Art: from Excavations series by Detlef Gotzens
Change of Heart
It’d make no difference
if you did or didn’t.
I’m addressing a fly
for the world’s been reduced
to that–a self
interest I cannot fault.
But if you found the heart
to speak, speak in earnest.
Do in the fewest words.
(This poem is in conversation with the following quote from Orlando by Virginia Woolf: “Two things alone remained to him in which he now put any trust: dogs and nature; an elk-hound and a rose bush. The world, in all its variety, life in all its complexity, had shrunk to that. Dogs and a bush were the whole of it.”)
But Beautifully [You] Will Come
as a matter
of fact
folding
into every roofline
only to defy
the walls
protective of profit
margins like division
signs
for intimacy
over thin walls
of privacy equals the number
of tenants
each blooming a real
estate
bubble of false
emphasis
as birds chirp blue streaks into
late night into
daybreak
as if afterward
clings
to their featherbones.
from Excavations series by Detlef Gotzens
This Land of From
Other beaches surface
where I shaped.
I don’t mind taking
up the shape of an ocean
for a moment.
Do you understand the hunger
of dark water?
The horizon’s mane,
a wave of another day.
Home, a breeze spreading
from one edge of life
under the wings of cities.
There goes the gust
of my mind. There goes
the billow of between,
preferring silence.
I found threads
of the dead
through your sleep.
Anything that stays
out of sight long enough
becomes a god.
The sentence
you have to carry.
A crowd of fruit trees
on the verge of coherence.
The knife prying
apart ribs. The last
of me. A hungry crow
catching light in its black head.
My urge to make death
over. Reality forced
into another room.
Desire, god, blesses you.
What a relief–to accept
the heart we find
against all odds
writhing, undone
over time. Did I promise life
will outgrow the rest of desire?
Life, a mountain
alert with thirst,
palpitations mostly.
I turn to you. Later–seize me
here. Near the aftermath
of bread and beans.
Everything going still
like a colony of bees.
Can hornets stomach
the darkness of sometimes
through the spokes of sunrise.
Every time the soil finds a way
to side with the bees.
Pruning of desire, perfect pleasure.
Desire accessory to imagination.
Green as young earth.
Anyone can feel this age
of fog turning, holding
down a ripple of light.
Wars, return to words.
As I hug your head
so tight it shakes in my ribcage.
When words are too heavy
who dares to name.
I want the wind
arching to its limit
to share my tongue.
Run down those
flights of stairs beyond the horizon.
Is it not easy to forget the wind.
Now I see–pain folds
into one mouthful.
White lies near truth float
frail, unscathed.
Light alone can’t account
for all this dark or the perimeter
of time where water falls flat
as if to die. I am here, each
of us blunt details of wrath.
Part of childhood
splinters like spiderlings.
Your childhood
blitzed the moon to syllables.
What to say about it but–
be tender with the future.
The future a newborn’s eye,
a pure instinct.
Fold my mother’s life
at the pelvis and it’ll become a knife.
In the grand scheme of things,
it takes nothing to start
and start again.
Now is but a particular temperature
of kinship in the cold.
The syntax of reality, desperation
of nouns. Choose to celebrate.
A daily sequence
of sunlight is all it takes.
What is your hand has each finger
named, same as mine.
(This is a cento whose lines are made up of those from Present Tense Complex (Conduit Books & Ephemera, 2021))
from Excavations series by Detlef Gotzens
This Is the Only Way to Speak
A gust of snow slits
ajar a mouth among branches.
I have an island to keep blank.
Waves rave ashore
slowing around a deserted island
protectively.
Run down those flights of stairs.
Beyond the horizon is another night in flight
from its fixated existence.
I needed you
to gut me so you could narrow
me down like a fish.
Beyond the horizon is what meets the line’s both ends.
Its circumference, the island, empty, shoulders.
Is it not easy to forget the weight
when snow keeps falling in flecks.
I have an island made of water.
Let the wind through, let it phrase
what’s next to shudder.
Pomegranate
A night of snow sits coiled
on the pine tree like a brain.
She wakes up with a litter
of thoughts to drown.
The pine shields her
barn when her patience
agitates the fogbound sun.
In her head she renders lighter
the night her daughter left
so she can see the tress
of her shadow leaving
—after which she blessed,
as does a woman at peace
with the world, some scarecrows
with fringes for the wind to twirl.
The unstoppable fact of hunger
has been so many’s undoing.
She’s fed the cows what the land
couldn’t for two winters.
The fruit trees, repetition of good
weather and most of her bad hours.
Waist-deep in snow, the pine
remembers the spring air
disturbed by nuptial flights,
her daughter a girl who couldn’t tell
figs from pomegranates.
The girl sat, mindless
of what the gaunt swing
could stand, mindless of the horsefly
that just dined on death, biting
into the purple flesh of a fig
after another, her teeth red like seeds
of another fruit. The flat green
before her was alive with insects,
each lifetime a shivering stretch of gullet.
At night, the sun was nowhere
but underground.
Faithfully, each dawn,
her mother opened the curtains
for anything that stays
out of sight long enough
becomes a god.
This is the Only Way to Speak and Pomegranate originally appeared in Present Tense Complex (Conduit Books & Ephemera, 2021)
About the author:
Suphil Lee Park (수필 리 박 / 秀筆 李 朴) is the author of the poetry collection, Present Tense Complex (Conduit Books & Ephemera, 2021), winner of the Marystina Santiestevan Prize, and a forthcoming poetry chapbook, Still Life (Factory Hollow Press, 2023), selected by Ilya Kaminsky as the winner of the Tomaž Šalamun Prize. She is also the translator of If I’m Going to Live to One Hundred, I May As Well Be Happy by Rhee Kun Hoo (Union Square Books, 2024). Find more about her at:
In the artist’s words:
DEGO, Detlef Gotzens’ multi-medium artwork is stark and peerless, the product of a long and varied career in the arts.
In his adolescence, he found himself excelling in one of art’s most traditional and revered niches: stained glass design. Born in Cologne, Germany, he became an apprentice to Jacob Melchoir at the age of fifteen. Soon after completing his apprenticeship and receiving his journeyman certificate, he went on to study glass technology and design at Rheinbach’s prestigious Glass College. His success as an artist continued after he immigrated to Canada, where he opened his own atelier, and was commissioned to work on restoration projects for some of eastern Canada’s most recognizable churches, including St. Joseph’s Oratorio and Notre Dame Cathedral, as well as the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill. DEGO told Ottawa Life Magazine that during his work on the Peace tower they were running into technical difficulties and there were several barriers making progress difficult. He recommended that some of the key people on the project visit the Cologne Cathedral and speak with some of the world renowned architectural and design excerpts who had worked to restore that famous landmark and many others. The trip provided Gotzen and others on the Peace Tower restoration team with new ideas and innovations to make the project a success.
Throughout his years as a stained-glass artist, DEGO rarely painted or drew outside of his plans and designs for stained glass windows. He slowly started to create original paintings and sculptures under the name “Dego,” though he focused on his high-profile stained-glass commissions. Gotzens decided to commit himself full-time to his original artwork in 2009. Since then, his art has been celebrated, even being displayed in the famous Saatchi Galley in London, England.
The art itself is visceral, visually arresting. It is comparable to Pablo Picasso’s early Dadaist work, or Salvador Dali’s surrealist dreamscapes, only abstracted even further. In some cases, “DEGO’s” sculptures incorporate his training in glass: “I Can Fly” features a spindly, wiry bottom, supporting a stained-glass wing, encapsulating a sense of boundless freedom in its form. “Enchanting Shard” is defined by a clash of rigid and free-flowing shapes, with dark blues attempting to bring structure to the earthy hues that float around inside the glass.
His paintings also contain this same controlled chaos They feature familiar figures – such as roses, thrown into visual turmoil, seeming to represent definite beauty in an otherwise subjective world. Two of his painted works on display at Ottawa’s Alpha Art Gallery are defined by swirling, dripping streaks of earthy shades, seemingly arbitrary lines of paint that, together, create an image that is cathartic to its core.
DEGO’s finished products act as reflections of his artistic approach, as he is driven by impulse. He has a symbiotic relationship with his art: he creates what his work demands, and in return, it reflects his personhood. Depending on the medium that he is working with, it reflects a different aspect of his self. Whereas working with glass is a highly technical process, painting and sculpting are far more freeing.
“I believe that in my paintings as well as sculptures there are elements of free expression and, then again, of controlled form and order, which is certainly a manifestation of my personality showing through or reflecting in my work,” he explains.
DEGO paints to discover truth, whether it exists in him or in society. Painting is, for him, a visual language, for him to communicate with the world around him, an invitation for response. Gotzens touches on something very raw in his work: his art may be challenging and complex, but so are the emotions and truths that he is communicating through his abstract portrayals of his self and his world.
http://www.instagram.com/degoarts/
https://the-gleaner.com/detlef-gotzens-metaphors-and-messages/