Poetry Rules

I headed to see Frida Kahlo 's exhibit , today. It's not the first time I see her works "live." The first time was over 15 years ago. Just a few months before that exhibit, I remember walking into a bookstore and being attracted by a cover depicting a woman with a split open body showing a crumbling column and with her body pierced by nails. It was love at  first sight. From that moment onward I have read truly extensively about her life and art. Her first exhibition in Rome boasted "Las dos Fridas," (The Two Fridas), one of her paintings I love most, but today's exhibit had an item that truly moved me: one of Frida's plaster corsets. Her art is always amazing to me. It's not about "Beauty," but it's rather about Feelings: it's about Anguish, Love and Strength. I wasn't allowed to take pictures, but here below you may check some of the beauties I saw today.  

I have been thinking about Virginia Woolf , today. Not only because it is the anniversary of her birthday, or because I have spent the morning rereading excerpts from her A Room Of One's Own , a book that has truly changed the way I perceive writing and, specifically, women and writing. Whenever I think of Virginia though, I am always drawn to the madness and the anguish that she felt on that day of March 1941. I see her wearing an overcoat, filling her pockets with rocks and heading resolutely towards the River Ouse to kill herself. But, the words that come to my mind are those by Frida Kahlo , in a letter explaining why she had painted The Suicide of Dorothy Hale in such a realistic way. " I tried my best to do what I felt ," she wrote. I can't help thinking Virginia's thoughts and very words might have been the same in that time of agony. So true considering her writing and so true considering her nature. I must make this the subject of a new poem. Patti...