Sunday, January 24, 2021
Thursday, January 21, 2021
Bob Snyder’s Milky Way Accent (Dos Madres Press, 2020), reviewed by Gregory J. Wolos
Bob Snyder’s Milky Way Accent (Dos Madres Press, 2020), reviewed by Gregory J. Wolos
Bob Snyder, whose poems are gathered in Milky Way Accent, died twenty-five years ago. The manuscript memorializing his work has been prepared for publication by those he loved and mentored. In a preface to this volume, Snyder’s sister states that the poems “reflect love, family, West Virginia, crazy wisdom in the Buddhist tradition and countless other themes showing that in spite of (and because of) our hillbilly accents we are part of the Milky Way and the cosmos.” Snyder, though his poems spring from and reflect his West Virginian life, is not to be dismissed as a Regionalist interested only in depicting local color. Rather, his sister suggests, the poet “uses the prism of Appalachian experience” as a means of extending outward. The details of his poems are Snyder’s way of approaching the “Milky Way,” i.e., the “Universe.” Paradoxically, the more Snyder’s poems are authentically tuned to local voices and experiences that demonstrate how the Appalachian people “fit together in a fabulous backbone way,” the more they foster a Buddhist “one-ness.”
Snyder’s poem “Night Watch” illustrates the wide-angled lens through which he takes in the world: “above it all I’m the satellite watching/ lonesome cities lighting the Trans-Siberian Railway clusters/ of burnpipes on the Persian Gulf/ . . . squidlights flooding the Sea of Japan.” Yet the poet “keep[s] an eye on the whole planet,” and also draws the readers attention to the significance of minute detail: “I spy out David Boothe—hey Boothe! You down there/ in your bachelor trailer on Fenwick Mountain/ . . . / straighten up! There’s a blue baby mouse in that pile of dishes!” The poet sees not only “the flames across the African grasslands/ Amazonia dotted with slash and burn” but also “the campfire that Boothe and Billy have scattered.” Snyder, from his perch in the Milky Way establishes a connection among the fires of the world by containing them within the vision of a single poem: “a coal shining here . . . another over there/ what a spark-eyed sight to see.”
Though the language of Snyder’s poems is colloquial and the details and imagery drip with local color, their historical and literary allusiveness connect their immediacy to a greater world. In “Billy Greenhorn’s Tradegy [sic]” the lovelorn title figure, a stand-in for Snyder, refers to himself as the “Great Beer Joint Poet” while he “sits at midnight/ on the cold cold statehouse steps/ nestled on the Orion Bridge/ two thirds out the Milky Way radius.” As he sits, he imagines himself as the object of desire of famous women: “let me go you dirty dog/ it’s Billy Greenhorn I love/ (sez Heloise to Abelard)/ and [as] Mark Anthony smooches Cleopatra/ . . . / she rolls them Egyptian eyes/ and sighs and says/ O to have been born in the future in the province of West Virginia/ then I could have obtained a REAL MAN.” In “Kerouac in Charleston,” Snyder envisions the writer literally “on the road” in West Virginia. The visiting writer is “humble illusory” and ensconced in a kind of zen oneness as “sunfaced Mason says to moonfaced Dixon/ we got to draw no line nowhere.”
When Snyder celebrates the beauty of women in his poem “West Virginia’s Darlin Gal,” he does so by creating a bouquet of compliments drawn from the local roadhouse: “you’re no more’n inside the roadhouse door/ when everyone winks and whispers your name/ and law! You’re not one bit embarrassed/ but just tickled that someone—someone!—cares.” Snyder observes, “for you the pay phone rings off the hook/ for you bats circle Butch’s shingle job/ on the roof of the roistering honky-tonk/ for you Roy lurks in the parking lot/ nursing a tire iron for his rivals/ . . . / and for you just you/ the lil orphans in red sweetpea pajamas/ fold their sleepweak palms and pray for sugar.” In “Welfare Witch” Snyder captures the ensorcelling power of West Virginia womanhood: “Buster the canary mumed an oh/ No sooner than your slick sole hit sill./ Goldfish huddled behind the white chateau/ . . ./ This gal’s famous, I thought./ You tossed creek gypsy hair, flashed green eyes./ Trashy. Irresistible. Hot to trot.” But there is more to this woman than temptress, and Snyder’s concluding imagery connects the object of his fascination to the fertile land of his home: “[You] gave out such a wild will to show/ What went past sireening. Here was/ Stronger scythe. Broader swath. And longer row.”
In “To Blossom Dearie” Snyder describes the women he has known as confidantes, educators and symbols of a world unified by time, place and desire: “O the women of the fifties/ hard-loving women of the fifties/ the slinky smoke of their cigarettes/ rides in rings to the everlasting/ ebb and flow of human music--/ for one reefer lights another.” These women invite Snyder into their world: “they greet me/ HI BOBSVILLE WHAT’S HAPPENING” and treat him to “stories of exes and lovers/ in jealous little pictures . . . / a private collection of worries/ come down from La Boheme.” Snyder rhapsodizes about these women, suggesting that they not only educated him to the ways of the world, but set him on his path as a recorder of human emotions and feelings: “Out of love and boppawhatnot/ they made me their historian/ showed me what to feel and when/ and how to slide with the seasons/ (going through changes, doing takes)/ all that/ I owe to the women of the fifties.”
Snyder, having established in many of his poems the general truths that can be drawn from the specific, has provided a context for his close treatment of details in other poems, allowing readers to share a unifying experience through his depiction of a specific moment. “Payne’s Place” is a paean to the memory of a single kiss: “of all them fifty thousand-odd kisses/ there was one in particular/ in your old black Chevy/ outside Payne’s beer joint/ . . . / you pressed into my lips/ that cracked half a benny/ and all at once laid the kissereenymoe/ on your wide-eyed Christ of the cornfields.”
Snyder’s poems in Milky Way Accent demonstrate both the universalizing beauty of a remembered moment, as well as the truths to be gleaned from experience over time. The wonders of the galaxy are found in the metonymic features of small town West Virginia life; the vivid colloquialisms of Snyder’s verse celebrate the moment they depict—but they are the fruit that draw our attention to the tree that bears them.
Tuesday, January 19, 2021
Rejane Musis : Somerville's Practitioner of Praticutuca
How has it been for you living in Somerville? With the large Brazilian population here--it must in some ways feel like home.
I arrived in Boston in 2011, now I live in Everett, but Somerville is a city I love. I work a lot with Somerville residents. And yes, I feel a little piece of Brazil in some of the streets of Somerville (and I love it!).
You are a practitioner of Praticutuca--an educational tool that uses Brazilian pop culture for learning and cultural identity. Can you give us some more details about the program, and has the Somerville schools been receptive to it?
The Praticutuca is a project that teaches Portuguese heritage through language, music, and literacy. We have existed since 2005 in Brazil, and we found a home in Somerville. The Somerville schools are an awesome partner, sharing our videos and spreading the word about our group classes which are always free and now online.
Tell us about your Portuguese TV show.
We have a YouTube channel with music videos, storytelling and interviews. Everything is produced with kids from Brazilian families and everything is in Portuguese, YouTube.com/praticutuca
Sometime folks mistake Spanish for Portuguese-- there is a big difference between the two languages, right?
Sure! They are two totally different Romance languages. In my opinion the mistake is proof about how some people don't know about Latin America. I never saw that mistake between Portuguese and Italian or French, for example.
Do you think , through this program-- and in this racially charged climate--- you can address racism?
Of course! I just got approved the BIPOC grant by the Somerville Arts Council, and I will produce 10 videos for kids, in Portuguese, talking about racism here and in Brazil, and readings and singing by black authors/composers.
How has your work been affected by the Pandemic?
Deeply affected. We are a family of musicians, and don’t have the possibility of playing gigs and teaching our group classes. This has affected us financially and mentally. I hope now, with the new president, we can turn this page, and I hope soon Brazil will have the same chance to as well.
Friday, January 15, 2021
Thursday, January 14, 2021
The Open Door by Ruth Smullin
The Open Door
by Ruth Smullin
Fishing Line Press
Georgetown, Kentucky
ISBN 978-1-64662-356-3
The 26 poems of Ruth Smullin’s chapbook, The Open Door, arrived in the mail just in time to provide perfect biscuits to go with my wake-up-from-your-nap-and-face-up-to-the-afternoon coffee; they so absorbed my attention that I stretched out my arousal, compelled to finished the poems before I finished my coffee.
The poems of this collection, with its ekphrastic title poem on a painting of Bonnard, are life drawings from the speaker’s earliest memories until as a grandmother she places her grandchildren into a Bruegel composition in “Yom Kippur Under the Night Sky:”
On this eve of the day of atonement, it's hard
to feel solemn – the balmy October evening warm
and humid as a summer night, sky a blur of gray,
the moon fuzzy with moisture.
Twelve hundred chairs line the parking lot.
Sitting in the back row, listening to rush-hour sounds
from nearby streets, I watch families trickle in,
find seats and friends, catch up on news – children
of all ages and colors, jeans and striped socks,
tutus and leotards, Superman and Alice.
Intoxicated by the night air, the children, the moment,
I think of my two-week-old grandson,
born into a new moon, a new year.
Her strokes are sure, sometimes pointillistic and, when necessary, as fluid as these from the initial prose poem “Yellow,” which, besides being a dissertation on the color, “Sunflower, goldfinch, goldenrod, yellow jackets on a ripe peach,” is also an announcement of the time spanned by this collection from the yellow of “fat rendered from a chicken in Grandma’s kitchen,” to an impoverished present where “These day corn is too yellow, too sweet, watermelon yellow when it should be red; the seeds we loved to spit, gone.”
That mild complaint about seedless water melons provides a hint of an elegiac tone shared by many of these poems of which “Old Letters” (she has “saved every letter. … Six boxes full”) is a good example; here are its concluding stanzas:
Did you mean to sound so cold and hostile?
My mother writes. Dearest, his mother begins,
the phlox is blooming, we’re looking forward
to your visit.
Sarah is growing up at an alarming rate,
my now-dead friend tells me, she is thin,
complicated and moody –
Reading their letters an act of mourning
that sharpens the sense of loss.
I suspect Ruth’s favorite impressionist is Bonnard since, besides the title poem, the only other frankly ekphrastic poem is “Bonnard’s Nude in the Bath and Small Dog”:
In the bath, she floats, calmed
by warmth, wetness, a sensation
of lift. Around her, violet walls swell
blue-green tiles ripple. She drifts
like kelp on the open sea, the tub
holding her steady.
In addition to writing about painting she frequently writes as if painting a still life:
Pomegranate
on a white plate, my own still life.
Fruit lavish as a rose colors the room,
pleases my eye.
For weeks I study its odd shape,
angles like cheekbones, skin taut
with the fullness of what's hidden,
the blossom and a tiny crown.
or an intimate landscape:
Raspberry Patch in Winter
Rising from deep snow, the canes stand spare,
naked – bright calligraphy in late sun.
Their long shadows – delicate, insubstantial –
reach out across the white expanse.
But regrettably, as my initial pleasure was interrupted upon reaching the final poem, I must stop my praise somewhere, so I shall do it by letting the poet speak for herself about loss with the first lines from “Lost,” a poem where she approaches grieving with humor:
Why do people say we “lost” him when he died?
as if we'd left them on the beach by mistake
like a forgotten flip-flop, after we packed up
towels, shovels, sunblock, and somehow overlook
our husband and father asleep in the sand where we
buried him up to his neck, face covered with a hat
to protect him from sun. If we’d glanced back
from the car before driving home, surely
we'd have noticed the hat, the mound of sand.
Now, when you have obtained your copy from somewhere other than Amazon, such as with an old fashioned mail order from the publisher (Finishing Line Press, P.O. Box 1626, Georgetown, Kentucky 40324) make yourself a cup of coffee or tea or hot chocolate, sit where you have good light, and have some good reading.
—Wendell Smith
Tuesday, January 12, 2021
Somerville Artist Janeann Dill: An animated animator, painter, educator and filmmaker.
Somerville Artist Janeann Dill: An animated painter, educator and filmmaker.
This city offers a plethora of choices of talented artists to interview. Janeann Dill, caught my eye and interest--so I managed to catch up with her for an ( online) interview.
Interview by Doug Holder
Can you tell us about your Somerville Experience?
After relocating to the Boston area in 2011, I made a conscious choice to establish my studio in Somerville. When attending an ICA retrospective exhibition and memorial for an important experimental animation artist, Karen Aqua. As an experimental animation historian, I had been well aware of her artwork for years. I understood how influential and compelling her art films were for the City of Somerville as well as internationally. At this exhibition, I had the pleasure to meet and speak extensively with Karen’s husband, Ken Field. Ken Field is also an internationally recognized and compelling jazz artist, musician, and composer. Longer story short, with Ken’s generous help and suggestions, I was led to my artist studio at Miller Street in Somerville. I have worked in my studio and resided in Somerville for some seven years now and still believe that my decisions to live here were good ones! To name only one example among the many opportunities Somerville offers its artists, the Somerville Arts Council is an impressive arts organization with numerous successful programs for its artists and for Somerville’s citizens at-large. https://www.janeanndill-artist.com/somervilleartscouncil
You are a painter and filmmaker. Which came first? And do they inform each other?
I love this question! Thank you for asking. My first long-lasting professional career was as a painter of works on paper and paintings on canvas. Experimental animation came into my view years later when I realized that I wanted my paintings “to move in time” when an Artist In Residence at the American Center In Paris. Little had I realized the profound conceptual influence the animated film, FANTASIA, would have on my paintings prior to living in Paris. I was, however, quite aware of the influences of music, poetic literature, and choreography on my paintings.
You are a conceptual artist. You deal with the "action of thought" Can you explain this?
I teach my students in higher education how vital it is to at least try to understand their singular creative process as a disciplinary strategy in addition to being a medium or craft. I teach the importance of understanding what a concept is, and how to have one.
A concept is an idea. An idea comes into view through research. When research merges with intuition, creative intelligence informs and balances an artist’s output. In other words, one must take action when a thought arrives to reveal itself to an artist. It is a fleeting moment and comes quietly. Thought is ethereal. The act of hearing/seeing/sensing thought leads to another action, i.e., research. Research is meant to discern the impulse for idea. This takes work. Research is are acts of investigation to clarify an idea. For example, making a film is an arduous and laborious pursuit. Keeping a North Star of Idea in view during a lengthy creative process is essential to “remembering” why and how the artist decided to commit to this particular work of art in the first place. This is true for composing music, choreography, experiments in science, writing poetry, theatrical performances, and any visual works of art. I hope this is helpful …
You directed an award-winning documentary about the noted experimental filmmaker Jules Engel. Can you talk a bit about his work and your relationship to him?
I am the Authorized Biographer of Jules Engel (1909 - 2003). The biographical components yet to be distributed are a feature cinematic essay film (documentary) and book. The short film, “An Artist for All Seasons,” is in many ways a seven-minute introduction to the enormous and largely unknown art historical legacy of Engel and his art students. A consummate arts educator and mentor to four decades of artist-students, Engel was the Founding Director of the first animation program in America to award a higher education degree in Animation, California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). As one of his students and Engel as my Mentor at CalArts, Jules Engel’s teachings are not only visible and tangible in Los Angeles, his far-reaching influences are evidenced in New England as well. http://www.Jules-Engel.com
I read he was also a poet.
Jules Engel approached his experimental films and animations as a form of art founded on the principles of timing, rhythm, and personal expression. In much the same way, Engel’s poems are extensions of capturing a gesture of sound and motion in words.
Looking at your work on canvas it seems you use an orgasm of vivid colors--and they seem to project a certain energy--like the formation of a distant galaxy.
I am blushing! I suppose remnants of my Southern upbringing are responding! Hahaha
I’ve never framed my paintings as ‘orgasms’ of color; in this same way, I’ve never considered the Big-Bang an orgasmic event of our universe. That said, I understand how my paintings can be described in this way. I’m not offended by the comment. I did wonder, however, if this description would occur if these paintings had been created by a male artist? I ask out of curiosity. Do you think of the formation of a distant galaxy as an orgasm of color?
The formation of galaxies has been described to me by an astrophysicist to whom I showed my work early in his career and mine as “a kind-of colorful soup.” I am, indeed, creating an animated short film that involves the combining of NASA images (Harvard website) and my original images in which I imagined what is on the other side of the sky. This series of paintings were created in the South of France prior to the launching of the Hubble Telescope for deep space exploration. These pre-Hubble works may be viewed virtually on my website.
https://www.janeanndill-artist.com/creation-of-a-universe-project
Is it hard painting intangible things rather than, let's say, having a bowl of fruit in front of you? You must be very intuitive.
As mentioned, my view is that the intuitive is informed by intelligence, i.e., research! I teach a philosophical approach that is grounded in the discipline of an actual creative process … after years of experience (or no experience at all) the challenge for any artist, young or old, is to remain committed to seeking new fields of inquiry (for themselves) when blockages show up. I can say with certainty, blockages or plateaus or detours and distractions will present themselves to the creative process. In terms of external or internal stimuli for an artist, the distinctions of painting a bowl of fruit in front of me and intangible evidence are both a kind of grappling with the blank canvas, or the piece of white paper in front of a poet. One learns to “kill the white” (canvas or paper) with differing strategies attached to outcomes. Idea is intangible but a bowl of fruit is not just a bowl of fruit. Not even in Photorealist art works. Lighting, placement, and choice of spatial relationships all exemplify the grappling of an idea. Skillful execution imposes a demand whether or not the object is seen in actuality or in the mind’s eye.
Why should people view your art?
Why not? My paintings offer a sense of the mysterious and my experimental films offer a sense of inquiry and curiosity of the “in-between” of rhythm, timing, and pacing. Both challenge prior assumptions and evoke the viewer into the presence of the now - this is not something I consciously intended when emerging as a young artist nor do I consciously intend it now as a mature artist. These are simply responses as the art work’s first viewer.
The text, philosophies, information and defining descriptions written, composed and authored by (c) Janeann Dill are reserved rights. Citation and written permission directly from Janeann Dill is required to publish beyond this one-time use for online and print publication granted to Doug Holder and the Somerville Times.
Saturday, January 09, 2021
The Great Empty: A Renga in Time of Corona Gary Duehr
The Great Empty: A Renga in Time of Corona
Gary Duehr
Grisaille Press [2020]
$9.95
https://www.garyduehr.com/poetry
Review by David P. Miller
The Japanese term renga indicates a series of linked poems. Each poem consists of five lines in two “stanzas” with specific syllabic counts, the first with three lines of 5-7-5 syllables, the second with two lines of 7-7 syllables. This, at least, is how the form manifests in standard English-language practice: the relevant concept in Japanese practice is mora or “sound units” rather than syllables. If 5-7-5 seems familiar, it is: the first renga stanza, called hokku, evolved into what we know as haiku. Typically, renga are written collaboratively, and can be quite lengthy. The linkages between poems may be based on different attributes, such as (free-)association, comparison, or contrast. (There are interesting comparisons with more recent forms such as the surrealist “exquisite corpse.” On a global, multimedia scale, have a look at the collaborative Telephone Project: https://phonebook.gallery/.)
Gary Duehr makes a thoughtful, evocative contribution to the literature of the COVID-19 pandemic with The Great Empty. This renga includes forty linked poems in orthodox English-language form. As suggested by the title, Duehr especially evokes the sense of alienation and social abandonment which marked the onset of the crisis, in the late winter and spring of 2020. I’m writing this around the New Year at the top of 2021. Although we are still far from coming to grips with the disaster, on all levels beginning with the devastation of individual lives, families, and communities, the situation is no longer new. This work recalls what it was like to have the pandemic suddenly crashed down on us.
The Great Empty is not a group product. Nevertheless, Duehr makes use of different forms of linkage between poems, suggesting associative flows discovered in the process of writing. Individual words and phrases may be transmuted. A key image in the last line of poem 2 mutates in the second line of poem 3:
This face mask, smudged, torn blossom. (2)
On a U.S. map,
The pale pink smudges swell up, (3)
Stark contrasts may mark the space between poems. Poem 22 ends with an image of the early community applause for first responders: “Block by block, Brooklyn’s neighbors / Clap their hands: a pond’s ripples.” Compare this with the first stanza of 23: “Isolate, apart / A tribe of total strangers, / We roam dusty streets.” Images themselves may transform, as between poems 24 and 25. 24 ends with an image of late afternoon quiet, from the cessation of subtle sound: “Somewhere outside a dog yelps. / The house ticks, hums, falls silent.” This is followed by an image of nighttime quiet disrupted by sound similar to, but different from, ticking: “Two a.m. Hard rain / Nails the walls down. Still awake, / You miss everything.”
Particularly complex associations link poems 34 and 35. Here is 34:
These tiny moments:
Look how bright the house-fronts are!
Night slides into day.
From the next room, the tapping
Of computer keys: light rain.
Poem 35 begins with a line repeated verbatim from 34. It sets into motion connections between rain/river, present/past, and house fronts/skyscrapers:
Night slides into day.
The house a watery dream.
A lifetime ago,
The river in Chicago
Lit up by sunny towers.
The Great Empty is, of course, more than a compendium of linkage techniques. Duehr expresses the combined shock and melancholy of the early COVID-19 period, when we learned that the disease was going to mean much more than a cruise-ship infestation. Poem 5 imagines the sudden disappearance of normal crowds from city streets as an optical illusion: “As in a 19th-century / Tintype, only transient ghosts.” From 9: “Here’s The Great Empty: / Terminals, hotel lobbies, / Train stations, plazas.” The crises of emergency hospitalizations and surges in mass deaths manifest as surreal images of the mundane: “Beds flank a parking garage. / In a field, white tents billow” (11). Our lives’ in-person events, abruptly cancelled, resulted in blanks evoking hospitals and cemeteries: “Calendar squares lie empty: / Pillows, graves” (16). The sense of being unmoored expands to include time itself: “The day / Begins its long trip – // Alone, without any bags” (29).
At the same time, the voice does not settle for despair. The poet repeatedly re-centers his perception. For example, while poem 6 begins, “We are ghosts, transients,” it concludes, “In his drive, a dad unloads / 12-packs from his Range Rover.” “Forsythias spark” in 10, there’s “a din of starlings” in 20. To focus on such phenomena is not to bypass the catastrophe. Rather, it’s to keep one’s fears and cautions situated in what has in fact not changed, what is also still real. It is not a matter of sentimentality but of psychological survival. Poem 32 melds The Great Empty’s most affirmative statement with an observation that’s acute as it is uneasy:
What can be read there?
Einstein: live as if all things
Are miraculous.
Two branches, high up, rubbed raw:
A violin’s plaintive cry.
We’ve seen that poem 35 moves to the memory a past life in Chicago. This revery continues through poem 37 and then pivots, as if a reminiscent daydream wakes into contemplation of early morning and its qualities: “The world falls open— / Breathing, quiet—the glossy / Red mouths of tulips” (39). With the 40th poem, the renga concludes, not in an easily-grasped redemption, but with space for each moment and sensation:
Between breaths, a pause.
A quiet slice of Thisness.
She’s asleep upstairs.
Your day has not yet opened.
Let each thought stretch out, release.
COVID-19 has confronted us with challenges that are, in their totality, beyond individual comprehension. Poets have provided all manner of responses, contributing perspectives that, combined, help us to understand the depth and extent of the crisis. See, for example, Voices Amidst the Virus, published by the Lily Poetry Review Press (disclosure: that anthology includes a poem of my own). The distinctions of Gary Duehr’s The Great Empty are its formal elegance and its meditative quality. While not denying the pain and alienation of this time, it allows us to step back and reset. It turns out that emptiness means room for panic to subside, as well as the vanishing of vehicles and crowds.
(Duehr has also published a sequel, The Great Empty 2, including “infrared, black and white photos taken in the spring and summer of the pandemic by the author, which reflect the apocalyptic, science fiction-like nature of the times.”)
Friday, January 08, 2021
New Book coming soon from the Ibbetson Street Press/Endicott College Young Writer Series
**** The Ibbetson Street Press/Endicott College Young Writers Series will have a new book out this month by talented undergraduate Koby Hirschaut
https://youngpoetseries.wordpress.com/
"The title of Left on Read evokes not just an unanswered text message but also the violation of a traffic rule. Like a driver turning left on red, the poet takes us in a direction that is risky and unsanctioned, veering within the space of a single poem from pastoral dreams full of flowers and sunlight into nightmares in which posies appear to be grey bullets. Ultimately, however, Hirschaut’s achievement here lies in the way he explores the space between dreams and nightmares: the sleepless nights and early mornings full of grainy coffee that the poet sips alone, “lips pressed against nothing but porcelain.” Rejecting the comfortable clichés of love poetry and other “memories that aren’t mine,” Hirschaut plunges instead into a stark reality that he calls “undersold and ours”—in which, for example, an anonymous girl who appears “golden” turns out to be lit by the neon sign of a convenience store. Hirschaut is not afraid to indulge in this kind of “neon fantasy” (in fact, he suggests that fantasy is essential to self-discovery), but he is at his best when he shows us how the poet’s dreams are less compelling than their raw material-- the everyday experiences that make up what Yeats called famously "the foul rag and bone shop of the heart." ----Sam Alexander/ Associate Professor of English/Endicott College
Sunday, January 03, 2021
Friday, January 01, 2021
The Age of Infinity and Disappearance in Jane Hirshfield’s new collection of poems: Ledger
 |
| Jane Hirshfield |
The Age of Infinity and Disappearance in Jane Hirshfield’s new collection of poems Ledger
article by Michael Todd Steffen
You can be young Joe, thirteen years old, ridden with the anxiety of time and mortality at the discovery that the universe is finite, in Woody Allen’s Radio Days. Or you can be an American poet just past being fifty-something, writing an ode to the precedent decade of your life, as Jane Hirshfield, from her new book Ledger (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2020, ISBN 9780525657804), in the poem “TO MY FIFTIES.”
It is not so much an address by Hirshfield to her fifth decade of life, her fifties. It is to the substance of the maturity of her craft, the opening of inspiration, where a balance or equality has been struck between the poet and her light, creating the “You” of other within self to be reckoned with, with an exact reversal of terms expressing this equality, echoing the title of her visionary 2013 collection Come Thief:
You opened me
as a burglar opens a house with a silent alarm.
I opened you
as a burglar opens a house with a silent alarm.
It registers a memorable moment akin to “the uncertain hour before morning” section in T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding—“So I assumed a double part, and cried And heard another’s voice cry, ‘What! Are you here?’” Yet Hirshfield’s unraveling of the climactic moment turns at once to the familiar and to parable:
We knew we had to work quickly,
bears ecstatic, not minding the stinging.
The short poem goes on to unfold on a variation of anaphora: “Or say it was this:…Or this…Say:…”—concluding:
We were our own future,
a furnace invented to burn itself up.
For its facility, John Keats’s conclusion to one of his famous odes, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty…” has brought him, one of the undisputed Pleiades of English poetry, to considerable critical scrutiny.
But we do not scrutinize poets these days for their conclusions so much as for their faculties with associations, their ability to leap from association to association. (Eliot esteems the associative sensibility—yet in an age more beset with stultification than with diversity.)
The two middle sections of “TO MY FIFTIES” display Hirshfield’s virtuosity with transition, which might be identified as the virtuosity of the collection Ledger as a whole. One strophe reassures us with the familiar and particular, in this instance, of doing stuff at home, in an act of preparing a gift for others:
We were the wax paper bag
in which something was wrapped.
What was inside us
neither opaque nor entirely transparent.
Afterwards, we were folded into neat creases.
This is a sort of witness, metaphor of things (wax paper and then the things wax paper holds—“neither opaque nor entirely transparent”).
Yet it is important and honest for Hirshfield to recognize the poem as itself in textual terms:
Say we were paired
parentheses—
still evoking figures—
cupping two dates, a hyphen,
and much that continues unspoken—
“unspoken” to announce even the silence, the margins of white paper bespeaking the line breaks of verse that make poems different from prose.
Hirshfield’s poetry has been selected for seven editions of Best American Poetry. She is a distinguished member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, earning Kay Ryan’s praise as “a true person of letters—an eloquent and exacting poet, first, but in addition the author of enduring essays and influential translations and anthologies…bringing the good news about poetry to nearly every state of the union…[with] her elegant ambassadorship for poetry in the greater world (…Japan, Poland, China).”
Hirshfield demonstrates a keen awareness of her times. She may use the fog and mirrors of the trade where they are needed, where we are less concerned, such as with conclusions. She knows our agendas are full and she is mindful to fit her carefully termed and mystifying poems into our fifteen or so minutes here and there. We like passing by and stopping door to door but we don’t like those doors locking shut in our wake.
We live in this early 21st Century, in the moment of the poem just a little less than a well-spaced page, which may account for the rampant proliferation of poems on the accommodating Internet in the last 15 years or so. The good of this phenomenon has ever been with us, in the stars above, with the accompanying vertigo of contemplating—like young Joe in Radio Days—their vastness and finitude, and accelerated disappearance.
As Rosanna Warren reminds us, Hirshfield’s “poems appear simple, and are not. Her language, in its cleanliness and transparency, poses riddles of a quietly metaphysical nature.”
The poems in Ledger uphold this “sensual philosophy.” Hirshfield can do this with the butterfly net of a couplet, as in the concluding grasp of “NINE PEBBLES”:
This body, still walking.
The wind must go around it.
She does it more elaborately, comparable to the early 17th-century “Metaphysical” poets, in poems like “VEST” with its “many pockets,” concretizing with this single image the several ways diversity and compartmentalization hang in the balance of our lives as well as in our closets:
It is easy to forget
which holds the reading glasses,
which the small pen,
which the house keys,
the compass and whistle, the passport…
The poem proceeds characteristically with a jarring transition from the familiar and reassuring to the less-defined and potentially disturbing:
To forget at last for weeks
even the pocket holding the dates
of digging a place for my sister’s ashes,
the one holding the day
where someone will soon enough put my own.
The vest of Hirshfield’s poem speaks to this time of COVID isolation by holding in another of its pockets, for our restlessness and searching, remnants to our global transport and connectivity:
I rummage and rummage—
transfers
for Munich, for Melbourne,
to Oslo.
A receipt for a Singapore kopi.
To familiar readers the passage is like the closing of a dormer window opened in Hirshfield’s 2015 collection The Beauty, from a poem like the Norman Rockwell painting titled “A Common Cold”:
A common cold, we say—
common, though it has encircled the globe
seven times now handed traveler to traveler
though it has seen the Wild Goose Pagoda in X’ian
seen Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto in Monterchi
seen the emptied synagogues in Krasnogruda
seen the since-burned souk of Aleppo…
Lists are important—perhaps even necessary—in a time where events of magnitude follow one upon another, like the 30 named hurricanes the troubling year of 2020 has delivered to our quarantined and boarded-up doors and windows.
Thursday, December 31, 2020
Rita Baum Holder ( March 16, 1926 to Dec. 30, 2020)
(Left to Right) Sarah Holder, Rita Holder, Doug Holder, Josh Holder, Donald Holder, and Phil Segal
( March 16, 1926 to Dec. 30, 2020)
Rita Baum Holder--wife of the late Lawrence J. Holder, beloved mother of Don and Doug Holder, grandmother to Josh and Sarah Holder, and mother-in law to Evan Yionoulis and Dianne Robitaille, passed away Dec 30, 2020 at Mercy Hospital in Rockville Center, NY due to complications from cancer. Holder was born in the Bronx, attended James Monroe High School, and later graduated from Brooklyn College. For many years Holder was a high school biology teacher in the New York City School System. Holder was passionate about the arts--theatre, literature, opera, and film, and instilled this sensibility in her two sons. Later she was proud to attend the Tony Awards, where her son Donald, a noted theatrical lighting designer was honored on several occasions. She also attended many poetry readings that her son Doug was involved in, and even made former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky laugh. For many years Holder was an active member of the Arts Guild of Rockville Centre and received an award for her many contributions. Holder and her late husband Lawrence were world-travelers, and she often documented her trips with wonderful photographs and storytelling. Holder was a volunteer at the Museum of Natural History in New York City--a position she was very passionate about. She will be missed by many--friends, former students, and family. She was a devoted wife, friend, and grandmother. May she rest in peace.
Tuesday, December 29, 2020
Murder in the Marsh by Kevin Carey
The year 1980. The city of Revere. It is a coastal town right outside of Boston, but the Hub's skyline looks like OZ to the denizens of this gone-to-seed burg.
Carey, who is originally from Revere--knows the walk and can talk the talk. He is able to catch the bullshit banter of the barroom, and the invective from the numerous poseurs, thugs and cops, that circle each other in a compost heap of their own making. Carey's brutal dialogue reminds me of my favorite Boston crime writers--the late George Higgins ( "The Friends of Eddie Coyle").
Have if you will, detective Eddie Devlin. A 40ish-- disgraced cop--with a bad elbow. He has only one true friend, and a wheelchair bound-- almost girlfriend-- Gwen. She is a muse to this brooding poor man's Hamlet, as he tries to track the murderer who ruined his career and life.
Carey chooses the Marsh in Revere--a poignant symbol of all the hidden and repressed secrets that are below the scum of the surface. The Marsh is a cesspool of corpses and rotting detritus--it envelopes the whole story.
Devlin is on a journey to redeem himself, and Carey brings his crazed quest into full bloom. He portrays Devlin as almost as feral as his prey.
I can see echoes of Dennis Lehane, and Robert Parker in this story. But this story has a unique Revere feel to it, with all its greasy fried clams, stunted lives, rotgut booze, and the biker bars, wonderfully brought to seedy life.
Wednesday, December 23, 2020
Somerville Ceramicist Arthur Halvorsen Brings Flower Power To The City
Arthur's work uses bright colors, textures and patterns on earthenware, gathering inspiration from pop art, coloring books and tattoos. Arthur is a Somerville Mudflat studio artist, he teaches classes and workshops at Mudflat but also teaches at Lesley University in Cambridge MA and and other venues nationally as a visiting artist. His work has been featured in Ceramics Monthly, Pottery Making Illustrated, Studio Potter, ArtScope Magazine and on WCVB Channel 5; Chronicle. Arthur has been recognized as a 2019 Brother Thomas Fellow recipient for his work in the field of ceramics within the Boston area.
Recently Arthur has been painting murals with spray paint throughout Boston. Keep up to date with Arthur more accurately on Instagram @arthurhalvorsen
How has it been for a creative person living in Somerville?
I have to say that moving to Somerville, as an Artist, brings with it a lot of benefits because of the Somerville Arts Council and all that they have to offer artists that live in Somerville. I couldn’t take advantage of what they have to offer in the past because I didn’t live in Somerville. I didn’t have the residency box checked off. I have lived in South Boston, Dorchester, Braintree, Newton, and Chelsea, but I had my studio at Mudflat Studios on Broadway here in Somerville-- since we moved to the new building in 2011. I haven’t looked back since. Also I’m now a 10-15min walk to my studio from where I live. I don’t know if that’s necessarily a good thing, or a bad thing. I think it’s a little bit of both and I say that because I am an insomniac, so when I don’t or cant sleep, I’m in my studio.
You work as a ceramicist , but your recent project is spray painting flowers on abandoned storefronts in the city. Is this another direction for you, or just an extension of your work? Was this spurred on by the Pandemic?
I see both my work in clay, and my more recent work with spray paint as relating to one another and complimenting each other. The clay came first I have to say, but the imagery I use of flowers translates so well into spray paint. I think that has all to do with the thick black line. That line to me is an incredible vehicle for getting ideas across. I reference kids coloring books, stained glass windows, tattoos and drawings done with Sharpies-- like I did as a kid.
The spray paint did come out of the Pandemic. I work at a hardware store in the South End, and after one of the protests in the city there was rioting and looting. At the same time I had been self- quarantining away from Mudflat because I am a front line worker, I haven’t caught Covid luckily, thankfully, but back in 2009 I had Swine Flu (I survived the Swine, ‘09!), and I didn’t know if having had that made me more susceptible or whatever to catching Covid, so I stayed away for 13 weeks. That made me so depressed. I’m an artist and I feel as thought I need to work with my hands, I need to do something with my hands, I need to be creative. So the store where I work was hit by looters and we had plywood in the windows, we sell spray paint, and that's where I was hit by lightning with an idea… So I think for a second.... I’m depressed, a lot of other people are depressed what can I do to make other people smile? What is something that I could do for the people of city, where we have been through so much. Flowers, flowers are what you give to show someone they’re special, to say “I’m sorry” to send your condolences for a friend or family member that has passed away, etc. Flowers are very powerful, they can sometimes carry a lot of meaning and take on a life of their own, so I didn’t reinvent the wheel. I did what I knew I could do best and just started spray painting my flowers around the city. It was already in my wheelhouse but only on what I call the band-aids. One could say that I am vandalizing the buildings. But to be honest-- but I am only hitting plywood or rigid foam insulation, the band-aids. I am not and will not “tag” or spray paint a brick wall or something of the like, unless I have permission. At one point throughout the city, I had 48 spray painted murals. I also find it interesting about which ones do stick around or are kept up-- available to be viewed by the public. I assume after the pandemic that some of these murals will migrate and have a new life. They may be put in peoples' homes as art, to or they the art on the interiors of restaurants and local businesses. It is is going to be fascinating to me, where they end up.
For your ceramic objects you often take banal things like buses, city buildings, etc... that you infuse with colorful, bright, and provocative images. Do you see the extraordinary in the ordinary?
Short answer: Yes I do. Throughout my life I have a tendency to give inanimate objects personalities. For example I see the traffic cones and construction barriers as the urban wildflower. Imagine looking at a hill, field, meadow, whatever, you are going to see flowers and weeds, and more nature sprinkled in there as well. When I see the traffic cone as doing the same thing. They both signal for your attention and both are about survival, one is to entice a bee to pollinate it, the other is screaming “WATCH OUT!” or “DANGER, DANGER!” They’re both calling attention to themselves for a variety of reasons. I like to draw what I commonly see around me and make it special.
Why did you choose ceramics as your genre?
I graduated from Maine College of Art in 2007. When it was time to declare our majors I was torn between Ceramics and Photography, and in all honesty I didn’t want to be photographing weddings for the rest of my life. I would rather make the cake stand for the wedding. After watching the Reality TV show Bridezillas, one time in college, we got to see how brides act on their big day. After seeing how they treated the photographer I said to myself: Absolutely not! Honestly that’s how I came to clay. Also clay has a lot of mystery imbedded in it. It’s an art and a science at the same time. You give up a lot of what clay could be by placing things or objects into the kiln. You put your pieces in the kiln and there is magic that happens when it gets glaze- fired and then you open up the kiln again. That could be like Christmas Day or the worst day of your ceramics career-- if everything gets ruined. You have to have gambling in your blood in order to make friends with clay. You get used to disasters and happy accidents happening all the time with clay.
Why should we view your work?
Well why not? Everybody at least likes, not everyone loves but everyone likes flowers.
Monday, December 21, 2020
Wednesday, December 16, 2020
Hilary Sideris’s Animals in English
Hilary Sideris’s Animals in English (Dos Madres Press),
reviewed by Gregory J. Wolos
In the prologue to her poetry collection Animals in English, Hilary Sideris explains that she “was writing a series of poems in the voice of Temple Grandin,” who, because of her autism, “spent her youth and most of her adult life learning to speak the language of ‘normal’ humans so that she could tell us how animals . . . perceive, feel, and experience the world in pictures.” Sideris hopes that she can parallel Grandin’s intention “by translating Grandin’s experiences and insights into the language of free verse.” The “voice” of these poems is Sideris’s representation of Grandin’s: through the activist’s epistemological framework, the reader is brought closer to the inner worlds of animals, a rendering which expands our awareness of the greater existence we humans share with our fellow creatures.
In the collection’s opening poem, “Nantasket Lights,” Sideris begins her act of ventriloquizing Grandin. The poem details Grandin’s childhood frustration with language: “I didn’t think in words. Still don’t,” and describes how she was removed from school for slapping a classmate who mocked her repetitive attempts to tell a story by calling her “tape recorder.” What Sideris’s child-Grandin was trying to describe was a physical sensation, the pleasure of being “pushed up against a wall” while riding the tilting wheel of the Rotor at Nantasket Park. The comforting feeling of compression is continued in the next poem, “Squeeze Chute,” which describes how cattle are “clamped” in a metal cage to get there shots, a process which actually calms them down “like swaddled newborns.” Sideris’s Grandin suggests that she would find comfort in “a squeeze chute of my own.”
“Squeeze Chute,” as do more than half of Sideris’s poems, begins with an italicized quotation taken from a set of books cited at the volumes conclusion which are by or about Grandin. In the poem “Rapid Erratic Movement” the epigraph reads “It doesn’t jump out at normal people the way it does at me or a cow.” Sideris’s poem goes on to describe a child-Grandin who is “obsessed” with motion, such as “flags/ flapping in the wind,/the light reflecting off a fan’s rotating blades.” The narrator compares herself to a cat chasing a laser dot, “mindless,/ obsessed, their world/ a skittish dot,” and continues on to contrast her behavior with the purposefulness of a child, who, “cheered on by our mothers,/ makes a castle with/ a bucket & shovel.” Grandin, like the animals with which she empathizes, is observational, not planful, like the purposeful child. The epigraphs to Sideris’s poems tell us the activist “saw pictures inside her head,” and that during her thinking process had “no words in my head at all,” a revelation Sideris transliterates in her poem “Certain Infinites” as “Words came unnaturally,/ I learned to speak/ mimicking mom, who/ conjugated like a queen.” Sideris’s poems and the epigraphs upon which they are based suggest that Grandin was a difficult to child to raise, her condition nearly impossible to properly diagnose.
The epigraph to the poem “1950” describes how childhood autism was once believed to be “a reflection of bad parenting, and most especially of a chillingly remote . . . refrigerator mother.” The poem itself describes how, as child-Grandin “painted walls/ with my feces, Doctors told her [mother]/ she was the cause,/ there was no cure.” Yet while Grandin seemed immune to “normal” parenting, the poem “Ariel” reveals her intuitively empathetic relationship with a horse she was learning to ride: “She shows you/ how to ride, knows/ when you want/ to canter, gallop,/ trot—dances with/ you when people/ can’t or won’t.” The horse, it is suggested, observes the details of the child’s discomfort and adjusts to accommodate them; to demonstrate Grandin’s empathetic understanding of animals, Sideris’s poem “Signs of Horse Distress” parallels the autistic child’s suffering with the distressed awareness of an animal like Ariel: “Head high,/ eyes wide, ears/ pointing toward/ the person of/ concern or pinned/ back, flat. Sweat/ without exercise./ Tail swishing/ without flies.”
Sideris channels Grandin as she considers the difference between language as used by “normal” humans and animals. Our own human understanding of language prejudices our conception of animal language. As the epigraph to “Prairie Dogs” explains, “instead of looking for animal language in our closest genetic relatives, the primates, we should look at animals with the greatest need for language in order to stay alive.” The complementary poem suggests their calls are intended to warn that “a predator/ is on the way, how fast,/ where from, what kind.” The epigraph to “Annabelle’s Bite” explains that “[a]nimals probably don’t have the complex emotions people do, like shame, guilt, embarrassment, greed, or wanting bad tings to happen to people who are more successful than you.” Sideris’s poem illustrates the concept: “The pet we let out/ kills with grace, Calm jaws clamp/ prey then shake/ methodically.” In “Slaughterhouse Lights” the Grandin-based epigraph emphasizes once again the similarity between animals and the autistic, asserting that “[a]utistic people and animals are seeing a whole register of the visual world normal people can’t or don’t.” The poem describes how Grandin was hired by a company to determine why pigs were stopping on a chute that would lead them to slaughter: “I got on my hands/ & knees, saw the reflecting/ lights in puddles; pigs fear not death, but sudden movement,/ rapid changes, foreign objects/ in their visual field.
Sideris’s art in Animals in English resides in her ability to complete a multi-level act of transduction in clear, simple language. Her poems are based on dual premises: first, animal language is not based on the same premises as “normal” human language; second, that the epistemological framework of those with autism, specifically the animal activist Temple Grandin, closely resembles that of animals. Sideris’s concluding poem, “Stairway to Heaven,” opens by telling the reader that “Cows think in pictures,/ not stories.” While being led to slaughter, the proceed along the chute that leads them to death as if they’re part of a herd that “spirals” over pasture land, and uncomplicated by emotions, they “never wonder where it ends.”
Sunday, December 13, 2020
Thursday, December 10, 2020
The Girl in the Boston Box by Chuck Latovich
The Girl in the Boston Box by Chuck Latovich, 435 pp. available on Amazon
review by Lee Varon
During the ongoing pandemic, many of us have re-discovered the joy of getting lost in a good book. Especially, for me, this means a mystery. The Girl in the Boston Box by Cambridge writer Chuck Latovich is a perfect present for yourself or someone you know. Steeped in Boston lore and landmarks, the book follows two apparently unrelated characters—Mark, a 40-something gay man who works as a tour guide driving Duck Boats for a living, and Caitlyn, a graduate student in architectural history at Harvard. When the book opens, Mark’s brother, from whom he’s been estranged for decades, has been murdered, leaving few clues other than the mysterious words “Boston Box” on a scrap of paper in his apartment. The police have contacted Mark to identify his brother’s body, and because it seems Mark stands to inherit a hefty sum of money his brother left behind. From the start, things don’t go quite as planned. Mark soon learns other shadowy figures are laying claim to his brother’s money. Meanwhile, in a totally separate storyline, across the river in Cambridge, Caitlyn is studying 19th buildings with hidden rooms called Boston Boxes. Though some of these rooms seem to have been used by the Underground Railroad to hide runaway slaves in pre-Civil War days, as Caitlyn delves further she uncover dark secrets and shocking crimes involving Boston’s past.
How the story of these two strangers—Mark and Caitlyn—eventually connect is what makes up some of the excitement of The Girl in the Boston Box. The book alternates with galloping suspense between Mark and Caitlyn until their stories finally converge.
As an exciting mystery this book rates 5 stars, but it’s more than just a thriller. I can always tell I love a book when the characters stay with me long after I’ve finished reading. I found this with both characters, but especially with Mark. At the beginning he’s somewhat down and out. His long-term boyfriend has dumped him. He has no family and seemingly few friends. He lives in a shabby Brighton apartment and is clinging to his job as a Duck Boat driver. Yet despite this, Mark still has the ability to laugh at himself and to hope for better times. All in all, he’s a totally endearing character who bumbles through Boston trying to piece together the clues to his brother’s murder. Far from a one-dimensional character, Mark can be at times self-pitying, fearful, and petty, and at other times brave, noble, and selfless. I laughed out loud many times at his spot-on, sometimes ironic, observations of modern-day Bostonians and Cantabrigians. If you want to lose yourself in a truly absorbing book, pick up, The Girl in the Boston Box. You won’t regret it!
Monday, December 07, 2020
Saturday, December 05, 2020
Somerville Sculptor Danielle Krcmar: She wants to put a poem/ in your home!
 |
| FRAGMENT HOUSE |
I noticed that you use a lot of found objects in your work. Some of it comes from Carson Beach in Southie. With all the beaches we have around us--why Carson?
I do work with a lot of found objects in my work. Where I get my found objects depends on my location, I used to find old china and shoe leather fragments in bottle dumps near old house sites when I lived in Pennsylvania, near the southern tier of New York. When I lived in Western Massachusetts I would look around house foundations near the Quabbin. Because I was still making sculptures with found china when I moved to Fort Point, someone told me about Carson Beach- where there was plenty of china bits and beach glass due to a long history of dumping. I collected china and other items from the beach for years but never collected the beach glass because I didn't have a sculptural use for it at the time. When I decided to make the Fragment House piece using Beach glass. I knew where I could get it and I liked that the beach glass would have been collected from the shore, not too far from where the piece was initially sited - in Dartmouth, MA. When I was collecting beach glass for the Fragment House Project, I would always try to go to Southie at low tide, and the larger challenge was getting the plastic bags full of glass back to the car. One morning, I was able to pick up 30 pounds of glass with the help of my son, and two family friends. There are very few areas where you can get that much glass that easily and quickly. A lot of art has been made with pieces sourced from that beach- it would be interesting to curate a show of that work and talk to the artists.
You worked with the poet Mary Pinard on a Fragment House Project. You used word and images from her poems and incorporated into the house. Can you talk about this? Do homes with a history have a certain energy--a certain poetry about them?
Mary Pinard and I had talked about collaborating. When I was asked to create a site-specific piece for the DNRT ( Dartmouth Natural Resources Trust) it provided the perfect opportunity for us to work together. I loved Mary's Poem Song Net For An Estuary , and how she researches and responds to particular landscapes and their history. We walked the overall DNRT trails together to figure out a site that we were both interested in and eventually chose Bluebird Field. In the piece, Mary's full poem is etched into the window, which is the only solid surface in the house, and then select words from the poem are additionally etched into larger pieces of beach glass as a way of emphasizing those selected words. I am a little romantic about old houses, some of that may be a reaction to growing up in the suburbs in a more modern houses and having had childhood fantasies of discovering amazing heirlooms in the attic of an old Victorian house. I do think a newer house could contain poetry, but I do think older houses have a sense of poetry to them both for the age of the house itself and the accumulated life lived within its walls, but also the history of the materials- such as something like heart pine, that was 100 years old when it was milled for flooring over a hundred years ago. In the irregularly placed studs and the thicker milled lumber the sense of something being built by hand is more visible, that evidence of the work by hand is beautiful and yes - has poetry for me. I saved lumber from our interior walls when we renovated our 115 year old house, I've used some of it in another artist friend's piece and am figuring out how it might play into new work.
Tell us what your new idea is about-- linking Somerville Poets' poems with your art?
For this new idea, I am interested in working in Somerville neighborhoods as a way to provide another layer of communication while we are under lockdown, I've began thinking about this idea when lockdown first started - being masked in public, many of us didn't quite know how to interact with one another, we were avoiding each other in public because we didn't want to get close. Masks interfered with reading facial cues and made speech harder to understand, so even casual interactions between neighbors felt awkward. I found myself needing daily walks in my neighborhood - getting outside was such a relief. It was also beautiful to see people were doing community art projects like posting rainbows in their windows, or chalk drawings on their sidewalks to offer a little bit of beauty and surprise. I did a few of the sidewalk drawings with my son and it was cathartic to make something beautiful, though often very ephemeral! I was interested in doing something. I began to think about the possibility of working with a poet and attaching it to a large fence in Lincoln park, I worried it might get damaged and I was busy enough with work that it was hard to take on another project, but the idea stayed with me. And so we go into winter-- we will be indoors more and will see each other in person even less. Having someone tell you a story via a poem seems like a lovely way to make connections, both when I ask people to host poems at their houses- which I am still nervous about- and as I ask poets to work with me. Initially I imagined the poet would create a biographical poem in response to the person/ household hosting the poem, I liked the storytelling possibilities there, but I am a little concerned about managing a collaboration between 3 parties to everyone's satisfaction.
How has the Pandemic affected your work?
Covid really threw me off and completely overwhelmed me. There was so much uncertainty and fear, and unlike many people who reported having so much time on their hands, I had more work and less time and space to do it in. I had artwork to pack and ship for our gallery, kiln firings to run for our co- curricular ceramics program, and repairs to schedule prior to upcoming budget cuts. All had to be done without the in- person help of my student workers, due to social distancing measures on campus. My teaching work became much harder and more complicated when we went on line. Teaching painting from my home mini office and sculpture and from my kitchen table to students in multiple time zones with varying degrees of internet connectivity-- was overwhelming and exhausting. Making sidewalk chalk drawings with my son was one way to be creative but it didn't seem exactly connected to my work; though we will see if it plants the seed for something in the future, as often happens. My critique group shifted to Zoom meetings and it has been the highlight of my week. Each of us works on artwork during the zoom, some of us draw portraits from the zoom and some work on ongoing studio projects. We discuss our work, our lives, teaching pedagogy, and the work of other artists as it pertains to each of those three things. It has been an amazing space to share ideas, get in process feedback on work in a way that we were not able to do pre pandemic because we did not meet as frequently. We have also been able to bring back in a critique group member who had moved across the country. It has been profound to have this group of women artists discuss work and share successes and challenges.
In June, my full-time job at Babson College was terminated due to pandemic budget cuts at my institution, which was a real shock. I still could have the opportunity to teach as an adjunct in Spring 2021, but in the moment, I had to move out of my campus studio that I had for 16 years. Most of my colleagues wrote emails to the college administration protesting the decision, which provided me some comfort, but in the end, those efforts did not reverse the decision. In October, I decided not to teach there this coming Spring, so I removed the contents of my office and my personal teaching materials this week. I wanted to do it when the students were no longer on campus. I'm a bit of a packrat/ magpie/ and since I taught, ran workshops, curated the gallery, and managed the permanent art collection I had a lot of stuff related to all those roles. It has been a long week of getting everything out and bringing it to my home and studio.
The upside of this is that I am now pursuing more public art projects and commission work. This week I moved into a shared studio space at Vernon Street. I love Somerville Open Studios and have many friends at Vernon Street, and it is beyond exciting to be back in a studio building surrounded by other artists. Every time I unlock the door to the new studio I feel a surge of happiness, it's pretty great.
Are there poems about Sculpture that inspire you?
I love the sculptor Joseph Cornell and made many assemblages as and love Dime Store Alchemy by Charles Simic. The poem Where Chance Meets Necessity speaks to the serendipitous beauty offered by found objects. The first two lines say it perfectly:
Somewhere in the city of New York there are four or five
still-unknown objects that belong together. Once together
they'll make a work of art.
...................................................four or five
still unknown objects that belong together.
the perfect economy of those words
Some of my older work with the figure was inspired by Whitman's poems. I love the visceral physicality in his poetry, as experienced here:
I mind how we lay in June, such a transparent
summer morning,
You settled your head athwart my hips, and gently
turned over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and
plunged your tongue to my bare-stripped heart,
And reached till you felt my beard, and reached
till you held my feet.
Why should people look at your work?
I'm interested in the potential for transformation in everyday objects and materials, my hope is that those transformations offer the viewer an opportunity for surprise and discovery through extended or repeated viewing of the work viewings of the work. My work is best experienced in person, so you can discover surface details or see how all the pieces come together to make the whole.
