Over the weekend we had various students stop by, mainly women all in the early stages of ceramic experiments and clay education. They asked about how we physically make things as well as the conceptual pursuits. While working towards my decembrance series I have been imagining a series of panels that looked as if I found them on the street. But to create them I had to layer pages of paintings, add more paint and sand back down through the surfaces chasing an image glimpsed on the periphery of my imagination. I could not make my panels without the pots or the intent of making photographs. All of this attention and inattention is part of finding my way through this dark point in the year.
The painter Willem de Kooning famously called himself a slipping glimpser, slipping into the glimpse--slipping toward the image--that he would then arrest in paint. I spend much of my time trying to write poems about what I can single out from my own slipping, which is difficult because when you're slipping you tend to keep your eyes trained on your feet to keep from crashing; it's hard to lift your eyes so that the world can be attended to. Easy to forget, the world is still occurring outside the drama of the self, and the poem of the self is going to be limited unless the world can enter in.
--Lucia Perillo, from "The Glimpse," in I've Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature (Trinity University Press, 2007)
The painter Willem de Kooning famously called himself a slipping glimpser, slipping into the glimpse--slipping toward the image--that he would then arrest in paint. I spend much of my time trying to write poems about what I can single out from my own slipping, which is difficult because when you're slipping you tend to keep your eyes trained on your feet to keep from crashing; it's hard to lift your eyes so that the world can be attended to. Easy to forget, the world is still occurring outside the drama of the self, and the poem of the self is going to be limited unless the world can enter in.--Lucia Perillo, from "The Glimpse," in I've Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature (Trinity University Press, 2007)
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