Four Poets on the grass at Mill Lake in August 2024.
It has been awhile my dear friends so let's catch up. This is the four poets at our latest poetry society meeting, sitting on the grass where we held our afternoon vigil. I have continued writing poems on the Women of Waterhouse for the last five months while studying, and we have continued meeting as a society at the library. . . where I would read some of the poems from my manuscript of my next upcoming book which has yet to be decided on by a publisher.
When my manuscript was completed, I had composed on characters Saint Cecilia, Thisbe, Saint Eulalia, Ophelia, Elaine, Juliet, Cleopatra, Miranda, Orithyia, and Circe.
This painting, for example, is called Boreas, but I discovered that Boreas is the male character in the Greek myth of the North Wind, and the woman's actual name is Orithyia.
To quote from the introduction: "This book contains a number of poems that are based on the paintings of J.W. Waterhouse, pre-Raphaelite painter. He depicted in his paintings, women of poetry and myth, including Shakespearean women and Greek goddesses. Since my first glimpse of The Lady of Shalott at a friend’s house, I have admired Waterhouse. I set about this year with the intent to study the subjects of Waterhouse, and these poems are the fruit of my studies. The poems with woman characters Saint Cecilia, Thisbe, Saint Eulalia, Ophelia, Elaine, Juliet, Cleopatra, Miranda, Orithyia, and Circe are based on the subjects of his paintings.
"In addition many of the poems may be seen as
ekphrastic poems. Observing works of art, as paintings, photographs, sculptures
or music compositions has frequently inspired me. Writing poetry based on these
works of art is a challenge I have gladly embraced. In this collection, I not
only studied paintings and their meanings, I wrote along to musical
compositions such as Debussy’s Clair de Lune and
Schubert’s Ave Maria.
"The end result can only be characterized as
my own approach to the art, my drawing near to something I consider as sacred.
The characters of Waterhouse paintings, depicted as the main characters in
requiems or poetry, are highly ekphrastic. I have spend a good deal of time
with these paintings, framing the prints as a teenager, as a sort of obsession,
then collecting larger prints, bordered by larger mats, and framed with massive
frames as an adult. They draw the eye to them in the rooms I live and work
in."
St Eulalia by J.W. Waterhouse
The work that had been monthly to compose the poems became more frequent, as did the poetic impulse to write, as I sought to reach our deadlines. I also wanted to have poems to last us to the end of the year in movies. See our YouTube for the latest movie Cinderella. I hope this whets your appetite for sonnet sequences, particularly Requiems, lengthy as they may be. That is my book's working title, and the subject of most of the four page introduction on this innovative seven stanza form.A sonnet sequence, by the way, for the sake of this book full of them, is the structure of either fourteen line rhyming sequences or them broken up into shorter rhyming stanzas.
Kind Regards,
Emily
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