online poetic collections, featuring poetry from around the world
Draft, pencil and charcoal on paper, A4 sheet. This draft was made before working on the same subjects with papier-mâché. Five faces with different expressions, each one representing a feeling of fear. Continue reading “Fear Issue Cover: What’s it about?”
Some artists wrap buildings in paper, others with sounds. Brian Eno (musician, composer, digital artist, and creator of the Microsoft sound for Windows 95) performed in July 2016 in Italy, in the city of Mantova, where this picture was taken. The performance presented a sound-installation named “The Ship,” projecting colorful lights on an historical palace. Continue reading “Sound Issue Cover: What’s It About?”
Poetry is more than just a string of words and phrases. Poetry is composed in order to project a meaning from the viewpoint of the poet and how he or she wants the reader to view and interpret something in the world. But many things in the world aren’t necessarily interpreted by everyone else in quite the same way. The dark, sombre environment of a forest, the activities in a busy street, or the frightening passage of a great storm, may all be viewed differently when expressed in poetry. This makes it extremely difficult for a poetry translator to find just the right words to illustrate the mood of the poet.
Continue reading “When Poetry, Translating And Plagiarising Collide”
The painting Tommaso’s Bedroom (oil on canvas, 26”x22”, 2016) by Andrea Rugarli depicts the frontal view of a teenager standing in his bedroom. The view is cropped so that the only visible part of the body is between the elbows and the ankles. Elbows, knees and ankles divide the composition in three parts, occupying respectively the top, center, and bottom of the canvas. This unusual perspective creates a tension between a strongly sexual picture and a focus on ambiguous gender. The impossibility to categorize the gender of the subject is intriguing. Even though the title reveals the identity of the boy, the painting emphasizes certain parts of the body that are rarely understood as gender-specific. With our second issue, the aim is to focus on human bodies, without considering gendered categorizations. Ankles, legs and knees are the best representation of the tension between the mind and the body. We all want to be people with both feet on the ground and yet constantly on the move.
I have always had a very personal relationship with language. I grew up in a bilingual home and have often had to play the role of interpreter between different members of my family, particularly across my paternal and maternal sides.
I’m expecting a baby. And, at first glance, this statement may seem irrelevant to poetry. But, what I feel as a woman with a little body growing inside mine, makes me ask this question again and again. What are poems about pregnant women like?
When we agreed to dedicate the second issue to the body, it immediately struck me that the poem of my choice should be about pregnancy, the most common and the most incredible miracle in the world. Continue reading “Why don’t poets write about pregnancy?”
One could argue that time, as the theme of a publication with texts from all around the world, would somehow establish a common denominator; one that could make the diversity of our selected works more harmonious. Continue reading “Time is of the Essence”
While ink in the title almost simultaneously came to our minds because of its obvious reference to literature and poetry, purple is the result of long collective quest. Continue reading “Why Purple Ink”
The cover depicting the sculpture (40 cm length x 30 cm high) represents the theme of the very first issue of Purple Ink: Time. Why did we choose this sculpture? Continue reading “Time Issue Cover: What’s it about?”
Growing up, I lived between two worlds defined by two different cultures. While my father is American born, with Irish and Jewish backgrounds, my mother was born and raised in Vietnam.