I remember putting a slide talk together for a workshop many years ago. It was like branches of ideas arrived in the form of images. As I worked from photographs of pots and the landscape the words arrived. After I presented the talk I felt like I had been summoned to put my current work where my words had been. I walked our property and gathered grasses. I worked from the specific blades, identifying species like deer tongue grasses and switch grass. These names began to feel like poems. The moment of describing the intimate studio efforts tied together the memory of my experience of painting in France with the current days of studying the view out the window in my Virginia workshop. I found myself translating the panes of glass framing tall grasses into poetic individual plates.
And it was at that age … Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.
–Pablo Neruda, excerpt from Poetry in “Neruda: Selected Poems,” Ecco, 1990