{"id":2276,"date":"2018-10-26T18:07:32","date_gmt":"2018-10-26T18:07:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/?page_id=2276"},"modified":"2018-11-01T23:03:07","modified_gmt":"2018-11-01T23:03:07","slug":"solway","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/solway\/","title":{"rendered":"Solway"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\tan online poetry journal\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/h2>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoto \"Silfra, Iceland\" by Melissa Hotchkiss\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t

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\n\t\t\t\t\t\tWhere the Sky Meets the Sea\t\t\t\t\t<\/h5>\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
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by Arthur Solway<\/em><\/p>\n

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How many times have you imagined a room
\nwith whitewashed walls, a floor
\nof smooth stone cool to bare feet.
\nA room that is sparse. Only a table and chair.
\nThere is a solitary window looking out
\nto where the sky meets the sea,
\ncloudless and blue. There is nothing else.
\nAnd how many times has an emptiness
\nsuch as this filled you with a sense of calm
\ntoo good to be true, as the setting sun
\ncuts water like an old knife, its amber light
\ncasting its spell, and you unafraid to say
\nthe word: sparkle.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Poet's Statement: The first time I went to Greece was in 1976. The junta and Georgios Papadopoulos\u2019 regime was ousted two years earlier, but the country was still recovering from a brutal dictatorship. I ended up staying for over a year, living by my wits and out of a rucksack, sleeping on rooftops and at dirt-cheap hostels, and then went on the then so-called \u201cHippie Trail\u201d heading to Afghanistan overland. Some twenty years later I went back to Greece, spending many consecutive summers on the island of Paros in the middle of the Cycladic Islands. I returned to reading the poems of Yannis Ritsos, whom I discovered in the mid 1970s, writing in my journal and sketching notes for numerous failed poems while spending my days naked under cypress trees, mesmerized by the sunlight on the Aegean Sea.<\/p>\n<\/span>\n

\u201cWhere the Sky Meets the Sea\u201d is a poem attempting to reclaim some of those days. But like many of my poems over the years\u2014and poems I\u2019m most attracted to generally\u2014have multiple frames of reference. On the one hand the speaker in this poem touches on the bare-bones or monastic accommodations while also alluding to incarceration. Here I might have been thinking about Ritsos\u2019s years of exile and imprisonment on the islands of Samos and later Lemnos. I might have also simultaneously been thinking of the early paintings by the American artist Brice Marden, who has kept a studio on the island of Hydra for many years. Marden\u2019s early oil and encaustic wax paintings from the late 1960s and early 1970s, some referring to the sea\u2019s seemingly endless horizon line and shifts in color, remain as rigorous and contemplative meditations on structure and sustained observation.<\/p>\n<\/span>\n

Bio:\u00a0Arthur Solway\u2019s poetry and essays have appeared most recently in The London Magazine, Salmagundi, TriQuarterly, BOMB, The Antioch Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Tiferet<\/em>, and The Shanghai Literary Review<\/em>. He is also a regular contributor of reviews and cultural essays to Artforum, Frieze<\/em>, and Art Asia Pacific<\/em> magazines. A graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, he has been based in Shanghai since 2007 and has completed a first full-length manuscript of poems, Love Songs In Another Language<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/span>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

4X2 an online poetry journal Photo “Silfra, Iceland” by Melissa Hotchkiss Where the Sky Meets the Sea by Arthur Solway How many times have you imagined a room with whitewashed walls, a floor of smooth stone cool to bare feet. A room that is sparse. Only a table and chair. There is a solitary window…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"full-width-page.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2276","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2276"}],"version-history":[{"count":31,"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2276\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2438,"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2276\/revisions\/2438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/barrowstreet.org\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}