Canvases
Painted Prose Poems
by Hoyt Rogers

A Note on Canvases

These poems are the nucleus of an ongoing sequence of rectangular chunks of “painted prose.” They posit the existence of a non-binary, feminist, multiethnic, environmentalist, Hispanic-Caribbean artist who writes ekphrastic poems about her/his/their own works, and then paints over them. To some degree, the prose poems run parallel to a verse-cycle entitled Colors, which follows a similar pattern of polychrome variations. Here’s an example:

Both the prose poems and verse-cycle are connected to passages in my forthcoming novel, Midnight at Sea, the second volume of The Caribbean Trilogy (the first, Sailing to Noon, has already appeared at Spuyten Duyvil Press). One of the main characters is a painter named Virgilio, who thinks in terms of canvases; sometimes he executes his conceptions, but often they simply remain suspended in his mind.
In addition to his own works, he describes plates from The Taíno Codex, an indigenous manuscript from the sixteenth century. In that apocryphal tome, one of the last Native Americans on a Hispanic-Caribbean island has created a codex similar to the well-known Aztec and Inca accounts. This is how Virgilio depicts one of the illustrations:

In all forms—whether verse, prose poetry, or narrative—I’m exploring how an artwork can generate an ekphrastic word-scape, only to pivot back towards the visual once again. — HR

Hoyt Rogers is an award-winning translator, essayist, poet, and novelist. He has published many books; he has contributed poetry, fiction, essays, and translations to a wide variety of periodicals and anthologies. His latest works are a poetry collection, Thresholds (MadHat Press); the novel Sailing to Noon (Spuyten Duyvil), book one of The Caribbean Trilogy; and a translation of Yves Bonnefoy’s The Wandering Life (Seagull Books). For more information, please visit his website, hoytrogers.com.

Canvases Painted Prose Poems by Hoyt Rogers

A Note on Canvases

Contents

Canvases
Painted Prose Poems
by Hoyt Rogers