, the best witness
That our dignity can render to Your pity,
This tide of tears which age after age gathers
To fail and fall on the shore of Your eternity?

Il Ho

Laurent Koller

Bayad plays the oud to The Lady. from the Riyad & Bayad , Arabic tale

By William Blake (1757–1827)


MY Spectre around me night and day
Like a wild beast guards my way;
My Emanation far within
Weeps incessantly for my sin.

‘A fathomless and boundless deep,
There we wander, there we weep;
On the hungry craving wind
My Spectre follows thee behind.

‘He scents thy footsteps in the snow
Wheresoever thou dost go,
Thro’ the wintry hail and rain.
When wilt thou return again?

’Dost thou not in pride and scorn
Fill with tempests all my morn,
And with jealousies and fears
Fill my pleasant nights with tears?

‘Seven of my sweet loves thy knife
Has bereavèd of their life.
Their marble tombs I built with tears,
And with cold and shuddering fears.

‘Seven more loves weep night and day
Round the tombs where my loves lay,
And seven more loves attend each night
Around my couch with torches bright.

‘And seven more loves in my bed
Crown with wine my mournful head,
Pitying and forgiving all
Thy transgressions great and small.

‘When wilt thou return and view
My loves, and them to life renew?
When wilt thou return and live?
When wilt thou pity as I forgive?’

‘O’er my sins thou sit and moan:
Hast thou no sins of thy own?
O’er my sins thou sit and weep,
And lull thy own sins fast asleep.

‘What transgressions I commit
Are for thy transgressions fit.
They thy harlots, thou their slave;
And my bed becomes their grave.

‘Never, never, I return:
Still for victory I burn.
Living, thee alone I’ll have;
And when dead I’ll be thy grave.

‘Thro’ the Heaven and Earth and Hell
Thou shalt never, quell:
I will fly and thou pursue:
Night and morn the flight renew.’

‘Poor, pale, pitiable form
That I follow in a storm;
Iron tears and groans of lead
Bind around my aching head.

‘Till I turn from Female love
And root up the Infernal Grove,
I shall never worthy be
To step into Eternity.

‘And, to end thy cruel mocks,
Annihilate thee on the rocks,
And another form create
To be subservient to my fate.

‘Let us agree to give up love,
And root up the Infernal Grove;
Then shall we return and see
The worlds of happy Eternity.

‘And throughout all Eternity
I forgive you, you forgive me.
As our dear Redeemer said:
“This the Wine, and this the Bread.”’

Asia Week in New York

Wang Xizhi Watching Geese by Qian Xuan

Detail of Qian Xuan's “Wang Xizhi Watching Geese.”

Night-Shining White by Han Gan

Fu Sheng Transmitting the Book of Documents by Du Jin

Isn’t part of the point of our Western passion for Asian art to find a serenity that we can’t seem to cook up on our own, a metabolic slow-down, a less-is-more state of grace? One 15th-century Chinese writer recorded such an ideal in a lifestyle wish list that includes: “A nice cottage. A clean table. A clear sky with a beautiful moon. A vase of flowers. No cares of the world.” He was describing the optimum environment for looking at art, but also for living artfully.

“Anatomy of a Masterpiece” has all the elements on his list, and one more: instruction. The curator, Maxwell K. Hearn of the Met’s Asian art department, has given the museum’s lofty Chinese painting and calligraphy galleries the intimacy of a teaching collection, with a limited number of objects accompanied by short labels and photographic enlargements of details. The labels are thematic and ruminative, approaching paintings through ideas rather than dynasties. The photographs are a revelation.

Continued here..

No one was born an adult - Colors

By Ali Messaoudi

Safwan Dahoul

The Dacca Gauzes
Agha Shahid Ali

“…for a whole year he sought

to accumulate the most exquisite

Dacca gauzes.”

– Oscar Wilde /The Picture of Dorian Gray

Those transparent Dacca gauzes

known as woven air, running

water, evening dew:

a dead art now, dead over
a hundred years. ‘No one
now knows,’ my grandmother says,

‘what it was to wear
or touch that cloth.’ She wore
it once, an heirloom sari from

her mother’s dowry, proved
genuine when it was pulled, all
six yards, through a ring.

Years later when it tore,
many handkerchiefs embroidered
with gold-thread paisleys

were distributed among
the nieces and daughters-in-law.
Those too now lost.

In history we learned: the hands
of weavers were amputated,
the looms of Bengal silenced,

and the cotton shipped raw
by the British to England.
History of little use to her,

my grandmother just says
how the muslins of today
seem so coarse and that only

in autumn, should one wake up
at dawn to pray, can one
feel that same texture again.

One morning, she says, the air
was dew-starched: she pulled
it absently through her ring.

The Language Of Sin

By Adonis

I burn my inheritance, I say:

"My land is virgin, and no graves in my youth."

I transcend both God and Satan

(my path goes beyond the paths of God and Satan).

I go across in my book,

in the procession of the luminous thunderbolt,

the procession of the green thunderbolt,

shouting:

"After me there's no Paradise, no Fall,"

and abolishing the language of sin.

S H Raza

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