Featured: Week of Jan. 7 (Inspiration)

By on Jan 8, 2013 in Issue Archives

Many wishes for a wonderful new year! We are back from the holiday season, feeling refreshed and ready to set upon new paths and new creative goals. With that in mind, we will devote two weeks to the sources of artistic inspiration, beginning with poems by two poets, Robert Lavett Smith and Deborah H. Doolittle.

Robert Lavett Smith’s “Maud Gonne” looks at the hold that unrequited love had on William Butler Yeats and how it influenced his poetry. 

Smith’s “Bird and Cows” shows us jazz great Charlie “Bird” Parker, playing a nighttime piece for cows, which likely inspired both musician and bovines. 

Deborah H. Doolittle’s “How to Read a Cat” provides an interpretation of the famous Henri Matisse painting inspired by his subject, who was also his daughter.

Doolittle’s “The Woman with Green Eyes” gets inside the mind of the unnamed subject who inspired Matisse’s painting of the same name.

About

Alyce Wilson is the editor of Wild Violet and in her copious spare time writes humor, non-fiction, fiction and poetry and infrequently keeps an online journal. Her first chapbook, Picturebook of the Martyrs; her e-book/pamphlet, Stay Out of the Bin! An Editor's Tips on Getting Published in Lit Mags ; her book of essays and columns, The Art of Life; her humorous nonfiction ebook, Dedicated Idiocy: How Monty Python Fandom Changed My Life, and her newest poetry collection, Owning the Ghosts, can all be ordered from her Web site, AlyceWilson.com. In late 2019, she published a volume of poetry by her third great-grandfather, Reading's Physician Poet: Poems by Dr. James Meredith Mathews, which also contains genealogical information about the Mathews family. She lives with her husband and son in the Philadelphia area and takes far too many photos of her handsome, creative son, nicknamed Kung Fu Panda.