Monday, August 29, 2011

New at Scattered Light Library

That Feel: paintings and poems
also, free to read at Issuu

Sunday, August 28, 2011

Claustrophobic with Orange Hat

Claustrophobic with Orange Hat, a photo by shivasarms43 on Flickr.

Feel like this after the earthquake-hurricane combo this week? Me too.

Friday, August 26, 2011

Ten More

ten more 20x24, a photo by shivasarms43 on Flickr.

What a week for weather! Batten down the hatches, East coasters, and good luck!

Sunday, August 21, 2011

Welcome to Scattered Light, She Writers. We are two sisters, painter & poet, who collaborate on books, this blog, and life. Saunter through our offerings -- we have art, we have music, we have words. Lots & lots of words! Enjoy yourselves and please sign our guestbook, AKA the Comments box, and we will return the visit.

Red Fez

One of Cheryl's videos can be seen at Red Fez now. There are others at her You Tube channel as well. Just so you know...

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Treasure

a wonderful poem by Tim Buck about Janet's art:

openings (for Janet)

Her selection of pigments glistens on a palette,

pigments vibrating in rhythms of probability --

stochastic atoms of colors matching synapses.

The canvas seems infinite, a white ground bass.

And music will complement her morning brushes --

Scriabin or Miles? Chopin or Tom's 3/4 cadence?

Ah...Debussy will spread his elusive prismatics!

What will emerge?

It's not for me to know how she opens the portals of dream and vision.

But phantoms come, and forms of feeling

become masses hanging in strange balance.

Deep fall the eyes into that opening rendered.

Wild is the way that spirits clothe themselves

in chromatic meaning, then aesthetically whisper

into the pensive Moment haunting brushed fabric --

melancholia and suspense, death and wan Eros.

It's not for me to call this magic or miracle of color between now and numinous.

Or...a muted drama of black ink and charcoal

performing metamorphosis in titanium white.

Objects without name are apparitions

made of what this painters is feeling,

in hues wrought from mineral silence

to uncover modes of arcane space.

A slow grinding of intuitions into image opiums.

A grinding of elements into immanent powders,

releasing powers of shaman, seer, oracle.

Sienna, umber, ocher, madder.

Cobalt, chrome, cadmium, copper.

And the blues! -- brilliant or nocturnal.

All for alchemy transmuting incantations

that sigh in violet or simmer in alizarin.

A spellbound mixing of slow ecstatic oils

into inspiration, dark-gleaned discovery,

bringing affective texture to presence.

But sometimes I do wonder...

just what is happening underneath

this paint and these ghostly forms?

If I stared too long, if eyes fell too deeply,

I might see too much, go mad inside layers.

Sleep

Poem Made of Sleep

Lower your limbs into it
like a bath, your spine repeating
the blue wave of your lashes.
A tear made of the day
escapes onto your cheek
like the slow start of rain
and your fingers curl slightly.
Around what? The street sounds
outside your window fade away,
also refusing to be held.
This is the moment
you are most alone, listening to
the systems inside you, your thudding
blood, chest rising and falling,

each breath stretching like a yawn.
There's no fear of the numbness
that creeps through you now,
let it come,
loosening muscle, thinning thought.
Let it tell you what you already know,
in symbols and signs and implausibles.
At this hour, your mind talks in riddles
and the language is a mystery
you cannot hold past the moment
you tunnel up through the very dreams
that traveled so far to touch you.

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Rachmaninoff Plays his Elegie, Op 3 No 1

Sunday, August 14, 2011

New!

Cheryl has a poem in Up the Staircase Quarterly today. She used Janet's drawing "Porthole", above, for inspiration.

Friday, August 12, 2011

Goodie Bag

For a limited time, we're offering free downloads of the complete Scattered Light Library here
Not samples, mind you, but all eight chapbooks, in their entirety.

You're welcome.

Thursday, August 11, 2011

Groundworks Dance Theater

For the Life of Me from Amy Miller on Vimeo.

Tuesday, August 09, 2011

Richter plays Scriabin: Sonata no. 2, Op 19 (movement 1)

Friday, August 05, 2011

Blood Lotus: An Online Literary Journal: BL #21

Check us out!

Blood Lotus: An Online Literary Journal: BL #21: "In This Issue… Isaac James Baker Jason Bradford Rachel Bunting Thomas Michael Duncan C.B. Forrest Jennifer Givhan Scott Horn Monica Koeni..."

Thursday, August 04, 2011

Grilled Cheese

She always liked grilled cheese sandwiches, the gooey melt of them, the buttery crustiness. Today, when she bites into the one I just made for her, her mouth turns down. She purses her lips.

"What's the matter?"

"Nothing."

"Not hungry?" She's never hungry these days.She's so thin she can't get warm.

"It's your favorite," I remind her, pushing the plate closer to the table's edge. She says the sandwich has no flavor. She says it as if she's afraid of being heard.

I take her to lunch at a new place. She's restless and needs to get out, but the unfamiliar surroundings unsettle her. I point out the pictures on the wall similar to the ones in her bedroom, the identical plastic ficus. She hugs herself and looks at the door. When the grilled cheese comes, there's that frown again. The pursing. "No flavor?" Nodding, this time she has tears in her eyes.

We come home to a pile of junk mail. The people who send it seem to know she is ninety, are betting she has Alzheimer's. Orphans, the terminally ill, soldiers, and politicians all scream for donations. Sweepstakes promise her big winnings for small fees. Even the causes she has always supported notice that she has lost track of time, and dun her monthly rather than once in a year. She can no longer write a check, but I find a five dollar bill in a return envelope on top of the stack to be mailed.

"Would you like to go out for lunch?" I ask her a few days later. We have been kept in by thunderstorms, which scare her although she cannot hear the actual thunder. She closes the photo album with the captions that shore up her landsliding memories."Let's go to that place..." she begins, and I hope I've guessed correctly when I open the door to the coffee shop, the one she always took us to after Sunday School and recitals, after shopping for new school clothes, a first car, a wedding dress.

When her grilled cheese comes, she tucks into it as if it's the most delicious food she's ever tasted

Tuesday, August 02, 2011

DEVO - Worried Man - from Neil Young's Human Highway

What They Say

The Blend of Visual and Written Art

THAT FEEL is one of the finest collaborative books published by the sisters Snell. Cheryl Snell is a fine poet and her sister Janet Snell is a fine expressionist artist. In their previous books there was often the question of whether Janet was illustrating Cheryl's poetry or if perhaps each artist made her art and then combined it in the most suitable manner.

Now it is obvious that the art that spreads across both sides of an open book is unified and equally involved in the nidus of expression. The poems and art of THAT FEEL seem to be more visceral than those that came before them - these are poems from the gut, art about alienation and longing and rapturous moments that fade too quickly (or were they even there?). For example in the combined expression of the following, the painting accompanying the poem is that of two faces distorted by reflection in glass or mirror or memory:

REFLECTIONS IN CRACKED GLASS

Each brush stroke had been its own allegory

and could not reconcile the break. I felt for

connection in blind corridors, whispering

Who's there? from within the room's glass

eye.

Maybe I was dreaming. The facts were hard

to parse and sometimes lied. I did, too,

confused by what my reflection showed. The

glass distorted it and the fissure widened from

a thin red line. It splintered our embrace and

again I was alone.

The book may be brief but it is a powerful one. The only criticism about this latest opus is the somewhat disjointed feeling of the varying fonts or typefaces the artists used. Those wide variations of print diminish the tone of the poetry/art like unwanted audience distracters. But that is a minor complaint in a book that further substantiates the excellent collaborative efforts of the sisters Snell. --Grady Harp

Cheryl Snell's Shiva's Arms (novel review)
by Matthew Biberman

Any one who frequents the fiction section of a good independent bookstore knows that there is something of a cottage industry of writers currently churning out fiction invested in capturing the lived experience of ex‐pat Indians who have moved to America. One of the more distinctive elements of this sub‐genre is its investment in detailing life in India as well as in America, most often in ways that include, often in great detail, the back stories of the
characters before their decision to move away from their home land.
A recent addition to this stack of books is Cheryl Snell’s first novel, Shiva’s Arms. I know and admire Cheryl first and foremost as a poet, a fact that inevitably colored my reading of this book. Indeed I would encourage anyone who begins Shiva’s Arms to keep this fact in mind because I believe it influences the writing of this novel all the way down to its essence. Cheryl’s poetic eye is not just visible in the felicitous phrase, though the book is filled with such moments. A conversation in an Indian cab takes place in a dialect that sounds “like gravel in their mouths.” When a character unravels, we see that her eyes are “blue puddles in her slack face.” Food gets sopped up “in a baseball mitt” of bread. But to read Shiva’s Arms for its precise, poetic imagery is to skate along an iced over lake without any thought to the depths below.
The true challenge of Shiva’s Arms is to recognize that it is a very ambitious—indeed, innovative piece of writing. It is an experiment in what I would call a transversal novel. Shiva’s Arms takes shape somewhere between the sonnet craze that swept Shakespeare’s England four centuries ago and the cinematic techniques often identified as producing the Rashomon effect in twentieth century avant garde film.
First we must think about that now largely obsolete form—the sonnet sequence. Generally understood to have been popularized by Petrarch with his love poems to Laura, the sonnet sequence flourished in the late sixteenth century in London. Shakespeare’s effort is a very late example, and perhaps for that reason, breaks new ground. For the first time, the poet is repeatedly identified with the speaker of the poems (think of all those puns on Will) and the beloved is not simply idealized (famously, her eyes are nothing like the sun) but also unfaithful. Nor is the narrative clear. When you read Shakespeare’s poems it is as if you are reading a novel in snap shots, but with this twist: as you read it dawns on you that somehow the poems are no longer in chronological order
While keeping that experience in mind, let us flash forward to the art house movie. Famously, Kurosawa made a film‐‐Rashomon (1950) that retells a crime from four different perspectives, a device that highlights the complex and dynamic nature of reality. What the Rashomon effect
highlights is the truth that though reality is intersubjective (that is, reality is a collective formation), this “collective hallucination” (to use Freud’s term) is inevitably being made by individuals who are experiencing what is happening in ways that are always at once congruent and divergent.
What Cheryl has done in Shiva’s Arms is to present the story of an extended family in a novel that combines both of these techniques. The result can be described as a novel where each chapter operates as a kind of intense short poem, that is‐‐ as a sonnet. The chapters do not,however, anchor the reader to one character. Rather, the reader is passed from character to character. We begin tied to the American Alice, but then pass on to her husband Ram, and then their child Sam. This primary pattern is however interrupted with detours into Ram’s mother Amma, and ‐‐ with increasing frequency as the book builds to its conclusion ‐‐ the shunned sister Nela. With each shift, a different perspective is showcased. In strategy, the result is reminiscent of some of our most celebrated modernist novels, books such as Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway come immediately to mind. But in those works, the effect encourages the reader to separate out the characters so that the readers gains a satisfying sense that people are unique, yet isolated, grounded but limited to their bodies.
The effect that Snell produces in Shiva’s Arms is striking because it works in reverse. People in families get caught up in each other so that the configurations shift and change. Suddenly the notion that we are limited to our physical bodies falls away. We meld in our struggles, mix and combine in ways that defeat the macro laws of physics both in terms of space and even time. In this, Snell’s work is reminiscent of Djuna Barnes cult masterpiece Nightwood, though the overall mood is far more evocative of Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky.
For me the high points of Shiva’s Arms come when Snell renders the rapid blooming of a state of existential dread. The effect is positively unsettling in its intensity, most especially early in the novel after Alice’s marriage precipitates a psychological crisis. The concluding confrontation between Amma and Alice is even more impressive, coming as it does so effectively after the dramatic resolution of the dinner immediately preceding it. Fights in Shiva Arms do not end with characters walling themselves off. Everything drives toward mixture, a fact highlighted by Ram when he observes that “we are all just chemistry labs.” This theme is made overt via the role food plays in this novel complete with Recipes, a crowning touch.
According to western cliché, cooking and food illustrate how each of us enjoys a unique and colorful heritage of goodness. True to its radical nature, Shiva’s Arms upends that idea and puts in place the notion that each of us is but an ingredient, a blend that makes up the bigger whole.
Shiva’s Arms is a satisfying novel that demands much from its reader. Its strengths are many but if I had to pick one on which to end I will stress that this is a book that provocatively challenges many of the most cherished presumptions propping up many well known examples of Indian – American fiction, or indeed of multicultural literature generally speaking. Despite paying lip service to the idea that western notions of subjectivity are not universal, most writers working in the genre of the English novel continue to present nonwestern forms of consciousness via free standing western characters. In stark contrast, Shiva’s Arms invites you to imagine characters that are interconnected parts of a larger whole. Such a radical insight can only come from a novelist of great talent and skillful execution. With luck, future novels from Cheryl Snell will deepen this exploration. As a reader I certainly look forward to the adventure.

Prisoner's Dilemma:...The diction here, precise and yet off-hand, coupled with the unexpected coupling of ideas (beauty – rivers – the girl who knows all the boys desire her) places Snell on intimate relations with the main currents of twentieth century American poetry, a landscape marked by masters such as John Ashberry, Mark Strand, Louise Bogan and Louise Gluck, to name but a few poets associated with the style Alan Williamson (himself a fine poet) dubbed the new American surrealism. And yet Snell—or rather the Snells—for the book I am reviewing, The Prisoner’s Dilemma, is a collection that alternates between Cheryl’s short lyric poems and Janet’s pencil drawings -- stands apart.

The difference is hard to explain, so lets be blunt: in the best of Cheryl’s work, the style regains its vigor, enlivened by the poet’s deep sense of what it means to be caught up in life. A digression on Freud may help here because we are on the subject of digressions. Freud could never stop being fascinated by the notion that it is life that is the interruption. Not death. The immortal is the natural state. But somehow we find ourselves shunted and routed out of the immortal and into the detour of the mortal for a brief go round before flowing back into the immortal, back into death, and the beyond of death. Cheryl Snell’s poetry, and Janet’s art, together illuminate this insight: that the detour into life is a circular whirlpool. --Matthew Biberman

It could be the case that those human heads are floating in a paradoxical space: yes, obviously human (and all that that signals to us) but also pure moments of form. Cephalic shapes to circumscribe color-vacuums, lending force to the other “objects.”Another impression jumps into my own head, beyond what I said above about...well, whatever it was I said. For me, I feel like I'm looking at a negative-image of consciousness. The subconscious? Maybe. And what's weird and cool is that those heads, drained of color and feature detail, seem to express more human soulfulness and depth than even a portrait by Rembrandt!...Tim Buck

There is something of Keats's “negative capability” revealed in this poignant story: it is a mystery to me how a female author can so perfectly inhabit the hurting corners of a middle-aged man's soul. And her striking turns of phrase bring delight to the reader, even as he squirms and winces in sympathy with Roger...Tim Buck

The imagery is often stark and reminiscent of Sylvia Plath, the emotion bottled which, unstoppered, pervades an air of vaguely fragrant stoicism. Where the subtext is menacing, it frets away at a blithe surface like a sliver of glass stuck in the weave. But, often, it's uncompromising, violent, in-your-face, leaving the reader with no more than the merest scintilla of hope...Rosy Cole

...This is a collection of poems to be lingered over, like reminders of first views or experiences we usually keep to ourselves for fear that speaking of them will make them lost to us. Snell has captured these moments and we can only hope she will continue to write such tender thoughts as well as in MULTIVERSE. ---Grady Harp

Marilyn Kallet, on Multiverse:
"Cheryl Snell's poems are rich, integrative, witty, and beautifully composed."

This is not poetry merely to beguile the imagination; it is experience by vital proxy, full of pulse and texture and radiance. Memento Mori is a tour de force. (R.Cole)

"... Both Snells' (author and painter) works soar in this lovely book. It was interesting to watch the movement of fear between the poems...A nervous and wonderful collection of art fused with poetry."--Andrew Demcak, on Multiverse

Dorothy Shin, Akron Beacon Journal--
"Her work is dark,mysterious, seemingly drawn from the subconscious...Foreboding, regret, entrapment, longing and enigma vie for prominence while gestural, expressive brushwork gives the forms a supernormal tension and energy..."

Bob Grumman, Taproot--"Macabre, comic, mysterious, and subtly erotic, these fascinating drawings constantly flirt with disgust -- a perfect example of graphic black humor. "

"A series of charcoal drawings that go darkly anywhere via an expressionism that reminds me of Egon Schiele and Francis Bacon. Snell provides poems for her illustrations that generally extend rather than just rephrase them-- ."

... varied and beautifully imaged lyric narratives...Again, she stuns us with her imagery.---Comstock Review