www.kanetin.com

Ever since I was a little girl art has been my world. I made mud pies, paper-dolls, and connected with any of my mother’s friends who seemed creative. I remember a friend of hers who lived down the street from us who painted her bathroom black and wore crazy clothes. I LOVED her! I loved her yet stood afar from her because I was a little girl and she was this elusive figure that I hoped to become someday. She was not afraid of criticism she just did what came to her. Gads! I struggle every time I paint or sculpt or write an email. I struggle and then remind myself that it’s only paper or it’s only clay and that approval of what I do and how I do it is solely up to me.

“Stop It!”, I say, “Forget about everything outside of your heart”

Sometimes that works!

I often pull ideas for art projects from emotions expressed in my own poetry. I pick out phrases and try to convey the words done with graphite’s into colors on canvas or mold a figure from a cool block of clay. I paint women mostly so sometimes a poem I have written is just an expression on her face.

I have posted the poem below before but I post it again to share my idea for my next painting and my process of getting to that space. Right now I especially connect with these lines in the poem below:

Pointing in the direction of the sky
I expected beyond
But the treasure was in the trees
My eyes gathered them
standing beneath and within
I bend my branches

I love the idea of ‘becoming’ a tree. Pulling from Greek Mythology where everything seems logical and meaningful I accept that I actually can become a tree. I go through fashion magazines all of the time and tear out anything that feels dramatic, colorful, inspiring and file the pages in categories. These files often to get me triggered for my next work. The emotions stirred up by the colors, mood or even specific things, in this case a tree, spark me up and I am ready. I then pull photos of models I have taken and blend all of these elements together. Make sense? To me it does… and I guess that is the point I try to make within my own self. Ha! Just paint! Just sculpt! You have the ideas and all the elements ready. Just accept who you are and what your personal inner being is about and EXPRESS IT!

The full Poem:

“Defined By So Few Words”

Neon Blue continues on
I am neither sad nor happy
I guess i find myself relieved
waiting for tears if i need them

I never realized her poems to be so short
so inconclusive
so undefined
she always seemed so magnificently tormented

Ahhh Zelda
where are you when i need you?

Pointing in the direction of the sky
I expected beyond
but the treasure was in the trees
My eyes gathered them
standing beneath and within
I bend my branches

Born with a melancholy
poets charm that pathway
Books and paintings
sculptures of flight
rounded off with a drunken stupor

My fingers feel numb
I approach the station to arrive
I have been there and back
I am coated with the very same torment
said with few words
on the pages you sent to me

19 May 2006

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About the Author:

Kathy Ostman-Magnusen
Hawaii, United States

Aloha! I am a figurative artist and Illustrator. If you check out my website you will see that I am very prolific in oils. My paintings are collected worldwide. I also do sculpture; images available upon request. I have illustrated for Hay House Inc., Neil Davidson, who was considered for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing, and several other publications. I also enjoy story writing and poetry. All of the paintings, stories and poems on my blogs and website are written by me.

Check out my website http://www.kathysart.com or one of my blogs at: http://kathysart.blogspot.com/

Aloha

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I’ve been writing poetry for quite some time. I care about the art and how the art effects people.

I want to talk some about how poetry is seen in my opinion and how narrow the view of some can be when it comes to poetry and the worth and value it holds in society. I’ve heard many times by reviewers and critics and even booksellers that poetry books are hard to sell and that little interest is taken in the art of poetry by the general public but I beg to differ on these views held by so many in the literary world.

I feel poetry is such a unique and expressive art that has stood the test of time and as we look back on poets like Wordsworth and Dickinson and all the wonderful poets of a time gone by we can all agree that nobody can discount or dismiss the contributions these people have made to the literary world.

The Wordsworth’s and Lord Byron’s are still out there today working hard to bring back into the mainstream the powerful emotions and feelings that once struck a chord so long ago. These people are putting their heart and soul into their words and putting forth messages that they want to share with readers from all origins and backgrounds.

We should not put limitations on them by telling them their art is dead or that their art is not much of a selling point in society because it is and if it wasn’t we would not have so many poetry forums and websites accross the infinite space of the internet from nation to nation. One website I visited has over five million poets in their database alone so obviously their is an interest in poetry and it’s growing bigger with every passing day. Multitudes of people from accross the globe enjoy this art we call poetry and this is a fact that should not be ignored.

There is also a problem in my view with some people who take the role of critic and these people judge the work of others and seek to influence how an individual chooses to express themselves through poetry. I feel that each person and expression is unique and I have never been much of a fan of the critic as Teddy Roosevelt reminded us in ” The Battle of Life ” it’s not the critic that counts and I agree.

Individualism and uniqueness spawns genius in my opinion in every facet of life or work and it’s also certainly true when it comes to poetry. I want to read new and freshly presented material from someone original. I don’t want to see someone trying to copy another artist or his or her ways. I want to see someone expressing their own ways that I will not judge because I feel I have no rightful place in doing so.

We must remember that it’s not my opinion or the opinion of a critic that counts when it comes to you and your work and the feelings you wish to present. These things are yours and yours alone that nobody should touch or try to fine tune in any fashion. If Shakespeare had allowed his work to be sorted out and played with by the masses then he would not have been the Shakespeare we know today and your work will not be yours if you allow it to be changed to fit the views of others.

Let your vision and your work live and die on it’s own and let it live independantly and develop into what you wish it to be not what someone else wants it to be so it never ceases to be your very own.

Publishamerica poet.

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Performance artists of all types enjoy the awe and the kudos coming their way from the general public. In return, any concert or performance turns livelier with audience participation. During the recent decades, more and more musicians–even those in the classical music field–have begun to encourage the audience to sing along or clap to the beat. This behavior has seeped out to other fields such as stand-up comedy and open-mic poetry readings.

With these facts in mind, I imagine, the slam poetry is succeeding because people are drawn into the magnetism of our clannish eras when everyone participated in the tribal dances, telling stories, and sing-along sessions. Truth is, I had not heard of “Slams” in regard to poetry, until–in the writing site I belong to–I started to participate in the slam poetry contests, hosted by two site members: one, a creative writing professor from Chicago and the other an English teacher/poet from Australia.

Later on, I found out that slam poetry was sometimes attacked by the academia with the idea that slams cheapen the true art of poetry. As an answer to this accusation, slam poets became more vocal and more organized to make themselves accepted as members of a serious performance media.

The first slam poetry started in 1984, in the Get Me High lounge, a Chicago jazz club, by a construction worker named Marc Smith. Two years later, Marc Smith offered a plan to another jazz club, the Green Mill. When the owner accepted Marc Smith’s plan of hosting a poetry competition for performance poets every Saturday night, the slam poetry competition was introduced to the public arena.

Although the opposition to the poetry slams still exists, slams have performed an impressive function in promoting poetry to the general public. During the later years, more poetry books have been sold and an astonishing number of searches about poetry have been conducted on the internet search engines.

Poetry slams are here to stay because they have pushed poetry into the livelier world of performance, turning it into an intense experience for both the poet-participants and the audience. The art of poetry too, when faced with detachment or worse yet extinction, has welcomed the slams, as if returning to its earliest origin of spoken words made to be heard.

A serious poetry slam, as performance poetry, does not depend on the quality of the words, lines, and the poetic devices alone. It also involves oral skills such as eye contact with the audience, emphatic reading, voice control, and controlled body language. This is because poetry slams are performed primarily for the audience entertainment. A slam is not the same as an open-mic performance since an open-mic is there to encourage the poets while the audience fares second.

Sometime ago, I was among the audience in an informal poetry slam. True, it felt akin to a vaudeville show, but the audience participation and the poets’ enjoyment were genuine. In an informal slam poetry contest, the judges are selected from among the audience and all forms of audience participation are encouraged, even booing the poets at the end or the middle of their poetry readings. If the audience is dissatisfied the poet leaves the stage; however, during the slam I watched nobody left the stage as the result of public booing. Probably, I was inside a quieter audience.

In the beginning, slam poetry used to be about specific subjects that involved public concerns like politics, baseball, social issues, etc. Afterwards, the themes and the subjects expanded in range immensely.

At present, poetry slams find worldwide fame due to the efforts of PSI or Poetry Slam Inc. and The National Poetry Slam or the annual slam championship tournament. During the first round of a serious slam competition, all entrants can read their poetry. The time period for each poem is three minutes. Poets are allowed to enter the succeeding rounds if they qualify. The judges’ scores are numerical from zero to ten.

In the beginning, this competition was for poets singly. Nowadays, poets compete in four or five persons in a team in their home states and countries from North America and Europe. The winning teams travel to a city hosting the final competition. Since most local public radios broadcast the competition live to their listeners, the annual National Poetry Slam has become a popular event.

Besides the National Poetry Slam, any community may organize special slams such as: Dead Poet Slams that is reading from the works of deceased poets; Cover Slams where poets read other poets’ works; Improv Slams where poets say whatever comes to their minds without previous preparation; Group-Poem Slams written by a group of poets instead of one; Haiku or Limerick Slams; and the very funny Bad Poem Slams or the Low-Ball Slams where the worst score wins.

Poetry slams are not a passing fad. Any form of entertainment that is grounded in imagination with its roots in art will surely endure excess showmanship or high-brow criticism. Poetry Slams and their organization Poetry Slam Inc. are here to stay in earnest.

Joy Cagil is an author on http://www.Writing.Com/
which is a site for Poetry Contests.
Her education is in linguistics and foreign languages. She has been involved with poetry all her life. Her portfolio can be found at http://www.Writing.Com/authors/joycag

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