Category Archives: Art

Decisions, revisions

Currently, I’m deeply immersed reading two very different new books of poetry. First, the late Harry Humes‘ new and selected, Going across the Water, is out from Ohio University Press–a lovely, large collection that includes some biography and commentary, as well as some never-collected new poems (Harry’s former student and long-time friend, Daniel Donaghy, edited and co-compiled the selections). Some of the poems are a re-read for me, as I have most of Harry’s books in my own library, but they’re poems well-worth many reads. And the work I’m less familiar with is rewarding. He was so good. The other collection I’m perusing at present is Daisy Fried’s brand-new My Destination, which could hardly be less like Humes’ in terms of topic, content, style, you-name-it. Katie Peterson writes that Fried’s book succeeds because of “the poet’s unapologetic curiosity about experience, and her remorseless hunger for the right words to know her moment…” I’ll concur, though I am only part-way through the collection. It’s fascinating to find myself enjoying the work of two such dissimilar writers at the same time; and I find they do have “things to say to one another,” at least through me as intermediary. Strongly evocative and well-observed poems in both cases.

~

And today I spent awhile obtaining a more complete idea of how much time and effort I’ll have to put in to my own artist book endeavor. So many new things I’ll have to learn to do, and how I’ll have to be much more finicky and careful than I usually am, if I want this book to be worthy of its story. Any project of value is liable to take energy, time, resources of one kind or another, and will require at least some revision, however. That’s my line, and I’m sticking to it.

I have the layout almost correct: a few minor revisions should do it. The choice of paper? Check, except for the cover stock, still deciding on that. Of course, I have to do some math to figure out how much paper to buy and then get it cut to size. Do-able. Not a huge challenge, right? I spent an hour with my knowledgeable “consultant,” MaryAnn Miller, deciding on a cover image and learning what the steps of actually manufacturing (ha) a book will be. I was afraid my amateurish artwork wouldn’t be appropriate; but she thought that it might be best with something not so polished, something I could use without getting copyright for, something a bit–er–primitive. I experimented with linocut, something I haven’t done in decades, and with watercolor (in my class at Blue Church Arts), based upon a photograph I’d researched. It’s one of the craggy, cold mountains in western North Korea not far from the Yalu River.

I’ve no way of knowing whether this particular peak is near where prisoner Camp 5 was located, but it gave off the kind of forbidding vibes I was looking for. Trying to capture it with my rusty and limited skills kept me occupied for many hours.

This was exciting, working with something that isn’t words, wrestling with the materials, trying several techniques. Deciding, revising!

So, the process continues.

Paper

A handmade book is generally made of paper (I’m sure there are imaginative exceptions). So I went looking at paper for the cover of my chapbook-to-be [previous blog will explain]. Even at my local art supplies store in a suburban region, I felt a bit overwhelmed by options. But after my initial excitement about the marvelous diversity available, I settled down to think about the book, its content, its context. Color. And the feel of a chapbook in one’s hand: all of those things should rightly affect design choices, I believe.

Fancy, decorated papers are appealing, but they won’t work for this project. It’s not a cheery story. Perhaps colors of the North Korean flag? Um, no; the colors of the DPRK are…red, white, and blue! (Though a deep red is an intriguing possibility). MaryAnn Miller showed me a lovely black paper she has used for artist books, but I have decided that isn’t quite what I want, either. Anyway, aside from color, there’s also the paper’s texture to consider, and whether digital printing will work on it.

So many decisions!

Thinking about paper brings to mind my on-and-off obsession with ephemera over the years. I do love paper and things made of it, things that are probably not meant to last, and are fragile or easily destroyed. I’m not the only human who feels this way, which makes me wonder why ephemera is so appealing to some people, while granite or marble monuments are so appealing to others. I enjoy visiting Apport Used Books, the bookstore itself and its Instagram online “catalogue,” because Ben is one of the folks who finds, sells, trades, and shares postcards, letters, photos, chapbooks, poetry books, occult items, poetry broadsides, collages, and other fragile and nearly-lost things. I can drive over the hill and get my fix of wonders, though I don’t buy much because these days I’m trying to cull my own collection of books and oddments.

I also wonder why some of us write poetry, and others among us need to create architectural wonders. Which is no guarantee of lasting into the future: think of Antiochus I, whose tomb and history was lost for millenniums, while Sappho’s poetry fragments and Beowulf remained active in the minds of humans, who are certainly ephemeral creatures.

I don’t expect my current poetry chapbook project, or any work of my own, to live on after me. Paper and humans–we don’t last long on earth. Like butterflies, so temporary and so fascinating.

Arts, gardens, bicentennial memories

When I was a second-grader in Yonkers, NY, our school took us on a class trip to an art museum in New York City. I could not tell you which art museum it was (possibly the Whitney, possibly MoMA), but I remember how vividly impressed I was by one of the things I saw there: a very large mobile suspended overhead, ever so slightly moving. I had never seen anything like it before, and it rocked my world. It was clearly art, but unlike any art I’d seen before. Thus began my lifelong love of art museums, which my parents were glad to encourage.

When a new art museum opens near me, which certainly isn’t all that often, I try to get to it. Philadelphia is a little over an hour away, so I was thrilled when I heard about the new Calder Gardens, (opened in late 2025) which combines two of my favorite things–art and gardens. Not to mention the opportunity to wander past old an favorite, the Rodin Museum, as well as the reflecting pools and tall pines surrounding the much newer Barnes Museum, and to stop at Buena Onda for fish tacos. The Calder gardens were designed by Piet Oudolf and are lovely. Evoking plains or meadows in the midst of a very urban environment, the landscaping proves that pollinators will find their way to plants even when surrounded by traffic and skyscrapers. Delicate grasses were setting seeds when we arrived, giving an airy lightness to what was a typical hot, muggy summer-in-the-city day. Bees and butterflies were as busy as the streets.

I have to say that I don’t much like the museum’s exterior, but the interior architecture suits Calder’s works perfectly. The galleries are unexpected, curving, textured, with walls that range from wood to lava-like to smoothly-polished stone, and they feature niches for seating and gazing, in addition to huge windows that look out onto Calder’s larger stabiles that are situated in well-like, below-ground outdoor spaces. Lighting allows intriguing shadows to be cast by the mobiles; a soundscape softly fills one of the galleries. Docents offer detailed talks and answer visitor questions. The whole place, though on the small side in terms of “quantity,” is a memorable experience.

~

On our way to the Calder Gardens, we passed the monumental Philadelphia Museum of Art and noticed that part of the Parkway and “the oval” were blocked off; there was a huge array of theater lights and speakers that technicians were raising in front of the museum’s famous steps. If we’d visited toward the end of the week, we’d have found the Parkway considerably more limited.

Oh, right. July 4 in Philadelphia: always mayhem, but this year the semiquincentennial.

We avoid Independence Day in Philadelphia because I don’t care for crowds, though I’ve been known to make exceptions for a march or a concert. Not to mention the traffic and parking or the fact that Philadelphia in July is miserably hot and humid, absolutely without exception. Anyway, the nation’s 250th doesn’t feel all that celebratory to me. I suppose I have become cynical.

But seeing all the setup in Center City took me back to Philadelphia on July 4, 1976, when my family lived across the river in New Jersey. My parents–they must have been crazy!–drove us into the city for the evening’s bicentennial party. I had just turned 18, my sister was 16, our brother was almost 12. We saw the musical “1776” on the big lawn in front of Independence Hall (no lawn there now–it’s the Liberty Bell Center). We then walked around the city, going from park to park to watch the fireworks, the five of us holding hands sometimes, trying to stay together and not get separated in the crowd. An enormous crowd! It was exhilarating and a bit scary, and I recall thinking that it gave me a sense of what a war zone must feel like. All those bangs and booms, so loud and so frequent I could feel the vibrations in my body; and sprays and fountains of light overhead, and actual fountains reflecting sparklers and fireworks, warning lights, streetlamps; cars driving past, honking; people singing and shouting. There were protesters, too, but despite the protests (we applauded their efforts and the right of citizens to protest), and despite the presence of police and federal troopers, I don’t recall feeling fearful or anxious. It may be the closest I’ve ever gotten to feeling “patriotic.”

Well, I was very young, and I wasn’t following the controversies very closely (curious about said controversies? See this article). I was aware of conflict and division in the USA, but youth tends toward optimism and energy; I was excited about art, music, books, my college education. That was 50 years ago. There’s much I have forgotten, but the arts haven’t let me down in all those years. Poetry, sculpture, music, painting, dance, and the “humanities” sustain me still.

Not a luxury

I’ve just finally gotten around to reading Salman Rushdie’s memoir Knife, in which he writes:

“…[A]rt challenges orthodoxy. To reject or vilify that art because it does that is to fail to understand its nature. Art sets the artist’s passionate personal vision against the received ideas of its time. Art knows that received ideas are the enemies of art…clichés are received ideas and so are ideologies…without art, our ability to think, to see freshly, and to renew our world would wither and die.

Art is not a luxury. It stands at the essence of our humanity, and it asks for no special protection except the right to exist. It accepts argument, criticism, even rejection. It does not accept violence.” [Salman Rushdie]

There are others who’ve said this. I think immediately of Audre Lorde: “Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.”

What makes a person really a writer, really an artist, is–in my mind–this quality of necessity. And of the right to exist, regardless of whether the nation, state, government, religion, or other ideology suggests that one ought to shut up. For many years, I questioned whether I was, or would ever be, “really a writer.” Now, I feel that I am. Regardless of what the academy, the current aesthetic, the powers that be might say. There’s a deep contentment that accompanies this feeling: somehow or other, I got here; it has little to do with publication or public acknowledgment, and even less to do with remuneration.

Maybe it’s age. (Crone wisdom, anyone?) So, for any of my readers who are younger people, by which I mean under 55, who feel like impostors or dilettantes or who question whether they deserve the title of “a serious writer,” I’m going to suggest that you keep writing and endure. And maybe stop asking yourself so many questions about your worth. You don’t have to be famous or acknowledged to be a writer, you just have to be dedicated to writing and to learning about writing. There’s value even in that, in looking hard at the “rock experiences” of your daily life and endeavoring to make something of those experiences. Stay curious, stay unorthodox.

A recent anecdote to illustrate: For a few years now, I have been revising and revising a challenging poem that says something that is important to me, even though the idea came from someone else. I finally realized it would have to be a persona poem and would need to use the person’s actual words as a starting point. It’s a poem about a major breach of faith, a sad piece that questions orthodoxy in a significant way, in a way that is braver than I would be able to do myself. Once I finally got the poem to work, I had no idea who would want to publish it. (My Best Beloved found this poem “troubling,” which is a reaction I’m happy with because it should be troubling to readers, that was the point.) And then I saw a call from a journal I have admired and read online for quite awhile…looking for thorny pieces on this sort of topic. Working with the unorthodox isn’t easy.

Anyway? The poem’s been accepted. I’m thrilled! I’m a writer!

(The poem is here. Scroll down quite a bit or, better yet, read the work in this issue of Persimmon Tree!)

Invention

I’ve been thinking about creativity in the sense of inventiveness, spurred by two recent visits to two very different places. The first place is the Hagley Museum, an industrial museum, site of the original DuPont de Nemours gunpowder works in Delaware, along the quiet Brandywine. The area was not so placid from 1803 to 1920 when the factories were active and a town’s-worth of people lived and labored here doing a dangerous job. The historic non-profit has created a “museum of invention” at the works, in what was once a textile mill, and it features a large number of mostly 19th-century patent models. Also some of the mechanical drawings that accompanied them. Inventors from all walks of life are represented, and I was impressed by the usually-anonymous craftspeople who made the 3-D models for the Patent Office. So cool!

I think this is the west side of the house…

Then, a couple of days ago, we visited Luna Parc, which is quite an experience. It is a handmade house, sculpture garden, and studio that Ricky Boscarino has been working on for decades. A Rhode Island School of Design student fascinated by silver-smithing, Boscarino decided early on that he wanted to make a living doing art. He began by making unusual (and sometimes slightly alarming*) jewelry and creating art from found objects. He’s also a painter, ceramicist, welder, woodworker…and trying to make his housing needs, studio, and life as sustainable as possible in the wooded region near Stokes State Park in New Jersey. Now, the place is a non-profit that trains students, sponsors art interns, and continues to grow and morph into, well, who knows? He’s devoted his life to art-making. And the place is really fun to explore.

Talk about inventive!

It’s something people need to do, have an urge to do–invent stuff for some purpose, to solve a problem, for enjoyment, or out of a need to play around; we are, as Huizinga says, Homo Ludens (see this post!). Play leads to all kinds of things, piqued by curiosity and that urge to fiddle with things. The patent models at Hagley were behind glass, but I was itching to play with them, like a five-year-old.

That is what I like about writing poetry, too, the play and invention of it–using words, images, sounds, patterns. Earlier today I was messing around with quatrains that used rhyme/slant rhyme line endings, switching off between ABBA and ABAB by stanza. The poem’s content isn’t cheerful, yet puttering with possible patterns was fun and kept me thinking about the topic. Then I went inside and put Bach’s Inventions & Sinfonias on the stereo.

~

* One of Boscarino’s jewelry pieces
Inventive patterns
some wild stairsteps

All of the above by Ricky Boscarino. Purchase his work or book a tour here.

Back in time

At Şanlıurfa in the Urfa region, a Kurdish area in eastern Turkey, we stayed two nights after our visit to two amazing, ancient monuments that are really out in the middle of nowhere: Mt Nemrut Dağ (the tomb of Antiochus I) and Göbekli Tepe, a Neolithic site of the Stone Mound Culture, both Unesco World Heritage sites. I remember reading about the discovery of Göbekli Tepe in the early 1990s, when German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt began excavations there; the “buzz” at the time was that these megaliths mark the earliest temple or place of community worship ever recorded [ca. 9000 BC]. Since then, new discoveries unearthed at Göbekli Tepe, as well as discoveries of similar sites (such as Karahan Tepe, which we later visited) in the region, have somewhat altered Schmidt’s original speculations.

It appears now that people lived here at least part of the time, though until these discoveries, historians assumed humans in the pre-pottery Neolithic Era were hunter-gatherer nomads who did not build permanent structures. Our guide told us the current thinking is that the buildings here played some sort of role in preparing young men for adulthood–almost all of the reliefs and statuary portray male figures and male animals. But it is early yet to guess, and besides, we can never know for certain.

But there are cisterns, a system that distributed water through tunnels, containers that have traces of grains and, yes, beer. Back to the argument of which came first to humans: Bread or beer. My money is on beer. *

But to back up a few hours–first, we rose at 5 am so that we could take the circuitous drive up the mountainside to Nemrut Dağ, a relatively youthful site built around 60 BC, presumably by Antiochus I, who was connecting a slew of peoples and cultures together in a kind of Iranian-Hellenic-Armenian-etc. aggregation in a move toward empire at a time of Roman ascendancy. Commagene is the Romanized name used for this ancient region, which was a merger of Persian and Hellenic areas once Alexander the Great’s empire had disintegrated. Antiochus married a Cappadocian princess and had big plans, but his empire did not last long after his death; by 29 BC, his sons had died or been executed.

The path we walked up to get to the tumulus, 6:45am; my photo

And then over time, this huge tomb monument was forgotten until its rediscovery in the 1880s. The region feels deserted and surreal, and the climb up to the tumulus–though there is now a partially paved path–is long, the wind swirling around, full of dust. My sunhat blew off my head even though I had a neck strap. I guess that was my offering to the ancient king.

What an astonishing place it is, especially at dawn, and despite a fair but not overwhelming number of tourists.

~

Monuments are a step toward writing: they tell stories, written in stone with picture images, because the stories we tell or sing with our human voices don’t leave much of a record for cultures other than our own. I found myself wondering what the poets of these ancient places said or sang, and how their language sounded, and whether I would feel exhilarated or moved by those lays had I been there.

And at Göbekli Tepe, when I learned about the cisterns that contained beer, I thought of a poem I’d written some years ago after visiting a Mesopotamian exhibit at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. So with a bit of awe and a bit of tongue in cheek, I’ll post it here. [It initially appeared in Mezzo Cammin.]

~

*Porter, Stout, & Mesopotamian Deity

Sisters, let us raise a glass
to agriculture, to dark brew
made possible by wooden hoes,
by seed-gatherers: me and you,
our aunts, foremothers, those
who stayed, patient, and grew
grains, diverted rain, winnowed,
boiled, fermented mash, who
certainly invented ale. For we
descend from goddess Ninkasi
who nourished babies through
breast milk fortified by beer
and whose forgotten virtue
we revive, consuming her.

~~

Thanks to copyright-free photos from Pexels since my own photos are snapshots taken with an out of date cell phone.

Illusions, connections

Reading Proust again returned me to some of my own past reflections on memory and self, the capital-S Self. A decade or so ago I spent considerable time reading in philosophy, physics, and neuroscience in an endeavor to get a grip on human consciousness and, perhaps, behavior. I posted about some of these texts on this here blog, in between writing about poetry, the garden, and my teaching job. Recent coincidences of reading returned me to this topic, “the hard problem of consciousness,” and made me consider how our embodied selves/minds/awareness: use shortcuts to manage the overwhelming inputs of our environments; define who we are using subjective if physically-based perceptions; and fail to see the obvious because of habituation and the apparent need to confirm what we believe we know. Illusions! The Vedic concept of Māyā, Plato’s Theory of Forms…propaganda, Penn & Teller, quantum physics, complexity theory, Marcel Proust, complementarity. I have a lot on my mind.

If it IS on (or in) “my” “mind.” For there’s even some question about that, as proposed by Neil Theise in his book Notes on Complexity. Just as light can be a wave or a particle, depending upon perspective and viewer (see: complementarity), it’s possible that our minds or selves can be individual and separate but also connected and boundary-less. The subtitle of this text is what appealed to me: “A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being;” so far, I’m enjoying it and finding inspiration.

It’s needed, inspiration. Despite a few plunges into new drafts (see here), I have not been writing much for at least two months, and I miss it. The ideas from physics and neuroscience that intrigue me include potential metaphors and terms such as quenched disorder, endosymbiosis theory, and holarchy. These–along with the hard problem of consciousness–all have some relationship to complexity theory, and Theise does an elegant job of writing about complicated science concepts for the non-expert.

I ran across Notes on Complexity right after finishing Sleights of Mind, a book about the neuroscience behind the sort of illusion we call entertainment magic: sleight of hand, sawing people in two, mentalist “mind-reading,” and other performances; the authors, Susana Martinez-Conde, Stephen Macknik, and Sandra Blakeslee, are trying to discover more about how brains work (or filter, and sometimes don’t work so well) by studying how we get fooled by illusionists. This is a fun book, even more fun for me because one of my Best Beloveds has long been an enthusiast of magic shows and magicians. Martinez-Conde and Macknik are neurologists, so–unlike Theise’s text–this book is very body-mechanics in its basis. Their work reminded me of how amazing the human physiological system is. And it’s entertaining.

Before these non-fiction reads, I was finishing up with Proust who, in his own creative way, was exploring the interiority of the human self and carefully observing human interactions, behaviors, assumptions, prejudices, and aesthetics. Not neuroscience, because there is no science to it, but definitely related to how our brains and bodies process experience. My sense is that poetry works that that way for me: it’s not an abstract stream of thought but something inextricable from bodily experience, maybe even, through the environment in which we exist, something deeply connected to everything, a global being-there.

The way we process experience (and is this consciousness?) is largely what leads us to the arts, to make art or to appreciate it, and to decide what feels compelling, important, beautiful. And it’s not all in our heads.

Heaven, hell, & halos

After 30 years, my husband and I still take part in the Goschenhoppen Festival each August. You will find I have mentioned it in many an August blog.

The photo at left is from 2010 or thereabouts, when the festival had newly moved to the park in Perkiomenville, PA, which is where the beautiful Antes House (ca. 1736) is located. My daughter and I were enjoying funnel cake. The park’s trees have grown considerably since then, and there’s more shade for demonstrators (and visitors). We were grateful this past weekend that the sunny days were not as humid as some years and that there haven’t been downpours to churn the parking areas into mud. And though neither of my own offspring could participate this year, it was lovely to see their festival-friends now grown, married–some having kids of their own–and still showing up to volunteer at the two-day reenactment of Pennsylvania German folk life of the 18th & 19th centuries.

My demonstration is in the 19th-c household and foods area, and each year I am assigned a couple of young “apprentices,” girls ages from 12-17 in gingham work-dresses. This year a friend’s daughter was thrilled to be old enough to officially participate. She is full of wondering about life and is the sort of child who poses her questions and speculations aloud. She’s also at the age when she’s taking church classes for confirmation, and she’s interesting to talk with when she wades into her thoughts about Big Subjects. I often find myself telling her that the things she wonders about are puzzling even to grownups. Because it’s true.

Yesterday she asked about someone we knew who had died: “Do you suppose they went to heaven?” Yikes. While it might have been a good opportunity to throw a wrench into religious indoctrination, I felt her parents might not appreciate that. I merely responded that I didn’t see why not. But this little exchange reminded me of my own wrestling with the idea of heaven and hell when I was her age. From fairly early on, I just couldn’t imagine that the cartoonish heaven of winged souls wearing halos was in any way real; and though hell was also mentioned frequently in church liturgy, prayers, and hymns, my dad’s belief in a god who was forgiving made hell seem unlikely. So the information I took in was confusing.

It is no less confusing to me now, but I no longer sweat over it the way I did as a child. Anyway, the conversation with my little friend called to mind a poem I’d drafted after returning from a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit “Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350” which reminded me of how I loved Medieval and early Renaissance art when I was a youngster. All those saints and crucifixions. All that gold and iconography. I must have had a gothic tendency!

This draft may be more about art than about heaven, and more about envisioning than about anything else. It's not a finished poem, but who cares on this bright, late-summer morning?
~


Halos

What interested me most about
paintings of Jesus was
the glow around his head
because I saw such auras everywhere 
when sun silhouetted our cat
in the dining room window
or lit up dew on tall grasses.

In later years I studied art 
and learned the problem of cheating
light from solid pigments 
the paradox of density layered
so some artists applied gold dust
to depict the nimbus gleam.

Yet even my little sister’s
fine blonde curls or the hairs
on my own skin could shine
that way illuminated like crowns
of hickory trees some autumn
morning long in brightness
no art to it at all.

Blue

At one of our local used book stores,* I found a copy of William Gass’ 1976 On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry. Gass writes in a style one might term prolix; but if you are like me and sometimes appreciate lists, wordplay, allusions, lengthy sentences, and fine distinctions in your sentences–as well as humor–while exploring the limits and the stretches of words and language, this book-length essay on the word/concept/color/iconography/sexual innuendo/moody attitude and conflicting meanings of the word blue might appeal. I’ve been feeling a bit on the blue side lately, hence my attraction to the book (though I do like Gass as a writer, as long as I don’t have to read too much of him at one time). And guess? It cheered me! [I will caution the reader who avoids the use of “bad language” that Gass employs such words in this essay, for purely intellectual reasons…]

Granted, my feeling blue has a different tone from other uses of the word: blue postcards, sexual meanings of blue–I’m reminded of the movie “I Am Curious (Blue)” which was considered racy and given an X rating when I was a kid, though the blue in that title referred to the Swedish flag, apparently. My blue is the blue of songs like “Baby’s in Black” or Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” album. Or just that classic music form, the blues.

And I’ll get over feeling this way. That’s what moods are: feelings that come and go, transitory. It always seems as though low moods stay around longer than neutral or cheerful ones, but many scientific studies show that it is our perception and memory of the negatives that make us think we are sadder for longer. Even Wikipedia has an entry on negativity bias, with some sources if you want to check things out yourself. As I age, I realize that bad moods and sad events and past mistakes don’t need to stick around as much as I used to think. A bit of mediation, some practice and readings in Zen and in psychology, a lengthening perspective on life’s vicissitudes, some counseling and even some medicine; whatever it is that’s brought me here, I recognize that before long the depressive hours will lift. Also I know some methods of thinking that assist me to move to more neutral ground.

I will note there are many kinds and hues of blue, enough for Gass to write 112 pages on it and for the word to appear in 85 files of my own poetry during the past 12 years–I did a quick word search just to find out. That is in the files alone, and each file contains many poems. so I can only imagine how much I have over-used the word in my writing life! Certainly, not all of those blues are sad. Many are beautiful, sunny, the blues of blueberries and balloon flowers, the New Mexico sky, mountains and oceans; teal-blues and turquoise, the bright royal blue I like to wear, the pale color of robin’s eggs.

Blue. It has always been my favorite color.

~~

*The bookstore is Apport, in Emmaus, PA. Ben has an active Instagram feed and really cool catalogues of odd books, art, and ephemera.

*The first “blue” above is an encaustic painting by Deborah Barlow; the second is at Bandolier National Monument; the third is of the Blue Ridge Mountains; the last was taken at an inlet bay, maybe in Delaware–I’ve forgotten.

Behind the arts

The regional drought has officially ended, and the rain continues. Ironic, then, that the online site Feed the Holy just posted a poem I wrote near the close of a droughty August: “Zen Gold.” Fireflies and bats, while not abundant, manage to enjoy the recent dampness. The monarch butterflies have returned to our meadow, though I don’t catch sight of them on rainy days. But the moist conditions didn’t dampen the turnout or enthusiasm of local citizens who came out in droves for peaceful “No Kings” protests here…in a decidedly “purple-red” area of Pennsylvania.

Speaking of regional, this weekend I also attended the debut showing of a documentary film about the performing arts community in Bethlehem, PA, formerly famous for Bethlehem Steel Corporation. The film is titled “Rooted,” and it follows that “roots” idea with the planting of trees at arts sites, the metaphor of the mycorrhizal network (see my references to Lesley Wheeler’s latest book–so much overlap!) and the concept of community development. Especially through works of imagination. In the 1970s, when the steelworks was beginning to slow production and lose employees to retirement and business to competitors, small groups of young, talented artists in theater, dance, music, and puppetry started performing in parks, churches, etc…and gradually found inexpensive space in the city to establish themselves and pursue their dreams. Some of those little startups, such as Touchstone Theatre, have been operating, teaching groups of children, entertaining the community, and advocating for the arts for over 50 years.

Godfrey Daniels coffeehouse/listening room and The Ice House (home of Mock Turtle Productions) have been sites for poetry as well as for music and theater-craft. I have participated in and attended poetry and one-act play readings at both of those venues. I don’t live in Bethlehem, but it isn’t too far away from me–still in the Lehigh Valley region. And I deeply appreciate the work that pioneering arts-folks have done, and that arts advocates and teaching artists continue to do, for our area. The people behind the arts deserve recognition.

I’m not the sort of person who networks well; event-planning exhausts me, and preparing for committee meetings and writing grants are not my forte–though I gladly proofread grants and PR materials for local non-profits. Thus I admire the types of people who not only create in the arts but also find creative ways to keep the arts alive through outreach and planning, often in the face of very steep odds (yes, I’m talking funding here, and board membership, and organizing the necessary minutia, and the grind of public relations). God bless them for making space for actors, musicians, dancers, visual artists, sculptors, installation artists, poets, and visionaries of numerous kinds. It’s because of folks like these that I don’t have to travel all the way to New York or Philadelphia to experience lively contemporary arts of many kinds.

You can think of local arts organizations as the independent booksellers of the performance world. You go there to discover stuff that you won’t find on best-sellers lists, for work that’s by new artists, or work that’s been rediscovered, or cool perspectives on the familiar canon of major works by the famous. That has value. That offers inspiration. That gives you the courage to keep on doing whatever kind of art it is you do. Which in my case is poetry, not generally thought of as as performance art–though it once was, and slam poetry events prove it can still be. Maybe I’m a little more of a hermit-in-the-woods writer, but that doesn’t mean I never want to venture out into the wider arts community. And when I do? I’m grateful for the people who have established the beautiful network under my feet.

image: https://truetimber.net/TrueTimber arborists