Below you'll find highlighted several current or upcoming poetry-related exhibitions.
✭ A community visual and poetic exhibition is on view through June 19 at Pine Camp Arts and Community Center, Richmond, Virginia. Hosted by Richmond's Department of Parks, Recreation and Community Facilities, the free exhibition, "Narratives: Telling Your Story", comprises both visual art and spoken word. In the Spotlight Gallery, work by artist Bukuru Nywandi is on show.
Read Rob Cardwell's article about Nywandi, "Henrico Student Defies the Odds, Inspires Others With His Art", WTRV, May 7, 2015.
✭ Continuing through June 28 at Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, Massachusetts, is "Bill of Lading: The Art & Poetry of Roger Martin". A designer, illustrator, and painter, Martin, who died March 14, 2015, was the inaugural Poet Laureate of Rockport, Massachusetts, in the 1990s.
✭ June 25 is opening day of "Poets House Showcase", New York City. Each year, Poets House exhibits all the new poetry collections and poetry-related texts published in the United States in a single year by commercial, university, and independent presses. The 2015 exhibition will run through August 1.
✭ Lawrie Shabibi in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, continues "Poetry in Stone", a solo exhibition of work by Jordanian sculptor Mona Saudi. In addition to seven of Saudi's sculptures created between 2003 and 2012, the exhibition features seven silkscreens of drawings, made between 1976 and 1980, inspired by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1942-2008), Saudi's friend. Saudi has incorporated into her drawings phrases from Darwish's "Earth Poem", "Hymn for the Green", "Her Image", and "Suicide of the Lover". Also on view are 12 lithographs inspired by the poem "Petra Tablet" by Adonis. (Saudi self-published Petra tablet: the hand of stone draws the place, featuring Adonis's poem, in 2011. Adonis's poem "Singular into Plural" inspired a series of drawings Saudi exhibited in 1975, during the Lebanese Civil War.)
The Lawrie Shabibi exhibition continues through July 16.
Included in the gallery's exhibition press release is this poem by Mona Saudi (see the Arabic text), from An Ocean of Dreams: Forty-three Poems (Passeggiata Press, 1999); translated by Tania Tamari Nasir, the collection is out-of-print.
An Ocean of Dreams
To stones from which we build an ocean of dreams
To stones where beginnings and endings abide
To stones pregnant with the longing for revelation
To stones from which I weave the light of joy
To stones in which I chisel a path for the soul
To stones that I touch, and the vapors of love arise
And as I polish them my soul thins out
And the gods of mystery talk to me
To stones that thought me the radiance of creations
To stones I lean on whenever I am touched
By fatigue, and despair knocks my door
To stones that connect me with what I know
And with what I do not know
I learnt incarnation so as to touch the invisible
And I dwelt between the orbits of action
And the orbits of dreams.
Mona Saudi also has made drawings and prints inspired by poet and Nobelist Saint-John Perse 1887-1975).
See the archived "Homage to Mahmoud Darwish" at Jacaranda Images, Amman, Jordan.
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