Erik Thor Sandberg‘s Magical Realism’

Oil painter Erik Thor Sandberg‘s art is anything but typical, plain, or mundane. His Facebook page “Personal Interests” section describes his aesthetic best:

“Dead things, naked things, vintage things, antique things, disturbingly cute things, acutely disturbing things.”

The works produced by this American artist are beautifully rendered scenes that shy away from the conventional with additions of the grotesque, nudity, and symbolism. It could be said the work falls in the camp of ‘Magical Realism’, similar to the work of Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch. Some paintings encapsulate a spirit of intimacy, as if the viewer is falling upon a humorous, strange scene. In some, characters are complacently frozen in time, seldom making eye contact with the viewer, lost in their own interactions and daydreams- nudes absentmindedly spray-painting in the woods, deer lounging with a plethora of ladies. Other pieces are more chaotic as scenes in arbitrary spaces fill with wacky characters.

Figures are placed in landscapes reminiscent of a dark fairy tale, fit for our wildest dreams. This work seems to surpass the confines of the subconscious and catapult us into a dreamland where humans and animals find themselves in strange situations, interacting in unnatural ways. Erik favours including animals in his work due to the classical and personal symbolic interpretations they evoke. Flaws and folly are brought to the forefront in the stories these pieces tell.

Allie Schaitel

Erik Thor Sandberg: Beautifully Disturbing

The Sad Truth

My lover is a woman. I cherish
her sex-the puffy lips of the vulva
like ripe apricot halves, the thin inner lips
that lie closed, gently as eyelids.
I love the slippery slide up her 
Vagina and the whole thing thrown open
like a Casa Blanca lily. I  savour her
taste and smell and how easily she can
pop out one lovely orgasm after another
like a baker turning out loaves of fragrant bread. 
Sixteen years and I haven’t grown tired
of that oasis, that mouth watering hole.
Yet sometimes, I do miss a penis,
that nice thick flesh that hardens
to just the right consistency. I miss
feeling it nudge me from behind in the night,
poking in between my legs. And the way it goes
out ahead, an envoy, blatant and exposed
on the open plain. It’s so easy
to get its attention.
It jumps up in greeting like a setter.

And I’d enjoy it stuffed inside me
like a big wad of money in a purse.
I don’t want another lover, but
sometimes I recall it. That longing
grabs me by the waist, dips me back, 
sweeps my hair across the polished floor.

Ellen Bass

Winds of May

Winds of May, that dance on the sea,
Dancing a ring-around in glee
From furrow to furrow, while overhead
The foam flies up to be garlanded,
In silvery arches spanning the air,
Saw you my true love anywhere?
Welladay! Welladay!
For the winds of May!
Love is unhappy when love is away!

James Joyce

the possession of slaves

Never may an act of possession be exercised upon a free being; the exclusive possession of a woman is no less unjust than the possession of slaves; all men are born free, all have equal rights: never may there be granted to one sex the legitimate right to lay monopolizing hands on the other, and never may one of these sexes, or classes, arbitrarily possess the other.

Marquis de Sade

Philosophy in the Boudoir

my way of giving thanks

I always wanted to write poetry because poetry is really where my heart is. It’s my way of life, and my way of grappling with my experience and my way of paying attention, my way of giving thanks, my way of being outraged — my way of living in the world. It’s a process of finding out things that I don’t already know — an experience of discovery. So I missed it the entire time that I was away from it. When I missed it so much that it was just too much to bear, that’s when I returned to it.

Ellen Bass

Interviewed by Meryl Natchez for Poetry North West, 16^th May 2020

given the gift of life

Every one of us is a mystic. We may or may not realize it, we may not even like it. But whether we know it or not, whether we accept it or not, mystical experience is always there, inviting us on a journey of ultimate discovery. We have been given the gift of life in this perplexing world to become who we ultimately are: creatures of boundless love, caring compassion, and wisdom. Existence is a summons to the eternal journey of the sage – the sage we all are, if only we could see.

Wayne Teasdale

The Mystic Heart

Miss July grows older

How much longer can I get away
with being so fucking cute?
Not much longer.
The shoes with bows, the cunning underwear
with slogans on the crotch — Knock Here,
and so forth —
will have to go, along with the cat suit.
After a while you forget
what you really look like.
You think your mouth is the size it was.
You pretend not to care.

When I was young I went with my hair
hiding one eye, thinking myself daring;
off to the movies in my jaunty pencil
skirt and elastic cinch-belt,
chewed gum, left lipstick
imprints the shape of grateful, rubbery
sighs on the cigarettes of men
I hardly knew and didn’t want to.
Men were a skill, you had to have
good hands, breathe into
their nostrils, as for horses. It was something I did well,
like playing the flute, although I don’t.

In the forests of grey stems there are standing pools,
tarn-coloured, choked with brown leaves.
Through them you can see an arm, a shoulder,
when the light is right, with the sky clouded.
The train goes past silos, through meadows,
the winter wheat on the fields like scanty fur.

I still get letters, although not many.
A man writes me, requesting true-life stories
about bad sex. He’s doing an anthology.
He got my name off an old calendar,
the photo that’s mostly bum and daisies,
back when my skin had the golden slick
of fresh-spread margarine.
Not rape, he says, but disappointment,
more like a defeat of expectations.
Dear Sir, I reply, I never had any.
Bad sex, that is.
It was never the sex, it was the other things,
the absence of flowers, the death threats,
the eating habits at breakfast.
I notice I’m using the past tense.

Though the vaporous cloud of chemicals that enveloped
you
like a glowing eggshell, an incense,
doesn’t disappear: it just gets larger
and takes in more. You grow out
of sex like a shrunk dress
into your common senses, those you share
with whatever’s listening. The way the sun
moves through the hours becomes important,
the smeared raindrops
on the window, buds
on the roadside weeds, the sheen
of spilled oil on a raw ditch
filling with muddy water.

Don’t get me wrong: with the lights out
I’d still take on anyone,
if I had the energy to spare.
But after a while these flesh arpeggios get boring,
like Bach over and over;
too much of one kind of glory.

When I was all body I was lazy.
I had an easy life, and was not grateful.
Now there are more of me.
Don’t confuse me with my hen-leg elbows:
what you get is no longer
what you see.

Margaret Atwood

Sonnet for Mark

Now wakes a path between the oaks, now
falls a spell of dove and frog, and stones
dream of their mountain clans and each stick
breaks to hear its name. Now light edges creek
and water appears as a quick coin trick or
silk pulled from a funnel of months, now
behind us, at last, and shade and sky fill
the mirror moving from next to next. Now
do you see there is no stillness to this world?
Even in sleep a seed is knitting its breach
from the dark and the body hums
on the march to becoming less and right
now words depart then arrive, like a brush
returning to a well of colour.


Emma Trelles

say things you didn’t expect

When you sit down to write a poem, you really don’t know where you’re going. If you know where you’re going, the poem stinks, you probably already wrote it, and you’re imitating yourself. You have to follow where the poem leads. And it will surprise you. It will say things you didn’t expect to say. And you look at the poem and you realize, ‘That is truly what I felt.’ That is truly what I saw.

Philip Levi

New Poet Laureate Philip Levine’s ‘Absolute Truth’

NPR 14^th August 2011

explodes and gives birth

[…] men, that is to say, are now writing only with the male side of their brains […] It is the power of suggestion that one most misses, I thought, taking Mr B the critic in my hand and reading, very carefully and very dutifully, his remarks upon the art of poetry. Very able they were, acute and full of learning; but the trouble was that his feelings no longer communicated; his mind seemed separated into different chambers; not a sound carried from one to the other. Thus, when one takes a sentence of Mr B into the mind it falls plump to the ground – dead; but when one takes a sentence of Coleridge into the mind, it explodes and gives birth to all kinds of other ideas, and that is the only sort of writing of which one can say that it has the secret of perpetual life.

Virginia Woolf

A Room of One’s Own