May 19, 2012:  I love 'stream of
consciousness' journeys when our minds start
out with one train of thought and end up
somewhere completely different.

My mind drifted along a stream of poetry,
during the time I painted this simple rose.

Lines of poems kept running through my mind,
beginning with 'a rose by any other name' from
Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet'...which then
morphed into Gertrude Stein's 'a rose is a
rose is a rose is a rose' (from her poem,
'Sacred Emily').

From there, my mind traveled back to a mid-
1970s performance by Toronto sound poets
'The Four Horsemen' (Steve McCaffrey, the late
bp Nichol, Rafael Barreto-Rivera and Paul
Dutton)...reciting a poem written by Steve
McCaffrey entitled 'Latin Lines: for
Gertrude Stein'.

I wish a recording of their performance could
accompany this painting...as no description can
capture the exquisite brilliance of this simplest
of poems or the vitality of their performance:

"A Rose ... Cicero's ... Cicero's... Cicero's..."
repeated over and over, so what began as
'A Rose', ended with 'Cicero's' and sounded like
'a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose'.