“Cost”
POETRY FORMAT, 30 Dec 2019
Gary Corseri – TRANSCEND Media Service
Subjective, intuitive, artistically scholarly, sophisticated…. Artists inhabit a world all of their own only accessible to the initiated, at times. Poets, particularly, seem to possess that especial quality of being able to transform the trivial into sublime–and vice versa. Playing with reality and irrealities as playthings. Not merely words or semantics but ideas, thoughts, perceptions, visions, consciousness. — TMS Editor
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“I confess a total faith in art, and I know as a result what I want
to express in my works, and that I shall do my best to express it,
whatever it may cost me.”
–Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo, 1885
“… it’s my constant hope that I am not working for myself alone.
I believe in the absolute necessity of a new art of color, of design—
and of the artistic life. And if we work in that faith, it seems to me
there is a chance that we do not hope in vain.”
–Vincent to Theo, 1888
“Well, my own work, I am risking my life for it
and my reason has half-foundered because of it.”
–Vincent to Theo, 1890
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In Van Gogh’s painting of Pere Tanguy,
the figure merges with the prints behind him:
Japanese, and helter-skeltered…. Fuji
perches on the floating hat, while at his right,
the courtesan gossips round his shoulder.
The communard, Tanguy, must have liked
the way he blended, un-foregrounded, yet retained
a Cloisonnist, sharp outline: himself
amidst the floating world. …
His eyes are steady,
fix upon the painter, almost steady
the nervous, up-ticked stroke the saint must bear
with all the colors in his bloodstream teeming.
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Dr. Gary Corseri is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment. He has published/posted poems, articles, fiction and dramas at Transcend Media Service and hundreds of publications and websites worldwide. He has performed his work at the Carter Presidential Library and his dramas have been produced on PBS-Atlanta. He edited the “Manifestations” literary anthology. He has published 2 novels and 2 poetry collections, has taught in US public schools and prisons and in US and Japanese universities. Contact: Gary_Corseri@comcast.net.
Tags: Art, Pere Tanguy, Poetry, Vincent Van Gogh
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 30 Dec 2019.
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