Summit Artspace invited local artists to channel Edgar Allan Poe this fall, creating works inspired by “mystery and Gothic fascination” to a juried exhibition.
Vladimir Suchan won the literary competition for “The Faun and Her Flute Have Been Found Again (Of Loves and Loving, Profane and Profound),” a poem.
Ron White won the visual competition with a ceramic sculpture of Poe himself.
The show is on view until Nov. 9.
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The Faun and Her Flute Have Been Found Again (Of Loves and Loving, Profane and Profound)
“That Mrs. Lackobreath should admire anything so dissimilar to myself was a natural and necessary evil.” Edgar Poe in “Loss of Breath”
“And via the passions I arrived at genuine philosophy,”
Julie cited by Edgar Poe in “Loss of Breath”
“No birth, no love, without a corresponding death”
Lucretius
What does it do,
if the it is—
a love significant,
once one drops dead?
Or when that love
is transferred,
betrayed, and as good
as purloined—dead,
when is the breath,
the rung, the letter,
cut below one’s step
above that first abyss?
Or is there souls’ entanglement
as amidst embodied elements
by which they last and even feel
one another past the grave and every gap
as if neither time nor space
nor any death’s divide are to stay?
So what is crossed out,
what is lost and what is gained,
when we cross each other,
crossing—hopping over
to some other love
or life—someplace else?
How much does that
make us, sliced and
dismembered,
if you disremember
that my soul is
still yours as well?
From the depths
past any reckoning
we are of two minds,
two snakes entangled
in a ceaseless strife
of life and death.
At the banquet
of the entwined Eroses
we both choose and serve
one another’s fills and wants.
Until we turn around
Orpheus’ Eurydice’s turning,
that fatal swing and swerving,
when poetry was live and music,
poetry was truth, and the soul—
the light and its lyre or melodic flute,
an instrument on which God, the Faun,
played us—and so did Beethoven, Bach and Poe.
