Tag Archives: Lorca

What are we doing here?

What is a self-directed, multi-disciplinary, eco/environmental artists’ residency? Why are we here? Or, since I can only truly speak for myself, why did I choose to participate in this experience, off the grid in the only true desert in Europe, with people I had never met? Several of my friends have been asking me these questions. I couldn’t really answer in advance because I had no data! I chose to come here partly to get some time alone, partly to visit the land where Lorca lived, and partly because everything would seem new to me.

Not everything seems new to me, as it turns out. Which is also something I expected. For example, my college experiences, both undergrad and graduate, were largely self-directed and multi-disciplinary; what’s changed is that now art disciplines include things like 3-D imaging, computer videos, podcasts, software-as-medium, and the like. Even blogging (here I am, composing creative work for humans to read through a computer screen). For example number two, the artists here are not so different from artists I have met in many circumstances and places over the years: they are curious, intelligent, creative, willing to take risks, and often quite mindful. Another example of things not so new is that, having spent a bit of time in the Albuquerque NM region recently, the lay of the land here and its exceptional flora, fauna, and aridity are not completely alien to my sensibilities.

I’m seeing a number of ideas about xeriscaping, creating fire-breaks, and about stopping erosion and saving water–such as environmental water systems that include basins, ponds, and plants as filters–in process or already in use here at the cortijo. We watered seedlings using water from an in-progress swimming pool near a small natural pond (one of only a very few up in this region) where the natterjack toads were croaking contentedly. The orchard is not producing much, as the trees are still small; but in a few years the farm should be able to get much of its fruit on site.

I’ve learned about the environmental history of this region, too, and how it has changed as the ecological ravages of humans have both worsened it and tried to revive it over centuries. In the Neolithic era, there was more rain. Bison roamed here, and people set up hunting camps in caves. Millenniums later, the Moors settled in the 11th c, built fortresses and small castles up in the hills. The close of the 15th century signaled the rise of noblemen, haciendas, bustling towns and small farms (cortijos)…and major deforestation. During the 19th c, the imperial government instituted a plan to reforest areas of what is now the park, and the economy grew, with more small farmholders; then the economy and population shrank in the 1950s and 60s when the climate became harder to deal with and infrastructure available elsewhere (electricity, paved roads, etc.) hadn’t gotten up to the mountains. People left for the cities. There are many abandoned houses/farm structures here.

Joya-Air explores and promotes sustainability, through mindful conservation and technology that uses fewer resources, along with creativity: art and ecology. The organization is “an advocacy association for ecosystem restoration / rural culture and residency for international contemporary artists and writers.” Simon Beckman is the curator/founder.

People volunteer at and attend or participate in these sorts of residencies and experiences for a host of reasons. For me, it’s a chance to switch perspective, view things from a place far from home, compose poems in a quiet space meant for just that–creative thinking and reflection. To inhabit, however briefly, a place intended to coexist with the flora and fauna, to find out what “off the grid” is like. And to learn new things, all of which contribute to the art of poetry.

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

Bow, lyre, poetics

books~~

I’m reading a collection of essays by Octavio Paz (Mexican poet, 1914-1998), The Bow and the Lyre (published in Spanish in 1956 and translated from the 1967 2nd edition by Ruth Simms).

[I like this photo of him but have not yet tracked down the year and the photographer. I’ll try to do that soon for permissions reasons.]

Paz is so quotable. He’s full of marvelous little aphoristic-sounding phrases such as:

“Poetry reveals this world; it creates another. Bread of the chosen; accursed food. It isolates; it unites.” The first chapter of the book begins with these phrases and images, almost biblical in their parallel rhetorical structure and intentionally paradoxical.

“Obedience to rules; creation of others. Imitation of the ancients, copy of the real, copy of a copy of the Idea. Madness, ecstasy, logos.” Here, he moves to triads… “play, work, ascetic activity…vision, music, symbol.”

Then he moves on to style, metricity, historical antecedents, art. “The unrepeatable and unique nature of the poem is shared by other works: paintings, sculptures, sonatas, dances, monuments. To all can be applied the distinction between poem and utensil, style and creation…the diversity of the arts does not hinder but rather emphasizes their diversity.”

The first chapter is philosophical, a kind of poetics taking a vast history as context and individuality as scope. I might have quibbles with some of his assertions; I might find his metaphors and analogies a bit too facile. But I do find the writing juicy and thought-provoking.

~

A fine essay, I must say, is Paz’s fourth chapter on verse and prose. I could read this text over a few times, I could use it to begin a second master’s thesis or to help me teach an advanced class on poetry. Marvelous work! I especially appreciate his insights into the necessity and diversity of rhythm as culturally/linguistically based. And, as a writer from the USA, I love his thinking about the Americas and Europe, our language precedents and influences, and how Paz interprets their differences. What a terrific, brief but clear, exploration into Eliot and Pound! Into Mallarmé an Baudelaire and Poe and the German Romantics, into Joyce and Neruda and Lorca, and the difference between Spanish-speaking poets of the Americas and those of Spain. What a creative inquiry into the development of free verse in three or four different cultures and eras!

I learned a good deal. More later, I suppose.

Multi-booking

Ah, the pile of books at my bedside. And the ones on my desk at work. And the one I left by the living room sofa.

When I was a younger bookworm, I was resolute about reading, or devouring, one book at a time—often one book at a sitting, in those less-busy days. I cannot indulge myself in that sort of approach to reading anymore, however; I have learned to multi-book.

Some books lend themselves to multi-booking more than others. I do not think I could re-read The Brothers Karamazov while reading other texts. In fact, novels are the one form of reading that I still try to read with my former one-book-at-a-time method. Various forms of non-fiction, though, are terrific for book meshing. It’s amazing how sometimes a synthesis occurs in my mind while reading multiple, randomly-unrelated texts: a book on typography, a philosophy book, a brief treatise on tree-pruning, the biography of a writer or artist.

I can also read poetry collections severally and simultaneously. Diversity of style or subject matter doesn’t matter much; I read poems more or less individually, anyway, and then go back and re-read for a sense of the collection as a whole. The first read is one I can pick and choose from to get a sense of the style, craft, strategies, and tone of the poems. The second read I may approach more wholly, to get a sense of the poet. But first, I like to read the poems.

Something I can do while reading other poets’ work, as I would in a literary journal.

The diversity, the styles, the differing contexts…the books, the poems, the subjects seem to begin a discourse with one another that is often inspirational. Taking a walk after reading both Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature and a few chapters of an entomology textbook resulted in my poem “Luminaries.”

Might I be interested in hearing a conversation between Whitman and Heaney? Sappho and Gregory Orr? Lorca and Kim Addonizio? Reading poetry puts them in touch with one another through their work and my imagination.

Sometimes, I still feel dismayed at how rarely I get the chance to curl up in a hammock or chair and allow myself the opportunity to plow through a book uninterrupted, undistracted. I have learned to adapt to other reading strategies, however, and have therefore never managed to stop gorging on books.

Which is all to the good.