from the ether
Peter Rotovsky © 2025
on Art, with Poetry
I recently scrolled through past from the Ether columns to see what we may have already said about art. They go all the way back to Spring 2005—20 freaking years ago! What a trip, as we used to say. Equally a trip?—to read what I was thinking about in that first Ether so early in the new millennium when I’d been editor in chief of DMQ Review for just a couple years.
In that very first column I recommended a novel I’d recently read by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind. While I recall having read Zafón’s book, I really don’t remember what it was about.
I’d clearly been moved by it, though, enough to share this quote, A book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us. I’d suggested this mirror to also be true of poetry. And I still think that.
Specifically on visual art—that is the physical (though etherized), concrete images that we include in each issue—I found On Featured Artists in Spring 2009 to do a good job of explaining how the process works on our end with the curation of image and poem.
Curation, not to be confused with ekphrasis. Ekphrasis involves creating a new work as a direct response to another artwork. Such ekphrastic expressions can be in the form of a poem, a dance, a song, a painting. . . you get the picture, pun intended. Instead, curation refers to the selection of unrelated works to be organized in a collection. At DMQ Review, curation includes poems and visual art.
To crib back to Zafón’s thought about books (or poems) as mirrors, I find this also to be true of visual art. Yes, the artist and the writer express something uniquely personal and personally meaningful in each creation, but a profound generosity lies in art’s reflectiveness, its capacity to resonate with or mirror another person apart from its creator. This is one reason we gravitate toward specific works of art. Perhaps we find something of ourselves.
When DMQ Review places an image on the page with a poem, the intent is to create a bit of extra mojo, a synaptic leap if you will, between them. This intensifies the gap where metaphor—a type of recognition—occurs, “some third thing created, a dynamic enterprise between image and word that happens afresh in the imagination of each reader/viewer,” as I wrote back in 2009. I think now I’d equate imagination with Zafón’s mirror.
To introduce another quote here might confound more than help, but I think it applies. Composer Claude Debussey suggested that “Music is the space between the notes.” If you can hear that, the idea that timing, the intervals or gaps between notes, actually makes or carries the music, you’ll see what I’m leaning into: the space between things, whether notes or words or image, or between the viewer and the viewed, is what allows a frisson, some extra jolt or connection.
Featured artist Peter Rostovsky’s art does that for me. Not only does he employ a variety of engaging modes and subjects, but his paintings make fine use of space—both through omissions and in a narrative openness—that invites conversation with the poems and with what we already carry inside us. We’re excited to share his work with you here, as we are with all of our featured artists over the years. Checking them out is well-worth a visit through the Archives but also on their websites. And we are equally thrilled with the poems that our contributors have entrusted to us for Fall 2025 that bring energy, beauty, frisson.
Spacey? Maybe a bit but go see for yourself. Or make that, see yourself!
Either way, we think you’ll find that this issue, like those across our nearly 30 years of continuous publication, will be a mirror, one that reflects a “dynamic enterprise,” one we trust you’ll enjoy.
from the Ether,
Sally Ashton
Editor-in-Chief