Welcome to Glinka Gallery, it’s open 24/7. it has six individual galleries for fine art, photography, poetry, dance and music and it is just a few finger clicks away from you wherever you are. I want to show you around.

I have always been involved with the arts world, from my student days, through many years making arts programmes for television, as a writer and, these days also as the artistic director of a virtual art gallery, Glinka Gallery, in the ‘multi-player virtual world’ called Second Life, where I have the virtual name, Wolfgang Glinka.

Wolfgang Glinka and Colin Bell are interchangeable versions of the person known as Me, and my gallery, is an extension of many of the things I have done and others that I have dreamed of doing before anyone even imagined the enormous potential of virtual reality. Virtual reality, is as its name implies just another form of reality. Here, as you can see in my welcome notice to virtual visitors to the gallery, I have been able to curate an extraordinary group of artists from most branches of the arts – fine art, photography, poetry, dance and music. Actually all of my artistic passions.

Over the eight years of Glinka Gallery’s existence, and now in in fourth rebuild, we are getting bigger and bigger, the gallery has shown regular exhibitions by a family of regular artists, including our resident artist, Lash vv, creatives in both virtual and real worlds, who find freedom and support at what has now become more than a gallery, more of a creative arts centre.

We now have an ever-growing permanent collection of some of the work by our exhibitors over the years. I think of them as my friends.

I am a writer, a novelist and poet, and I have been experimenting here at the gallery with ways of putting poetry, in particular, on the walls, along with fine art. Therefore I have built specific spaces for poetry and created a role for a resident poet (Shyla the Super Gecko) who holds regular poetry reading events here.

I also put on exhibitions of my own work, especially my Fibs, short-form Fibonacci poems which lend themselves to life on the wall as well as on the page. They have their own home in the Fibonacci Gallery.

Here is my, well, Wolfgang Glinka’s short film of his, well my Fib, Reflections, published by The Fib Review and now also viewable on Youtube.

We also have a resident dance troupe, 21 Parakeets, directed by Joseph Nussbaum, a composer and choreographer, who has sought to make contemporary dance an equal partner here with fine art and poetry. His work is inspired by the wish to show challenging but also entertaining dance shows in our own custom built dance theatre, the Aviary Theatre, built by our buildings director, Tony Marino.

Since I’ve been running the Glinka Gallery, I have been able to develop my interest in photography, often too far down the list of my priorities, in a busy writing schedule. In the last eight years I have been pushing myself to make my photography an equal form of expression with my poetry. At first, I made photography exhibitions of my work mostly shot on foreign trips, buy recently I have developed my interest in photo-art, mostly known as digital photo-editing or image manipulation. This is a completely new world for me and I was excited to find I could attract a large audience for the first of my recent shows, Ecce Homo, (Behold the Man), an examination of masculinity at a time of crisis in male identity.

My most recent show is Dead Poets in Love, Queer Writers from Shakespeare to Burroughs. Here I am trying another experiment in bringing writing and photography together. This has been, maybe my longterm ambition for most of my life. In the gallery the texts float as an ethereal presence in front of my manipulated images of the writers themselves. In the movie of the show, I decided that it was better to leave out the texts. Maybe I will take this idea further in my next projects.

If the potential of the arts in the virtual world is new to you, and if you are interested to come to Glinka Gallery and to the other arts venues in the often under-estimated virtual platform, Second Life, https://secondlife.comhere is a brief look. We hope to see you there, maybe.

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Perseus and Andromeda

Nude

in chains

on the rocks

she’s picture-perfect.

Titian’s Andromeda displayed

for us mortals, for hungry beasts, and for Perseus

who dives seaward dressed-to-kill in pink and gold robes to slaughter the slavering monster.

He’s a boy-hero, pointing his scimitar, playing the man-of-action awed by the glamour of a damsel’s distress – he needs to impress.

Her life depends on this handsome man so she exhibits herself in a table-dance

wearing fettish limb-fetters and a dangling earring

she guarantees love at first sight.

In moments of stress

decorum

learns how

to

flirt.

Colin Bell 29/9/2020

I was inspired by the much-praised Titian exhibition, Love Death and Desire, at London’s National Gallery this summer, during the infamous Covid-19 pandemic – so much so that I decided to write a set of Fibonacci poems about them. Poetry based on specific works of art are known as Ekphrastic – my four new poems, Four Ekphrastic Fibs are the result and they have just been published in The Fib Review, that impressive Fibonacci specialist journal. http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/

I thought I would reproduce them here along with the original paintings by Titian, maybe the greatest painter of the nude, known appropriately enough as the Poesie – or Poems. If you want to know more about these paintings read about them on my previous blog Titian Reunited: https://wolfiewolfgang.com/?p=19989

My four new Titian poems join a fifth, Diana and Actaeon, that was already published in a previous issue of the Fib Review in a set of poems inspired, like all of these paintings, by stories from the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I have printed it again here below.

I write these poems using the Fibonacci mathematical number sequence for each line’s syllable count….and now having had 104 of them published by The Fib Review, I guess you could say that I’m hooked as you will probably see if you look back on some of my previous blogs on the subject of Fibonacci and the Fib. https://wolfiewolfgang.com/?p=19

My thanks, yet again, to The Fib Review for continuing to publish my work.

Venus and Adonis

Stay

moans

Venus

love’s goddess

Titian’s writhing nude.

Adonis springs hot from her bed

his blushes define the child out-grown by his body.

He is dressed for hunting, she’s undressed for him, helpless love personified by its queen

who is now tasting the pain she inflicts on us all.

His dogs salivate sensing blood,

the boy is confused:

why this fuss?

Venus sees

the death

of

youth.

Colin Bell 29/9/2020

Diana and Callisto

Chaste

queens

turn mean

at bath time

in Titian’s paintings –

he likes women out of their clothes.

Virgin goddess Diana is nasty when she’s nude

she’s addicted to alfresco ablutions in the woods with her handmaidens naked.

Useful for Titian but bad for the nymph Callisto

pregnant by the king of the gods

strip-searched found guilty

shaming us

who stand

and

stare.

Colin Bell 30/9/2020

Actaeon

Don’t

look,

he thought,

but he did,

fearing what he saw,

alert to the change in himself.

Until now he’d been just a lad hunting with hound dogs.

Eyes know your desires before you do, he discovered in that surprised unblinking glance.

Arousal felt bestial to this embarrassed young man.

The transformation was instant

and the first horn grew.

Love’s not blind,

he thought,

for

stags.

Colin Bell 05/10/2017

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I am thrilled to be the new Featured Poet International for American poetry publisher, Muse-Pie Press, producers of the three highly-respected poetry journals: Fibonacci poetry specialist, The Fib Review; short-form poetry publishers, Shot Glass Journal; and the spoken-word magazine, Bent Ear Journal.

I have had a few short poems published in Shot Glass Journal, but in the last ten years I have had 99 Fibonacci poems published in 30 consecutive issues The Fib Review, the leading publishers of this very specific poetry form. Writing these short poems to submit to the triannual editions of The Fib Review has now become a a regular calendar event and I’m grateful to have had such support from the journal’s energetic editor, Mary-Jane Grandinetti.

There must be something about writing poetry to a precise syllable count that draws me again and again to what are known as Fibs. The style is named after the medieval Italian mathematician, Fibonacci, who saw a pattern, a code, some have said, in the sequence 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233 etc. where the next number is the sum of the previous two. In the last ten years, I have written many Fibs using the Fibonacci sequence for the syllable count per line. So far I haven’t dared to write a line with any more than 233 syllables, but, maybe, one day, I will venture to 377 syllables and beyond.

Muse-Pie Press asked me to be their Featured Poet International a few months ago, and I was really excited to be honoured like this, but I hadn’t realised that they would publish 25 of my Fibonacci poems on my own featured page where they look, I like to think, true to their Fibonacci inheritance. Seeing them all together, I was delighted to see that they also form a poetic sequence – a digital chapbook – I hope you agree.

If you want to see the whole page, here’s the link – I hope you enjoy the Fibs and that you might even have a go yourself at writing one yourself. http://www.musepiepress.com/index.html

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I have three new Fibonacci poems published today in the Fib Review, the specialist poetry journal for this intriguing style based on the Fibonacci number sequence.

I’ve been writing them now for over ten years and The Fib Review has now published 89 of them. I’m amazed and delighted to have had this long relationship with this pioneering publication. http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/index.html

My thanks, once again, to Mary-Jane Grandinetti, the editor of The Fib Review who has been guiding me on this interesting journey through a sea of numbers.

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Apollo and Daphne (1744/5) by Giovanni Batista Tiepolo (Louvre, Paris)

I have had three new Fibonacci poems published today in the splendid online publication The Fib Review, the world’s leading Fibonacci specialist publisher. These three make a total of 82 of my poems to be published by The Fib Review in 27 consecutive issues. Thank you so much Mary-Jane Grandimetti, the editor, for your continuous support of my work since I first tried to write these complicated, at times infuriating, but truly rewarding short-form poems.These new poems have been my second look at the Roman poet Ovid’s  masterly work, Metamorphoses, in itself a collection of stories from even further back in classical tradition. I have now written six Ovid poems and, maybe, I might have another go at some more one day. These three concern women who have been messed around by the gods – a common theme in Ovid and, surely, one for our times too.

The poems focus on Daphne who would rather be turned into a tree than submit to the God Apollo’s demands; Orpheus and Euridice and Semele. Here’s a brief note on their stories.

Daphne: Daphne is a nymph dedicated to virginity. She is desired by Apollo. She runs away from him pleading with the other gods to change her from her womanly form. She is transformed into a laurel tree and granted immortality, becoming evergreen.

Orpheus and Euridice (1862) by Edward Poynter

Orpheus and Euridice: Orpheus uses his musical skills to persuade Hades, the king of the underworld, to let Euridice, his dead wife, come back to life, but neither Orpheus nor Euridice can look back when they leave Hell. Orpheus can’t resist seeing his wife again. He turns to look. She dies a second time.

Jupiter and Semele by Pietro della Vecchia

Semele: Semele is a princess who is having an affair with Zeus, the king of the gods. Zeus’ wife, Hera, tricks her into making Zeus promise to grant her any wish and tells her to ask for him to appear to her in his god-like form. Zeus promises. She dies in his flames.

Read all about them in The Fib Review – here’s the link.

http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/preview/colin_bell1.html

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Here is one of them, Tulips:

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I’m celebrating today and it’s not all about numbers. They figure strongly in writing the usually short poetry form the Fibonacci poem which is based on the so-called Fibonacci Sequence of numbers.

The latest issue of  the world’s leading Fibonacci poetry journal, The Fib Review, is published today in its 25th issue on its 10th anniversary and, yes, my four new Fibs  bring my total 66 of poems published by the Fib Review. All these numbers are worth celebrating I think.

It may all look a bit dusty and arithmetical in the diagram but these numbers form a beautiful sequence that can be found in nature, in science,  in engineering and, yes, in art. The sequence consists of numbers where each  is the sum of the previous two, rising in numerical order and which can be seen in natural shapes  made from this ratio of numbers. It is the beauty of the sequence that has tempted poets to use the sequence as a way of ordering words and lines in poetry.

I have been writing Fibonacci poetry for eight years now by counting the syllables in each line so that the lines correspond to the sequence: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34.  Until now, I’ve never dared to go any higher in the numerical order but in two of my new poems I have added 55 syllable lines. I’m delighted that they are to be included in the new publication of The Fib Review. Take a look, not just for my new poems but for the fascinating variations on the form achieved by all the other poets, from all over the world,  published there:

http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/index.html

The Fibonacci Sequence is credited to the Italian mathematician Leonardo Bonacci who was also known as Fibonacci. He introduced this ancient Asian sequence into Western Europe in the 13th Century and it has fascinated mathematicians, scientists, artists, engineers and poets ever since.

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I’m often under scrutiny in my small Lewes urban garden but I’m getting used to it. I live next door to a one-eyed Siamese cat and, without actually being on speaking terms, we have a pleasant enough relationship which I have now recorded in one of my new Fibonacci poems published today in Issue 22 of  The Fib Review.

Sometimes it’s good to have a solid but silent relationship with someone who likes my garden as much as I do.

If you want to read my new poem along with the other three poems in The Fib Review, here’s a link:

http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/index.html

Don’t just read it for my work though – there’s a lot in this excellent journal and i’m proud to be included there again for the eighteenth consecutive time.

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My love affair continues with Leonardo Pisano Bigollo (c. 1170 – c. 1250) – the man now known simply as Fibonacci. Today sees the publication of the 14th issue of Muse-Pie Press’ journal devoted exclusively to Fibonacci poetry, The Fib Review, and I’m happy to be one of the poets to have a poem, Diplomacy,  published in it. Happy too that I have poetry in each issue since I first submitted my work there in 2009.

 So a big thank you to editor Mary-Jane Grandinetti for her support over these, actually all the years since I started writing poetry. She has been a supporter and a guide through this period and as helpful in what she has rejected as she has been encouraging in what she has selected. Now I’ve been in there long enough to feel paranoid each time I submit awaiting the moment when I break this very lucky run.

Click here to see my new Fib  http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/colin_bell1.html

Click here to see the writers’ archive where you will find links to all the Fibonacci poems I have had in this impressive journal  http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/writers.html

And click here for the Fib review’s home page so you can read the wide variety of poetry that can be, as Mary-Jane says, ‘squeezed into’ what is often seen as a rigid poetical form. http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/index.html

No time then for me to put up my feet and relax, Mary-Jane Grandinetti is a tough editor so I am already thinking about what to write next.

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