Sensuous Physicality

While doing chores this evening, I continued watching an iTunes U video on Van Gogh from an Art Historian at the Otis College of Art and Design.  The painting that caused me to jot down a few words here is 'Wheat Fields with Cypresses' from 1889, and just prior to that in the video, 'Olive Trees in a Mountainous Landscape' also 1889.  The year before Van Gogh wrote to his brother saying he wanted to produce paintings that presented 'symbolic language in colour alone"

These paintings and ideas, especially 'Olive Trees in a Mountainous Landscape' seemed to match how I write poetry. In my case, I attempt to present images, textures, sound, touch in words.  My words most often reject narrative, though not always, and attempt to induce sensations in the reader or speaker. For example I would love to write a poem to go with 'Olive Trees' but of course dare not given the evils of copyright.  In the following slide in this presentation, it was not so much the painting 'Wheat Fields' as the insert on that slide showing Van Gogh's luscious, sensuous brush strokes, that moved me.  Here the unnamed art historian used the phrase 'sensuous physicality'. I would say I attempt 'sensuous physicality' in my poetry.