Aug 1 5PM My guest will be Bagel Bard Scribe, Wilderness House Literary Review Poetry editor, and artist: Irene Koronas.
Irene Koronas and the SPIRITUAL POWER OF ZERO
by Lo Galluccio
Experimental poet and painter Irene Koronas based in Cambridge began creating when she was 12-years-old.
She explored language by reading and writing poetry and eventually fell in love with Octavio Paz, Cavafy and Yannos Ritsos.
Her Orthodox Greek heritage led her to be inspired by these poets as opposed to many confessional American poets.
Her latest creative exploration Project Zero, has led her to contemplate the meaning, image and representation of zero in all its many forms.
You will find paper reinforcements in some of her artwork because they are, after all, little sticky zeros. The title painting of her exhibition up at the O’Neill branch of the public library this month is titled 1 with 0=10-0_1 full circle.
Looking for zero, word combinations (o)
Wording zero’s representation, round soundVoid of biology, creator of chaos. Who belongsOpen? O differentiation from others. O only aloneAllows alone. O look you fools collapse
So broken so whole so smooth, so longSo propitious to soothe to group to blockCombinations; odd one equation annoys power;Old power oppositions. Zero uncovers
Look how wantonly, look you opposites,come, come. One, one good to twoZero zero plus two, no additionOnly zero operates somehow out of thought,subtraction. Others also born from cosmos,from reason, from axiom of you.
And Project Zero is not the first time Koronas has looked at numbers for their spiritual and artistic value. Her father made lists of numbers –pages and pages- before going to the dogtracks to bet and her Aunt was a compulsive scratch ticket gambler.
For Irene the numbers have a mystical meaning, for instance 1+ 2 = 3, is like the trinity. Her cubist paintings could compare with Eucharistic bread, broken into pieces but always whole.
Indeed her paintings --which relate to her poems like abstract correspondences-- are usually made on a grid composed of squares, which like eyes have images (or pupils) at the center.
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In the poem 12 cubes, printed below, she said, “The idea for this poem came from a painting done in a 12 cube grid. The words are not confined within the cubes but the cubes allow the images to co-exist. Unlike formalist writings and the use of a single subject; theme; I imagine the many and the varied images from the many sources. So each image compliments the other in and only in the fact that it is an image. The words paint an image. The image holds the words.”
12 cubes
everything’s wild on the way, in theway it is explained, i discover eightcubes from the 12 cubes painted. Nakedas opposed to nude, i witness yourleaps off the page, fifteen months toolate. Setting shutter speed, flexible andgetting paid for the method lovers tonein early morning. please sit, gatherliquid appropriately then clap. all sky,all video stores so red, no concept iscomplimented, it is blurry around myneck. I understand your concise cheer,red lines. Both round houses aremetaphysical, probably just adjustingwith ease with passing through. whatwill you inherit? the holes wornbackwards? dark night or day, standingby fountains fulfilling wishes? i dreamhow to button-hole memory: run staplesuntil an ostrich with no arms, a doorthat opens on explanations as conceit listens, tacks their thumbs; that’s whathappens in triangles. my brother wasthere he was orange he put himself inboxes to preserve our mothers for wesoak them in rain, in the end there by arope called victor, for grass in august islovely, sometimes an embarassment.have you transcended, thrown nerve upfrom tooth, given a ram one morechance to decode the seven purpleswamps. please, mothers, propel usthrough clouds, understanding our needto break even; hawks folding space, long corners into square houses
That poem relates to a painting in her upcoming exhibit, and is taken from a handmade chapbook called, “species.”
It’s full title comes from a definition found in a 1947 dictionary that Irene likes to use in order to find archaic meanings.
7. obsolete: specie.
{latin species seeing,appearance, likeness, aparticular sort, kind,species, from specere,to look at}
She said, “Forming a grid becomes a spiritual exercise, a discipline, a daily stance of commitment to my own definitions of what it means to be part of a species; historically I bring myself to myself each and every day. The becoming is within each square and each square represents that becoming.”
The maker of many one-of-a-kind handmade books, Irene Koronas also suggests that the musicality of her poems comes from her Orthodox Christian heritage where almost all the liturgy is sung.
“This is my history. It is as important to hear the poem as to read it,” she said.
Her watercolor paintings exhibit will be on display at the O’Neill Branch of the Public Library in Cambridge, 70 Rindge Ave., for the rest of January.
She is an exciting, experimental artist who is still dedicated to evolving
