“For me, it is the WORD that produces all images. It is the key sign for all processes…” –Joseph Beuys cited in Tisdall, 1979 By J.S. Porter Sometimes the language one uses or hears or…
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Oscars 2023
Who are you cheering for? Some will be cheering for Tom Cruise’s “Top Gun” or Steven Spielberg or “Elvis” or Michelle Yeoh or Jamie Lee Curtis or Andrea Riseborough in “To Leslie,” or “Everything Everywhere…
Stan Dragland: Bricoleur, Meanderthal, Newfoundlander, Canadian (1942-2022)
– for Marshall Soules – By J.S. Porter Don’t it always seem to go That you don’t know what you’ve got Till it’s gone – Joni Mitchell, “Big Yellow Taxi” On May 25, 2020, my…
Gifts and Givers
– for Dale Behnke – By J.S. Porter The Incredible String Band, Jan Garbarek, Nightnoise, Penguin Café Orchestra, Miles Davis, Being There, The Alexandria Quartet, Pablo Neruda, Gabriel García Márquez, Malcolm Lowry –Dale Behnke Some…
“I” in the English Language
For Nancy – editor, publisher, and friend By J.S. Porter A few months ago, I wrote a poem for poet Anna Veprinska in Toronto: I The loneliest word in the language not so much a…
“Tree Talk,” a Poem from John Reibetanz’s Earth Words
For Sean Malone, poet and friend By J.S. Porter John Reibetanz makes the dead speak–specifically three deceased sages– and non-linguistic life speak. He entwines plants and us, conjoins animals and us. He celebrates the great…
John Robert Colombo: The Great Encourager
(A dedication to Clare Warwick 1930- 2019 – teacher, journalist, friend) By J.S. Porter You wake up one morning and in your electronic mailbox is a message, a response to something you’ve just written. …so…
Meditation on a Mask (On Marshall Soules’ Photographs of Wall Masks in Havana)
“We are only slightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.” Virginia Woolf (for Dan Pilling who first introduced me to masks) By J.S. Porter I am not the…
Anna Veprinska: A New Voice Comes to the City
“We sleep in language if language does not come to wake us with its strangeness.” Robert Kelly for BW Powe By J.S. Porter Polish poet Tadeusz Różewicz says that when a new poet arrives at…
Portrait of a Potter – Frances Ward (plus Brancusi, a Japanese word & the Book of Jeremiah)
Pottery is an old art form. As old as the Bible. You’ve heard the lines sometimes referred to as “The Potter’s House and the Ruined Vessel” from Jeremiah 18: 3: “So I went down to…