Doreen LeBlanc: Two Poems

Edward’s Pout

Why the pout Edward Hopper?
Your many self portraits interchangeable
Turned down mouth
Empty eyes
Stoic
Sour
Brooding
Not a hint of a punch line
But always impeccably dressed
What lies beneath?

Your marriage to Josephine, Jo
Reads rather contentious, tumultuous
Yet she was your subject
Diminutive
Combative muse
Bedraggled nude
Expressionless
Perhaps eating from tin cans
Transformed you both to granite

Brushstrokes of simplicity
Your artistic gifts portrayed loneliness
Dark shadows
Deep thoughts
Solitude
Isolation
Until you created coastal scenes
Where you found light essence
And release

 

Musings on “Little Goose Girl” by Millet

What have you seen
Simple thatched house
Generations of simple folk
Who patched your humble walls

The geese at your doorstep
Years of harvest and famine
Like the seasons
And phases of the moon

Within, the acrid smells of your hearth
Beside you the giant tree
Your sentinel
Why does this interest me, you ask
Oh, I feel your heartbeat

 

(Poetry Workshop at Boston Museum
of Fine Arts, French Pastels, with Regie Gibson)

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The MFA Is Opening a Dreamy (and Rarely Shown) French Pastels Exhibit

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Copyright© 2020, by Doreen LeBlanc.

March: On the Cusp

The Lighthouse at Two Lights. By Edward Hopper. 1929

Tis a strange month, March. Both Winter and Spring, cold and temperate, it transitions us from Death to Life, fallow to green. Depending upon the region, depending upon one’s position on this earth, by design or chance, this month will bring us all great changes.

For Spinozablue, March brings us poetry by Virginie Colline, and fiction by Donal Mahoney. For this editor, March takes me closer to the lighthouse, and another rereading of the masterful, brilliant goddess of prose, Virginia Woolf. She brought us closer to lighthouses — metaphorical, fictional and in real time — because she brought us closer to the mind in search of.…

My Blueberry Nights

Nighthawks, by Edward Hopper. 1942. Art Institute of Chicago.

Wong Kar-wai’s My Blueberry Nights sparks a multitude of thoughts for me. Already an admirer of his previous work, I came to the film with some minor discomfort in need of assuaging. Funny thing about that discomfort. I didn’t even realize I had it until I was well into the film. And some of that realization made me uncomfortable with the discomfort itself.

Part of it was because the film is so beautiful on the surface. Wong Kar-wai has always been a master of color, hue, saturation, framing and time. He has always been able to make the passage of time a visual event, visceral, sometimes wistful, often a character within the story itself.…

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