Category Archives: Art

Two falls

I have experienced two autumns this October: one in New Mexico, one in Pennsylvania. In the American Southwest, high up in the world, the cottonwood trees that hug every available water source were going a brilliant gold while I was there. Any view above a creek or river revealed a winding path of yellow–along the Chama, along the Rio Grande. The tiny-leaved oaks were turning brown-leaved and dropping scads of acorns along the paths. The oranges and reds are mostly there year-round, on the mesas and in the canyons.

https://mjskitchen.com/2018/11/chama-river-valley-new-mexico/

It was wonderful to experience a poetry workshop with Anita Skeen and Cindy Hunter Morgan and to learn how books are made by hand, wonderful to draft some poems using color imagery and ekphrasis, wonderful to meet some fascinating people with whom I enjoyed pushing past my/our comfort zones and into art forms we may have been a bit less comfortable with. These are reasons to attend an instructor-led workshop, seminar, or residency. I spent part of last September in New Mexico, but it wasn’t the most spectacular time for autumn coloration–whereas October certainly gleams in northern NM!

When I returned home, I had missed “peak season” for color in Pennsylvania; my husband said that came a bit early this year because of drought. But it’s still very bright here. The maple leaves haven’t all fallen, most of the tulip trees are still yellow, the hickories haven’t reached peak gold yet, and many of the sassafras are that warm coral color I love so well. The burning bushes? Ours hasn’t dropped its bright fuchsia-maroon leaves. It’s a vivid presence at the corner of the house.

~

Therefore, I have two autumns this year, one sea-level Mid-Altlantic East, and one high-altitude Southwest.

Which strikes me as an abundance of beauty and color. So I am continuing the theme of last week’s workshop. Here’s a new draft of a new poem just for the joy of it. [This fall, those of us in the USA could use a bit of joy.]


I don’t have a title for it yet. Maybe you can help me think of one.

~


The difference between orange leaf color
and orange rock color.
Between the greens of grass and juniper,
the pale dun of meadow’s die-back
and beige sand stretching westward
to the mountains.
Even the clear sky’s blueness
on fair, mild mornings
differs by an almost measurable degree.
Something to do with altitude
and aridity, the science of which
I don’t really understand.
Life’s variations and hues—
striated like cliffs, buttes, mesas,
like hills of maple and hickory in fall—
beautiful and strange.
Even when I close my eyes, color-
memories, all those shades
I can’t define, sift through my skin.
Into blood. Into bone.

With color

I’m taking a break from the garden and from the news cycle and indulging in a different form of work: “Making Poems, Making Books,” a 4-day workshop with poets Anita Skeen and Cindy Hunter Morgan at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, NM. Yes, I’ll be making my own book–a small accordion book. There are about a dozen of us in the workshop, which is centered around the idea of color. Autumn in northern New Mexico offers a range of hues somewhat different from the post-equinox colors of eastern Pennsylvania. Perhaps that will inspire me. The last time I took a workshop here was in 1993, and I learned how to draw/paint in chalk pastels. A long time ago–and yet, walking around the dusty alfalfa field in the center of the Ranch’s office and dorm buildings, I felt completely at home. As if I’d been here just last year.

This week differs from the artist residency I attended at Joya-AiR in May because I’m part of a class getting instruction in how to make a hand-made book and also participating in feedback on our writing. Nonetheless, every afternoon there’s a nice stretch of time to work on solo projects, hike, drive to some nearby sites of interest, or nap. I will admit I have been doing more napping than I had hoped. The high altitude, dry air, walking more than usual (on rocky trails) and the emotional energy it takes to learn a new skill and meet new people have conspired to creep up on me some afternoons.

That’s fine with me, though, because I’m banking many images, quotes, anecdotes, ideas, prompts–all the things memory can do.

And I am drafting some new work, so there’s that as well.

~

Enjoying the session and the people, third best thing about this trip. Being back at Ghost Ranch, second best thing, though it is perfectly wonderful. Best thing? Getting some time in the Albuquerque area to visit with my daughter and her partner. And their dog. And their cat, guinea pigs, and beehives. According to her, bees kept in hives (apiculture) are considered considered agricultural animals.

Who knew?

It’s time for my nap, I think. But I have wanted to post about this workshop/retreat before I get home again, just to remind myself of how grateful I am to be here, to be writing, to be seeing my child, to be–yes–escaping from the media frenzy as the presidential election looms. If that seems like something you need, as well, all I can do is send a few cheerful photos I took at the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta.

~

Northern stars

Northern Stars (2023) Celestino Marco Cavalli

~

A phosphorescent path
connecting Italy and France
through glowing stones
that look like stars.
A poetic and political action.

~

https://www.celestinomarcocavalli.xyz/work.html

The installation shown here was created by one of the artists I met while at Joya, Celestino Marco Cavalli. The link above will take you to a description of his project. In brief, it is a series of fluorescent-painted stones that follow a trail refugees travel on their way from the Mediterranean, through Italy, and into France. The website does not include the many photographs Celestino took during his 5-month visit there to document the conditions under which emigrants travel–the trash they leave as they abandon belongings, the graffiti and the notes to others they leave in caves and hollows, the prayers they write, the places they shelter from the sun or rain or cold weather. Do the refugees litter the mountain paths? Yes. Do they do so out of desperation? Also yes.

This installation is innovative, compassionate, and political–also problematic; as always, borders between nations are fraught with concerns about each country’s boundaries, laws, rules and regulations. These days, most immigrants taking this trail (through Italy) have come from the global south, where the climate damage wrought by industrial nations has made living in poverty even harder and fostered political unrest. And the immigrants take huge risks–with no guarantees that they won’t be deported, or preyed upon by criminals who exploit their vulnerable status.

I’ve never been a refugee, an exile, an immigrant. I have met quite a few, though–often very young people, students I encountered at the college where I worked, students from Haiti, Dominican Republic, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Mexico, Venezuela, Pakistan, Eritrea, Viet Nam, Kenya…and my husband’s stepmother, who arrived at Ellis Island from Austria between the wars. And a colleague who was stranded at college in the USA when the Ayatollah took power in Iran, and a fellow employee from Cambodia, who lost her entire family except for one brother to the Khmer Rouge. Whenever I hear about the politics of immigration (which is often), I think of them: how hard they work, what they sacrificed to get here, how hopeful they are, how challenging their lives have been and continue to be. And their grief.

The following is a persona poem--"A persona poem is a poem in which the poet speaks through an assumed voice" (Academy of American Poets). Celestino's Northern Stars is my "prompt."

~

Refugees

Because we must hide by day
and travel at night, darkness hinders.
The narrow stony trail offers options:
turned ankles, torn skin, or a precipice
that takes us sliding down the mountain,
an avalanche of self, death’s prospect.
No one arrives eager for exile;
we’re just trying to save ourselves,
our families, a few belongings
we used to think were precious.

The way we take may be steep—
everyone knows that metaphor—
what we never expect is how much
it is an unburdening of all
we thought was necessary,
an education in physical need.
Shoes, for instance, more critical
than underwear. Ancestors emigrated 
on callused feet without watches 
or water bottles. The least cut could 
go septic, a child’s wail could betray us
to predators or enemies. Still true.

One by one we let things go, abandoned
in shallow caves with other people’s
remnants, plastic bags and t-shirts,
books, candlesticks, so much trash after all—
even our skins can barely hold what
we need anymore. We arrive shriven,
numb as feldspar, having walked so long.
May we have water? May we rest, with our
children in our laps, and sing the songs
our parents taught us not so long ago.

Jewel

Joya’s curator/founder Simon Beckman requests an artist’s statement from the residents, and mine is below. Compared to many of the resident artist statements, mine seems quite brief–artists often have complex conceptual ideas to describe and rely more on images, so their statements (words!) are often lengthier. I’m a writer, but I’m a poet; concise use of words ought to be my metier.

La jolla, and la joya, mean “the jewel” but also–especially the latter spelling–refer (geologically) to a bowl-like valley. The description is both physically and metaphorically apt, and provides context for the poem below my statement.

~~

In wild places, some part of me that’s not domestic surfaces. I experience a rise in my level of awareness regarding my surroundings, an apprehension in the etymological sense of “a seizing upon, laying hold of; understanding” (Etymology Online). In canyons, caverns, riverbeds, forests—yes, in the desert, too—I respond wholly differently from the way I encounter unfamiliar human-made spaces. While at Joya-AiR, I encountered both: new environments that I’m integrating into my inner ecology. New forms of art. That process of integration, an exciting one, will continue long after my residency here has ended.

It has been such a pleasure to interact with artists whose mediums vary from my own. I was the only poet in this group, and the opportunities I’ve had to learn more about the visual arts have been amazing and useful. My first loves were sketching and painting, and although my longtime practice has been writing, imagery has ever been vital to my creative work. I thank them for their generosity of spirit. What artists can offer to one another is an aspect of themselves through their perspectives as well as their mediums and works. This kind of giving and exchange strikes me as quite personal and enriching. It is something we can do for the world, too.

The extensive work that Simon and Donna have been doing here to make the place both welcoming and ecologically sustainable impresses me and confirms my conviction that with creativity, open minds, and persistence, humans can manage to live more cooperatively with the planet and damage it less—even, perhaps, help it to heal itself.

I will keep the images of Cortijada Los Gázquez with me for a long time.

~~

Jewel

…implies what is small, exquisite, bright.
At even higher altitudes, glassy glacial pools
shine at the caldera’s ridges.
Here, the hills’ aridity offers nothing
but shallow canyons where once
a river coursed, twisting around a cavity
anchored by holm oak and Aleppo pines.
The pinsapos sway in late afternoon,
their cones studded with hardy seeds.

Almond and olive trees dot pale clay soil.
No desert is ever gentle—what survives
must be temperamentally suited to the climate—
but what’s cradled in these ancient mountains
seems gentler than most. Night’s stars,
exquisite. Evenings of ruby, amber, amethyst.
Days that define bright. And when rain descends,
however briefly: everything gleams.


[Cortijada Los Gázquez, Vélez Blanco, Spain]



In residence

It’s been some time since I was away at a residency with other artists and writers. Conferences, yes, but residencies are different–more intimate in scope, less social-life activity, more one-to-one conversations, and a great many overlaps in interests, inspirations, and approaches. The intensity doesn’t feel at all like the intensity of a large conference such as AWP, where I often feel I must cram my schedule with panels, meet-ups, and attendance at presentations and where the exchanges, while often intellectual, generally require the context of careers and situational details. At a residency, we certainly don’t avoid topics like families and day jobs; but such getting-to-know-you chats are secondary to conversations about art, artists, reading, technical methods, responses to environment, discussions about intent and audience, aesthetic and artistic philosophy.

A residency also offers that key component of creativity: unstructured time (or, time one gets to structure to one’s own liking). I cannot stress enough the value of reflection, contemplation, and woolgathering; the residency I attended in Spain offered this to a degree I haven’t had in quite some time, and I relished it. I took along Olga Tokarczuk’s book Flights, perfect reading for a plane-bus-train trip, and Mark Doty’s Deep Lane, contemplative and fearless poems that urged me to spend the necessary time with my thoughts and my environment.

~

It was interesting to hear about the methods and processes of other participants who were there the week I was. While all of them write in some form, their creative work is visual: Photography, film, digital art (animation, 3D, comics), performance/performative art, painting, multimedia. At first, I felt a bit out of step since what I “produce” is…well, abstract, I guess? And the means a person uses to create poems is mostly invisible; it’s not as though you can see us at work. A person at a desk, sitting on a rock, or lying under a tree doesn’t appear to be in the process of making anything and, except when the written work appears in print/online, the “artwork” isn’t something one can show to others. As I began to converse more with the visual artists, however, once again I experienced the joy of discourse with fellow creatives, no matter their discipline. I certainly have friends who are sculptors, painters, photographers, ceramicists, dancers, musicians, actors, & craftspeople of all stripes–and I don’t feel out of step when talking with them. I suppose it is my initial hesitation around “strangers” that kicks in. Shortly into the residency, we were no longer strangers.

The word la joya is Spanish for “jewel,” and it can also refer to a geographic hollow–a bowl-like area, which is fitting since the cortijo is situated in a sort of high valley surrounded by the mountains of the Parque Nacional de Sierra Nevada. On my last day at Joya-AiR, we held an artist talk to inform one another of our creative work and processes, influences, and possible future directions we imagine our work going in. Some of the other participants will be working there for another week or two! Which would be lovely, but I could not extend my stay at this time. Nonetheless, the residency has been very useful and productive for me. I feel so grateful to the people at Joya and to my Best Beloved for encouraging me to attend.

Good w/words

I hear it often from people: “You’re a writer, you’re good with words.”

What I’m reflecting on while in a space where I have the time to reflect is that maybe, some writers are those folks who are not by nature “good with words.” Words, we may have, yes! We love words, love to read, love books, love poetry, love language. But that doesn’t mean that words come easily. We may have to work for and with them, rearrange and revise, check meanings and spellings, consider etymology and new ways of using words.

It may be we wrestle with them and, like Jacob with the Angel, find the process causes injury as well as revelation.

A study by Marc Chagall for his Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, ca, 1963

Writing may be a cat that follows us home when we really have nothing to feed it and our apartment building doesn’t allow cats, but there it is: needy and appealing, sitting on our doorstep.

For many writers, words are hard. As Virginia Woolf wrote, “Oh to be silent! Oh, to be a painter!” Some writers might prefer to be making a non-wordy art. Less energy to expend on how to say.

I know I can speak for a few writers when I state that, at least sometimes, words can be easier to write than to speak. If I’m chatting to somebody about my family or the garden or my opinions about online learning management systems (LMSs), I don’t usually have trouble with words. Those concepts stay within the familiar and the easy-to-express, even among people I barely know. In such conversations, I can be lively, make jokes, have opinions, and tell stories. This is social speech of a casual sort, even when the subjects are often close to my heart (well, not LMSs…).

But many things that are either more philosophical or more deeply reflective, even intimate, evade me when I try to say them in conversation. Questions I have, I may fear to ask. Describing a feeling, sensation, or emergent idea can be so difficult I decide just to stay quiet, listen to what I can glean from others. If my fellow conversationalists are patient and sympathetic and stay with me through more abstract, emotional, or artistic/philosophical topics, I will still find myself losing the thread of my sentences and tapering off into gesture. Gesture covers (badly) what I can’t seem to put into words. Even though I am supposedly good with words.

Later, I may endeavor to express in writing what I wanted to say when I resorted to silence. Writing is not the heat of the moment–there can be revisions, honing of concepts, maybe some research to cover the various vague lacunae during which I’d previously resorted to shrugging. Shall we say: clarification of thought through better words in a better order.* I may never learn to be adept at succinct intellectual conversation, but I can eventually get to compression of language for effect in a written text.

That would be enough. Or maybe it’s as David Kirby writes in his poem “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”— “Writing isn’t hard./You just have to be patient. You just have to get/everything right.”

~

*Samuel Taylor Coleridge‘s definition of poetry: best words in the best order.

Change of scene

Land of Lorca: Andalucia, Spain. I haven’t traveled out of the USA in 7 years, and the travel-abroad process has changed a great deal in response to covid and the use of the ubiquitous cellphone and its hosts of apps, so this trip has already been quite the adventure. No problems, however–despite my primitive Spanish language skills, people have been kind and helpful. The cellphone plan we thought we had acquired did not turn out to work in Spain for reasons I can’t explain, so I have been traveling old-school using maps instead of Google and without access to handy translation software.

You know what? That is how it used to be, and we managed somehow. I am learning a lot and viewing everything as adventure. Even the occasional snafu.

But here I am. A couple of miles from this:

Almond trees and La Muela in Almería Province in southern Spain, at an artist residency hosted by Joya-AiR. They are also on Instagram, if you are interested.

~

I guess I’m the resident poet this go-round; among us there are a photographer, a graphic artist, and two multi-media artists and they hail from UK, Canada, Italy, and USA. I have been here half a day and am already full of ideas and have had interesting conversations and have enjoyed meeting a dog named after Frida Kahlo and a goat named Fou-Fou.

This post is just a say-hi and to share my enthusiasm for this beautiful rugged place and the people who want to get into their artist-zone here. More later.

The courtyard patio of Cortijada Los Gazques, Velez Blanco

Reading by day

https://prolificpress.com/bookstore/chapbook-series-c-14/barefoot-girls-by-ann-e-michael-p-317.html

While I await the eventual drying-out of the garden soil so I can plant a few early veggies and herbs, it seems a good time to ready a few more poems. I’m revising, drafting, but not sending out work. That feels comfortable at the moment; anyway, I much prefer writing to submitting poems.

I’ve also reserved myself some quiet hours to read books of poetry and a novel or two. Jessica Cuello’s Yours, Creature just arrived in my mailbox, and I’m on an Isabel Allende kick at the moment, so I definitely need some time to devote to reading. My husband, who tends to do his reading in the evenings, recently forwarded a Washington Post column by Stephanie Shapiro about why so few people read for pleasure during the day. Its title is “Why Does Daylight Reading Feel So Wrong?” She writes, “Although I am retired, I find it hard to allow myself an afternoon with a book or a long magazine article. Just the thought of settling onto the sofa in daylight hours, especially on weekdays, smacks of laziness and stirs up guilt. If I must sit at all, it should be at a desk or a countertop to do something ‘useful’— answer an email, write a grocery list, look up a recipe, what have you.”

I’m sure this is a common feeling, but it isn’t one I acquired, probably because my dad was ALWAYS sitting around reading a book, newspaper, or magazine–day or night. Reading during the day seemed normal to me. It still does, I’m happy to say.

~ Here’s a poem from my chapbook Barefoot Girls.

Night Drawn

I drew the night
with a number 2 pencil
I'd sharpened with
a Girl Scout penknife.
It was 1969. Night
needed blurred edges
so I smudged at it
with two fingers of my
right hand. And then
night left its prints
on my thumbs and palms,
somehow, on the yellow
print blouse and blue
jeans I wore.

I sketched shadows
the way I saw them
under beds and outside
windows, how they
deepened the early hours
when Grandmother
wakened by gaslight
to start her chores--
in darkness
which I learned to draw
with a pencil and
which stayed on my skin
the whole day.

Legacy vs the present

For National Poetry Month, I’ll be posting a poem here every few days…something from one of my books and chapbooks.

First, though, musings on why it matters to me that my poems get collected in book form. I’ve been asked about this by a few people recently, sparked by conversations about the changing technology of “print,” and also artistic purpose, and even the concept of legacy. If I were a visual artist–say, a painter–there would be objects my hands had produced. Even a mediocre painter creates something apparently lasting or worth something. You die, and your paintings go to family members or to flea markets where people can purchase them (for the frames if nothing else…). A ceramicist may make truly useful things such as bowls and mugs; those items can last and be used, even if they end up in thrift shops or post-apocalyptic archeological digs. Maybe the painter or potter isn’t remembered, but the product endures for awhile.

But poems? So many people leave behind sheaves of unread, unpublished, perhaps private writing, much of which won’t resonate with anyone. Even if it could, the chance that anyone would care enough to sort through before burning or recycling and uncover a heretofore unknown genius is vanishingly small. I, for one, am not writing for eternity or for the future. I write for the now. The main reason I want to get books in print is that the product (a book! I love books!) matters while I’m here. After I die, no one will want my pile of drafts, old journals, revisions, false starts–not even my children. And why should they? Will future society value archives of anyone, let alone very minor poets of the early 21st c? Maybe the demise of technologically-based societies is right around the corner. All the more reason to work in and for the present moment. If I garner a few readers today, I feel blessed.

~ Today’s poem is from my 2011 FootHills Publishing chapbook The Capable Heart.

No Long Farewells

The weedy field.
On the rise beyond,
armies of brown corn,
ready to fall.
Willow looses streamers,
yellow kites
floundering in
tall grass.
I look at my hands, 
fingers gold. We
walk past grapevines.

Later I think of this day
as a drafty barn,
sun on its walls,
clouds high beyond rafters:
roofless. 
Nothing blocks our vision
for once. No blinders.

There is little time
for long farewells.
A light goes on.
Your bus is leaving now.
Moon follows you home.

Throwing mud

This week, I got the potatoes in the ground; last week, it was spinach. In between, a lengthy late-March cold snap and yes, more rain. But also a visit from a Dear One and a trip to parts of Pennsylvania I seldom have had reason to explore. Although I have lived in PA’s Lehigh Valley for nearly 40 years–longer than I have lived anywhere else–I confess a lack of familiarity with many areas of the Keystone State. Philadelphia and its suburbs I know well, and Reading and Lancaster, to a lesser degree; and our family often visits Gettysburg. We travel west and north to go camping now and then. I’ve been to Pittsburgh a few times and seen Falling Water and the Cathedral Trees and both branches of the Susquehanna River. Penn State just twice, once when I was chaperoning high school sophomores to History Day competitions.

Pennsylvania is a big commonwealth: 46,055 sq miles. It’s a good place for poetry, though I leave it to poets such as Harry Humes and Jerry Wemple (among others–looking at you, Dave Bonta) to explore its varied climate, geography, history, and culture. Mostly I stay within the confines of my own back yard, which is large and varied enough to inform me for a lifetime.

But the Dear One had planned to give her dad a pottery workshop with a well-known potter, Simon Leach, as a 70th birthday gift. That birthday fell during covid, however; the long-delayed weekend in Millheim PA thus did not take place until this past week. I have never placed my hands on a potter’s wheel (though I ought to try it sometime) and just went along for family togetherness and to visit the arboretum at Penn State, slightly out of season but still a very pleasant place to walk, by myself, on a cold but sunny Sunday. It rained on Saturday, so I sat by the fireplace at our B&B and read novels. Could anything be more perfect?

The task of Leach’s workshop was to practice making cylinders. It was a muddy job indeed. Here’s a photo of some of the student results. Dear One is quite adept at cylinders; indeed, she’s a good potter and sells much of her work, a skill she enjoys when she’s not providing emergency medical care to dogs and cats.

Leach uses the slogan “Keep practicing!” Yeah, that’s how you get to Carnegie Hall, right? But it is also how people get better at any skill, even those who are preternaturally talented in music, art, dance, etc. That includes writers. I have to remind myself that it is now time I got back to my routine of writing, revising, and the practice practice practice part of composing poems. The garden, the daughter, the travel, and the novel-reading have been splendid distractions, but as National Poetry Month approaches (April!), I ought to get myself back into routine.

A routine’s generally looked at as mundane–a tedious necessity. It needn’t be that way, I keep reminding myself. It can be as fun and messy and surprising (or frustrating) as throwing mud.

clay cylinder practice in Leach studio