Writing exercise - poem on  Francis Bacon's  painting The Screaming Pope

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After reading a few reviews on the painting I've used the cut-up technique of extracting some phrases and putting them together. My concern focused more on the meaning and interpretation of the painting rather than on the form of the poem, since this painting always had a strange impact on me as most of Bacon's distorted figures in other paintings.

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The Screaming Pope (re-writing)

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An obsessive series,

always changing,

reflexion of memories,

deconstruction of an image,

seduction of the viewer, mirage.

Evoking the opposite

of another painter’s creation,

never forgetting it.

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Ravaging emotional power,

dysfunctional,

imagery of the unconcious,

monstruous,

caotic forces of repression,

uncontrollable sources

of mental entrapment,

self-destruction, detachment,

existential crisis.

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Cage structures suggest

subjects as prisoners,

creatures on display.

Why is the pope screaming?

Is the artist screaming too?

For fear and loneliness…

at the horrors of the world,

at the wreckage of his faith

in a godless blue planet.

Violence and despair,

the real image is there,

looking at the abyss.

Dawn of an apocalypse!

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Poem on Hundertwassers paintings

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Hundertwasser

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Full colour palette,

a painter’s Paradise,

a lover discover.

Overwhelming canvas,

clashing  rich hues,

opulent colours,

dominant feelings,

layer upon layer.

Organic forms ,

the realm of the senses,

a hopeless eccentric.

tortuous spaces,

undulated dimensions.

Full creative control,

no guiding rules,

pure soul.

No art school,

a painter’s heart jewel

in a vegetative process,

of transautomatism,

unpretentiously,

naive as a child,

free of convention,

true expression.

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Using cut-up technique after reading a few reviews of last Murakami's short stories «Men without Women»

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Men without women

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Unquiet spirits, 
hearts of loneliness, 
pains of loss and emptiness, 
existential relationships 
between men and women. 
Egotistical men, 
when you lose a woman 
you loose them all! 
Do you know the moment 
your life went wrong? 
Absenses of identity, 
disconnected from reality, 
lingering sense 
of expectant incompleteness, 
a sense of deep regret. 
Melancholic, haunting tones 
of darkness, without a woman.

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The Poet Personas

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Literary alter egos, literary personas,

heteronyms, loner preferences -

a rural, uneducated poet of great ideas

writing free verse,

a physician who composed formal odes

influenced by Horace,

an adventurous naval engineer

influenced by Walt Whitman...

Characters with imaginary lifestyles,

shifting mosaic of contradictory impulses,

constellations swirling around the poet.

A full life to each persona, humanist profiles.

A split identity, dynamic construction,

dramatic destruction.

I’m a medium of myself,  less real than the others, less substantial -

«Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves».

The humility of the poet, magical illusion -

«I am nothing.

I shall never be anything.

I cannot even wish to be anything.

Apart from this, I have within me all dreams of the world.»

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Freedom Poems 

 

Free spirits unite and

convey a message of liberation,

life celebration.

We shall overcome,

some day!

Won’t you help to sing

these songs of freedom?

  

Protest! Don’t sin by absence,

raise your voice against injustice,

join us who speak out,

read out loud these words of reason,

from the depth of truth

into a sea of emancipation.

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