Introduction by Arlene Ang

          When I started out on this ekphrastic adventure, my goal was to choose poems that best evoked the visual art. Then something changed. I began to find pieces that went beyond describing the image. Instead, poets were using the artwork as a springboard to create something that moved away from the predefined visual structure. I found myself drawn to poems that either hold their own distorted mirrors in front of photographs or cut up the pictures and make papier mâché out of the pieces.

          Using my favorite lines from the twelve poems in this issue, I threaded together a cento, which incidentally reflects the emotion behind this painting my father gave me some years before his death. 

Ang Kiukok, Seated Clown

So the flowers have come, at last.
Brushed in lavenders and white,
I wasn’t ready to be swallowed
like a speck of dust curlicuing through the air.

To study the departing,
strangers stalled on street corners
spellbound, lost as if they have forgotten how to breathe. 

And I saw, in the yellow of morning sky, the moon
that white mass shot through with twigs—

it is the mind that deceives itself
until all that is left is an echo.
The only one who escapes is the dying man.

          I hope everyone enjoys reading these poems as much as I did.

Arlene Ang
Spinea, Italy
21 April 2012