Suparna Ghosh

I disagree with T.S. Eliot – this year, April was not the cruelest month after all. The floods receded from my walls, the days grew longer and their grey edge faded. My lost thoughts in bits of paper were found. And a video presentation by me evoked an expat’s musings from across lands and borders and other incarnations, real or imagined. It was inspired by the event sponsored, yes, in April, by the League of Canadian Poets, and the 2020 National Poetry Month, with the theme of “A World of Poetry”.

The video was presented virtually on Facebook’s ArtBarPoetryReadingSeries page on a Tuesday. The Art Bar is the longest-running, poetry only weekly series in Canada and has a special place in my history: in 1991, I was one of the founding members of the Art Bar in Toronto.

For this reading, I searched through my collection of poems from Sandalwood Thoughts and Occasionally and plucked and wove poems which conjure disparate voices of poetry from a diverse world, where memories are sketches of grief and laughter.

Founder of the Ontario Poetry Society, Bunny Iskov’s words encapsulate the essence of my poems:

Suparna Ghosh writes her poetry with a paint brush, creating wonderful works of art vibrant in colour and in form. Her lines will cling to you, and you will embrace them for a long time.

Writer, anthologist and recipient of the Order of Canada, John Robert Colombo, who was one of the founders of the League of Canadian Poets, stated:

Both her (Suparna’s) paintings and her poems are rich in extraordinarily bright and vivid colours and rhythms, so they illuminate and enrich the traditional landscape of Canadian art and literature.

Please visit suparnaghosh.com/about for further information.

A vibrant space has shut its doors. Gallery Hittite was a welcoming place for artists and art lovers, warm, inviting, inclusive, without the arrogance and stuffiness of most galleries. The highlight for me and my daughter Shayona was that both of us were a part of their Christmas show in a unique way. Shayona painted an interpretation in dazzling colours of my black and white sketch below and we exhibited the works together.

Each of us sold some in the gallery, although lovers did not always translate into buyers, and, after three decades, the curtains were drawn.

Sara Claglar and Anna Zinato, thank you for the memories.

You may have already seen a two-minute snippet of a video based on my album, Occasional Ghazal.

August 21, 2018, 8 pm, Art Bar, longest running poetry series at the Free Times Café

320 College Street (at Spadina), $5 at the door. Join three of the original Art Bar poets:
Allen Sutterfield, Pascal Dennis, Suparna Ghosh

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http://poets.ca/heartwood/

HEARTWOOD
Poems for the Love of Trees

Thursday, September 20, 2018, 6 – 9 pm, at High Park Nature Centre.
Join local poets, including me, and poets across Canada in celebrating the launch of a League of Canadian Poets anthology.

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Gallery Hittite, 107 Scollard St. in Yorkville, 416.924.4450
August Group Show, August 3rd to August 18th, 2018, open Wed to Sat, 12 to 6 pm

My pen and ink drawings with daughter Shayona’s painting of Cats

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Arts and Letters Club Summer Show ending August 31, 2018

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Valentine show in January and February, 2018 – oh, already happened. But a recent memory.

   
Tree Vigil                                                With Eyes Wide Open

My visits have been staggered. Yes, occasional. Because life happened. And the need and desire to create footprints took over.

You said I disappeared
without a trace

I have been there
in sudden corners
abrading petroglyphs
on sandstone

Here is how and why: