Hello folks!
As promised last week, today is Cover Reveal Day for Seizing the Bygone Light: A Tribute to Early Photography, our upcoming new book!
Once again, the cover was designed by Cendrine. We wanted something that reflects the complementary diversity featured in the book. Hadiya’s photo is at the top, followed by David’s words from one of his poems, and Cendrine’s image.
We hope you like the cover.
See you next week for the release date!
Hello everyone!
Cendrine, David and Hadiya here. We have some very exciting news to share with you today.
After Photography of Life and Living: The Black and White Book, our first book published last year, we are almost ready to release our sophomore project.
Titled Seizing the Bygone Light: A Tribute to Early Photography, this new book pays homage to the early days of photography in a way that you have probably never seen before. We cannot wait to show you!
In the meantime, here is the blurb:
The medium of limitless possibilities that is photography has been with us for almost 200 years.
Despite its great advancements, its early days still influence and dazzle a majority of professional photographers and artists. Such is the case of Cendrine Marrouat, Hadiya Ali and David Ellis, three members of the PoArtMo Collective.
The result? Seizing the Bygone Light: A Tribute to Early Photography. This unique collection of artistic styles brings together different innovative concepts of both gripping writing and stunning visual imagery.
In the first part of the book, photographer and painter Ali introduces us to two of her favorite photographers by reimagining and recreating images in the nature of her photographic idols — Irving Penn and Karl Blossfeldt.
In the second part, photographer, poet, and author Marrouat shares a selection of her reminigrams, a digital style that she personally created to honor and pay homage to the early days of photography.
Author and poet Ellis rounds things off with a series of pareiku poems (the poetry form he co-created with Marrouat), offering fresh outlooks for his sincere, heartfelt adoration of photography of the past.
A fascinating and compelling book, Seizing the Bygone Light: A Tribute to Early Photography will leave you with a deep sense of appreciation and a greater understanding of photography.
That’s all for today! See you next Monday for Cover Reveal Day!
The Inspirational Artist Series spotlights some of the artists featured in our issues and anthologies, and who have moved us in specific ways.
Today’s guest is Poet Daniel Lyons, whose work has been featured in our magazine.
How does a poem begin for you? Does it start with an image, a form or a particular theme?
My poems always begin with an emotion I can’t quite define. The specific nostalgia of autumn air, for example. Each of my poems is an exploration of that emotion, a definition, as it were.
Are there any forms you haven’t tried yet but would like to?
After several creative writing courses at Western Washington University, I think the only poetry form I haven’t tried yet is epic poetry.
What is your relationship with your speaking voice and your written voice?
My written voice is considerably more articulate and less prone to hyperbole than my spoken voice. As a high-functioning autistic, writing is a more accessible way for me to communicate (most of the time) with other human beings compared to the spoken word.
Have you considered getting other people to read your poetry or is it important for you to be the one to perform your poetry to an audience?
I don’t know if this has ever been an issue for me. It would be strange to hear someone else read my poetry, though I have no fundamental objection to it. Given a choice, I suppose I would prefer to perform my poetry myself, simply because I consider rhythm and pacing to be the soul of poetry.
How important is accessibility of the meaning of your poems? Should we have to work hard to “solve” the poems and discover their deeper meanings?
Poetry is like abstract expressionist painting, or at least my poems are. The point is not what it means but what it makes you feel. Whatever that is, is what it means.
Has your own opinion or idea of what poetry is changed since you first started writing poetry?
I started writing poems when I was in elementary school. It used to be very important to me that poetry rhyme, also that it tell a story. Now I regard it more as a way of painting with words, a way of capturing one moment or state in time, whose past and future are entirely open to interpretation.
Anything else we should know?
Since my father and grandmother passed away in 2020, I have embraced painting as a creative outlet, in addition to working full time and attending online school with Washington State University to pursue a second Bachelor’s, this time in Political Science.
While it is one of my dreams to write about politics and history for a living, I try to keep my personal politics out of my creative work — not out of my themes, but out of my creative content. In this, I draw inspiration from my favorite novel, Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess, whose politics were about as different from my own as it is possible to be, were subtly evident in all of his work, and yet which I am always able to forgive because Burgess filled every page he ever wrote with humor, warmth, wit, and compassion. As we gird ourselves for another round of divisiveness, I hope we can all try to imbibe some of that spirit in our creativity, in our personal relations, and in ourselves.
Changing Seasons - Daniel Lyons gilded autumn lightfall glows on leaves golden as the disappearing summer… what a wonderful time to be… the summer remnants fall on fall leaves glowing with the light of season’s dying… what a wonderful time to be… wintry air blast mocks the warm colors that blanket so much hibernating life… what a wonderful time to be.
Changing Seasons is featured in issue 2 of the Auroras & Blossoms Poetry Journal.
Daniel Lyons graduated from Western Washington University in 2016 with a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing. He is a published poet and the self-published author of All-American Aphrodite.
Daniel lives in SeaTac, Washington.
Links:
Daniel, thank you for answering our questions and supporting Auroras & Blossoms!
Cendrine & David
Hello everyone!
We are very excited to announce a new book in our series of guides and workbooks for authors and artists.
Last year, when we released My Creative Journal: 40 Prompts to Take Your Writing to the Next Level!, artists and creative types who are not writers asked us for prompts that would help them kill their ‘artist’s block’. We listened.
30 Creative Prompts to Take Your Art to the Next Level follows the uplifting concept behind Auroras & Blossoms. Each prompt comes with an image and will challenge artists of all levels and abilities to discover or perfect their voice, and let inspiration flow freely.
30 Creative Prompts to Take Your Art to the Next Level will be released on January 12, 2021. You can already pre-order your copy for the early-bird price of $1.99 $0.99 until that day. Just click on the cover below for more information.
Thanks for reading and as always, happy creating!
Cendrine & David
The Inspirational Artist Series spotlights some of the artists featured in our issues and anthologies, and who have moved us in specific ways.
Today’s guest is Poet Geoff Collard, whose work appears in The Auroras & Blossoms PoArtMo Anthology: 2020 Edition.
How does a poem begin for you? Does it start with an image, a form or a particular theme?
Great question. I have a couple of folders on my laptop. One is called ‘Input’. There, I collect all and anything that is inspirational at the time: an image, something I’ve read, a thought or memory. To give you an idea, the last four are: ‘A Million Migrating Monarchs’, a quote from John Steinbeck’s Noble Prize Acceptance Speech, the poem ‘if your complexion is a mess’ and the sentence; ‘..shift the shoreline between the known and the unknown…’.
In the other folder are poems I have come across that I love.
I then use the input to trigger an idea. Next, I’ll take a separate input and see if I can mix them up – find the most unlikely relationships. Then I’ll find a poem and use its form to play with what I’ve got; change the structure, rhyme scheme.
This is the ‘play stage’…
I don’t wait for inspiration to hit. Nine time out of ten, the inspiration will come from the process. Invariably, the finished product – with countless edits and fine tunes – looks nothing like where I started.
Are there any forms you haven’t tried yet but would like to?
I would love to collaborate with a video / film artist, to add images to words…words to images.
What is your relationship with your speaking voice and your written voice?
We’re on very good terms. I love performing. I will always read my poems out as I read – to find rhythm mostly. But I love the additional dimension and connection reading poetry has.
Have you considered getting other people to read your poetry or is it important for you to be the one to perform your poetry to an audience?
Haven’t considered it but I love the idea. So often, other people see something in your poems that you don’t.
How important is accessibility of the meaning of your poems? Should we have to work hard to “solve” the poems and discover their deeper meanings?
There are a number of elements to this – and probably no hard and fast rules. The short of it is that if you haven’t connected, you’ve failed.
Writing with an audience in mind is really important. This is NOT writing to try and win favour and appreciation. The best poems connect on both levels – they have an immediate connection and a deeper meaning. The very best will draw you back and reveal a little more each time. This is a little bit ‘show’ don’t ‘tell’ as well. Don’t tell the audience how you expect them to react – describe it with enough emotional depth that it will elicit a feeling unique to the reader.
Poems are, by nature, often incomplete, sometimes without resolution. It is an art form that should leave the reader wanting more…wanting to know more. So – no to opaqueness, yes to clarity and precision; no to showing off; yes to using language to create mystery.
Has your own opinion or idea of what poetry is changed since you first started writing poetry?
Yes. In many ways. I am continually reading books on writing. I know my craft has developed. I have had to relearn some of the basics of grammar.
I’m learning the discipline of economical writing; of showing rather than telling. I’ve collected hundreds of poems that I like and discarded many more.
I like the cleverness of depth simply told, tales of the everyday that reveal something about ourselves. I like the idea of poetry being loosely defined without ignoring its history.
A Mystery of Love - Geoff Callard Small girl astride his spade; her make-believe pony as he bends to dig. In the garden, daughter riding, her pale feet planted. Father turning dark soil, their laughter skipping up the path, flowing into sunlit western facing rooms, shadows still warm on careworn carpets. Her love, a gentle vine, entwined around her father’s heart. His love a tangle she would deftly unpick, freeing him in a way her mother never could.
Geoff Callard is a New Zealand-born, Melbourne-based writer. He was a featured poet at the Australian launch of the anthology Planet in Peril (Fly on the Wall Poetry, 2019) and has had poetry published in the Golden Walkman, Live Encounters Poetry and Writing, the Blue Nib, Red Eft Review. Some of his work has been and selected for volume four of PausePressPause.
Geoff, thank you for answering our questions and supporting Auroras & Blossoms!
Cendrine & David
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