Ekphrastic extravaganza

With renowned artist Linda Ekstrom, in front of her piece, "Your One True Home."

I was invited by Santa Barbara Poet Laureate George Yatchisin to write a poem about one of the pieces in the Textual Integration show at the Rubenstein Chan contemporary art gallery in Carpenteria, and present it at an evening event at the gallery. Wow!

A fantastic show, in which each piece incorporated text in some way, and I had to choose one for my subject. An ekphrastic poem is one written about a work of art (do a search for more involved definitions, history, and famous examples). When I saw Linda Ekstrom's ten-foot-long paper and ink sculptural piece, "Your One True Home," I was captivated and inspired.

I got particularly excited to use a poetic form that would be meaningful to this piece. I challenged myself to write a pantoum, which is a poetry form with four-line stanzas in which the second and fourth lines of one stanza become the first and third lines of the next. I love playing with repetition in poetry, to see how I can make the meaning shift in the repetition, and the repeated lines in this form mirrored the twisting of the paper. (So cool!)

It was a delightful evening of celebrating beautiful and moving visual art pieces with poetry, and to my delight (after I learned she loved my poem, whew!), the artist of "Your One True Home" was in the audience! What a treat to meet Linda Ekstrom and to have her hear my poem.

To find out about poetry events in Santa Barbara, visit https://sbpoetry.net/home/.

Reading my poem, titled, "Seven Stanzas on Linda Ekstrom’s Your One True Home"