Garden Song
by
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Sy Hakim, an American Artist and Poet, lived much of his life in Italy, traveled extensively in Europe, the United States, and North Africa, which explains many of the allusions in both his art and his poetry. His past includes military service,35 years teaching including: New York City;Landsthuhl, Germany;London,England;Vicenza,Italy. He continues to exhibit internationally and has been publishing his poetry in various papers, journals and zines as well as books since the 1970s.
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About the Book
In the garden are beauty and thought, poetry and reflection, expressions of modern living and inner life, situations of personal happenings appropriate to everyone, words based on modern rhythmic poetry, paths, and applications to shared understandings. Sy Hakim’s diverse and extensive background, education, and service serves as his poetic and artistic base—his garden.
Born, raised, and educated in New York City, he has taught and been a counselor in East Harlem during its more tempestuous days, encouraging underprivileged young men. He served in the US Army during the Korean conflict as an educated neuropsychiatric technician; the exposures and insights are memorable.
He has also lived and taught in Europe as it was being rebuilt after WWII (1960–1993). While in Europe, he traveled extensively, seeking the culture he had read about as a student. Memorable experiences included driving out from Prague, Czechoslovakia, as the Russian tanks drove in to secure communist rule. Czech friends telephoned shortly after midnight to tell them to escape before it was too late!
As with all, life experiences and impressions are continually absorbed, thought, rethought, and thought over in the garden of the mind. Sy has continued to exhibit art internationally as well as being published in journals, books, and most recently, contemporary zines. Everyone’s mind is their own unique garden, an expression of their experiences, but all gardens are fertile and compatible and are able to share in the knowledge, the understanding, and the beauty of their being. Sempre avanti!
About the Author
Sy Hakim is an American artist and poet who has lived much of his life in Italy. This accounts for the many classical allusions one find in his works, both art and poetry. In addition to publication in various magazines and journals, he has published collections of poems (From the Cave-2007) and two plays. His first collection of poems was published in 1970, the same year of his first one-person art show in Italy. He exhibits oils, woodblock prints, and relief sculptures.
As an exhibiting artist, his works have been shown and collected in Europe, Asia, and the United States. Currently, he is most active with the American Color Print Society, The Plastic Club, and the Philadelphia Sketch Club.
Both poems and the art works are thematic with a strong relationship between the works. There is a shared pictorial approach, strong bold colors paralleling bold rhythmic explorations. “Sy Hakim is a humanist, interested in . . . a diverse civility and the ethic search into the story of myriad civilizations and religions . . . . he fulfills the obligations of his subject and forms . . . a validity combined to sustain his expressionistic (humanistic and poetic) concept..." [S. Maugeri, Italian critic]
His artistic production, the work, the essence hopefully reveals in its variation of themes and syml expressionistic quality a life reverence: the ambiguity of life and the imminence of time.