The Thin Museum
Verse by William Dennis
Paintings by Michael Guinn
Introduction
The Thin Museum has been nearly two years in the making on the poetry side; on the graphic arts side, it surveys a lifetime’s achievement by the eminent Philadelphia artist, Michael Guinn. All verse…all art…draws heavily on other sources, but poetry based upon work in another artistic medium, such as this collection, is called “ekphrastic.” It was Michael Guinn’s suggestion, originally, to use his work as the basis for verse and, in addition to the germ of idea, he contributed a much greater body of work—both more numerous and more labor-intensive.
Michael Guinn studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia College of Art (now Uarts) and the Fleisher Art Memorial. After two years of private study in Rome, Italy, he returned to Philadelphia in 1972 and has lived in Center City ever since. He is also a past president of the historic Plastic Club, an artists’ club and gallery. A painter and draftsman, his work is in many public and private collections. |
The Collection
“Rebus” is a sestina, derived from the Latin for “sex.” It embodies a complicated formula for repeating end words, rather than simple rhyme, which appeals to a mathematical mind, such as our author’s
“Forty-Three Bar” is in ghazal form, so familiar as to need no explanation…, if one lives anywhere between the Mediterranean Sea and the Bay of Bengal, where it is pop love-song format. Mono-rhyme with a refrain about sums it up. “Woman’s Portrait” is a brief example of terza rima, devised and displayed at greater length by Dante in his “Comedia.” “Sir Thomas Moore Approaches Utopia” is a blankness of verse in a waste of pentametric iambs, the form most suited for up-hill trudging. “Tolstoy Girl” a Shakespearean sonnet in form, enjoys blank verse in an equivocal effort to one-up the master. "Perseus Reflects" is another sonnet after Shakespeare's model, complying with the strictures of rhyme, in this instance. "The Barrens Witch" is in full ballad form, with galloping meter to keep up the impression. This is one man's attempt to remedy the sore lack of fresh ballad material in this latter, lesser day and age. "This To Me" is another ghazal, a form which, for me, harks back to old Delhi's shady lanes, Jantar Mantar and K'du. "Tea Rose" every-line-a-breath free verse shows what modernity has contributed to poetic form. "I'm Off to the Newark Farmer's Market" (Sundays, April through October, in the co-op parking lot, Newark, Delaware) is a case of form following function, parsnips, potatoes, onions and turnips setting the pace in Mike Guinn's painting. The ababb rhyme pattern is too simple to be original, however inadvertently arrived at. Too short for ottavarima, too long for terzarima, perhaps it might be dubbed pentarima, five-fingered rhyme. It wants to be sung to a stringed instrument. "Entrance of the Guests..." is meant to be something of a tribute, an old-fashioned sentiment in old-fashioned quatrains, here slightly disguised by spacing out the lines. "Every Day's Bride" is in ghazal form, as are "This to Me," and "Forty-Three Bar." Some day ghazal will be as familiar to English-speakers as the sestina or pantoum. |