Author: Catherine White

When I paint my backdrops, set my pots on them, and perhaps add something in them it’s like creating a room or in poetic terms like writing a stanza. When I combine the image with a poem and a memory it’s as if I can play my whole life like a xylophone. My experiences as the child of artists or as the only girl in a family of boys strengthened my need to find my direction in clay. Sometimes I describe it as the walls in our apartment or later the loft were so filled up by the family’s art I was left to utilize the table. When I fill these pots it a reminder that I really do intend for these objects to be used. My images and the pots themselves create the boundary of function. I like to think of function as a large room with flexible walls that I push and pull to create my pots.

“Poetry allowed Olds to play her whole life like a xylophone: All those stories, sitting there in cold silence, could be struck and made to sing.”

“The word “stanza” means “room.” (Edward Hirsch: “Each stanza in a poem is like a room in a house, a lyric dwelling place.”) This means that every poem, and every book of poems, is a sort of house tour. The poet leads you, room by room, through the various chambers of his or her world. Different poets, of course, are very different hosts. T.S. Eliot cracks the front door solemnly, greets you with a formal nod and recedes into his velvety labyrinth; Wallace Stevens throws confetti in your face while shouting spelling-bee words; Emily Dickinson stares silently down from an upstairs window, blinking in Morse code.”

–Sam Anderson, from Sex, Death, Family: Sharon Olds Is Still Shockingly Intimate, New York Times, October 12, 2022

I have been reading Jamaica Kincaid’s Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya. It describes her trip to Nepal in 2000 to collect seeds. Comprehensively, she describes the heat, the walking, the leaches, and the Maoists. I wonder will the seed collecting be worth it. Would I even recognize these plants in their native habitat with a casual glance. How do you feel if you only see it blooming, no seeds to be found after climbing 6000 feet.

Today, I took the motivating opportunity of 50 degree sunshine to dig up dahlias. I store them on the floor in the cool studio under my pottery ware racks. I found vigorous worms in the tubers and my motivation to be diligent was encouraged. As I bring these plants in I feel a profound responsibility for the flowers. The current thinking is that one should not do too much garden cleanup so the bugs can overwinter, thus ready to do their thing come spring. But some clean up was called for so I made a little pen for my branches and stems. While cutting and digging I collected pods and seeds as if they were new to me, anticipating photographing an intriguing one nestled in a small handmade vessel.

“And my difficulties were these: I found each plant, each new turn in the road, each new turn in the weather, from cold to hot and then back again, each new set of boulders so absorbing, so new, and the newness so absorbing, and I was so in need of an explanation for each thing, that I was often in tears, troubling myself with questions, such as what am I and what is the thing in front of me.”

–Jamaica Kincaid, from Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya, Picador, p. 135.

When we moved to this property there were very few trees and sometimes in our minds’ memory it is still pasture. One huge, sterling tree is a Chinese big leaf magnolia that we transplanted as a seedling. I remember one of the last Thanksgivings that my dad made the trip to join us. His eyesight was failing but he was very happy to be here and have us cook the big meal. One morning he asked me to go retrieve the newspapers that had blown all over our yard. I had to tell him that what he was really seeing was the super large fall-beige-colored magnolia leaves. Virginia persimmon trees have also become a major presence in our local landscape. My dog loves to eat them no matter how astringent. I love to photograph them. Neighbors who grow non-native varieties gift us with plump fresh ones. My friend of many years who lives in California has sent me these beautiful dried ones. When these fruit gifts arrive I draw them to document them. I savor each one with the memories of the evolving landscape, long friendships, and the enjoyment of each variety.

This year, in the muddy lighting
of my parents’ cellar, I rummage, looking
for something I lost.
My father sits on the tired, wooden stairs,
black cane between his knees,
hand over hand, gripping the handle.
He’s so happy that I’ve come home.
I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question.
All gone, he answers.

Under some blankets, I find a box.
Inside the box I find three scrolls.
I sit beside him and untie
three paintings by my father:
Hibiscus leaf and a white flower.
Two cats preening.
Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth.

He raises both hands to touch the cloth,
asks, Which is this?

This is persimmons, Father.

Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk,
the strength, the tense
precision in the wrist.
I painted them hundreds of times
eyes closed. These I painted blind.
Some things never leave a person:
scent of the hair of one you love,
the texture of persimmons,
in your palm, the ripe weight.

–Li-Young Lee, excerpt from Persimmons, in Rose, BOA Editions

During the week leading up to an open studio I go through so many feelings. There is a wide gamut; doubt, joy, exhaustion, fear, assurance, creativity, and organization. The standard fear–perhaps similar to dreaming of the class you are enrolled in but never attended–is, “will anybody come after all the effort?” But old friends do show up and new acquaintances appear. The event becomes a gift exchange of looking and sharing. One friend had stopped at an orchard and shared her bag of pears and apples. Another painter friend said, “Oh, I want to paint this!” Today’s recovery involved photographing and drawing the gifted fruit. I processed the emotions of the week. I wish to express my gratitude to my friends who show up, read my messages, listen to my doubts and cheer me on.

Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.

–William Arthur Ward

Wherever my husband Warren seems to go he comes home with rocks in his pockets or under the car seat. I understand the impulse but there are times when I feel overwhelmed by the accumulation of rocks and pebbles. So sometimes I do a secret grand clear out and make piles in the garden. I am always afraid of what Warren or Zoë might say, but am sweetly surprised by their discoveries of what they say the fairies have created in our yard. At the same time in my clay studio I am trying to recreate the energy of a rock as a plate in clay.

“Wherever I go, pebbles seem to find their way into my pockets and bags. When autumn comes, I discover the long-forgotten relics of last year’s walks in my coats, each one of them a memento of a place, a time, a thought process. They scatter every surface in my house, too, sometimes requiring a grand clear out, when I gather them all up and tip them into the garden. Still, they find their way back in. I could almost believe that they reproduce.”

–Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

On my walk this morning I stopped to ponder a tree that was still full of leaves in December. It didn’t seem any more protected than other trees or stronger or taller. It was just a tree along our road and it got me to pause, look, and pay attention to the landscape and wonder about the last leaf of the season.

You Can’t

They will fall in the end, 
those who say you can’t. 
It’ll be age or boredom that overtakes them, 
or lack of imagination. 
Sooner or later, all leaves fall to the ground. 
You can be the last leaf. 
You can convince the universe 
that you pose no threat 
to the tree’s life. 

— Maya Abu Al-Hayyat from You Can Be the Last Leaf, Maya Abu Al-Hayyat & Fady Jouda, Milkweed Editions, 2022

We have been hard at work in our gallery space preparing for this weekend’s open studio. I asked Warren at one point, “what have you learned as we do this each season.” He replied that he feels lucky that we can follow a dream of making pots and displaying them in a calm place, sharing our vision for how we imagine pottery to be seen, used and appreciated.

The Conditional

Say tomorrow doesn’t come.
Say the moon becomes an icy pit.
Say the sweet-gum tree is petrified.
Say the sun’s a foul black tire fire.
Say the owl’s eyes are pinpricks.
Say the raccoon’s a hot tar stain.
Say the shirt’s plastic ditch-litter.
Say the kitchen’s a cow’s corpse.
Say we never get to see it: bright
future, stuck like a bum star, never
coming close, never dazzling.
Say we never meet her. Never him.
Say we spend our last moments staring
at each other, hands knotted together,
clutching the dog, watching the sky burn.
Say, It doesn’t matter. Say, That would be
enough. Say you’d still want this: us alive,
right here, feeling lucky.

–Ada Limón, Poem-a-Day, March 14, 2013

My older brothers spoke so fast and told such complicated jokes full of puns, rhymes and double entendre it was hard for me to find space to speak at the family table. They ran fast and made films. They went skateboarding and took their surfboards on the subway to go surfing at Far Rockaway in Queens. When I went with them I stood on the sand heron still (although at that point in time I had no idea what a heron was) to watch them. Sometimes we would wake at 6 am on a Sunday morning before the traffic emerged to go skateboarding in Manhattan on 96^th Street and Park Avenue where there was a good hill and a smooth pavement. Sometimes I was afraid if I got too close my brother might grab me and take me down the road flying on the skateboard or taunt me to climb up some cliff by the ocean. Perhaps I wanted to be taken like a mouthful of feathers. But most of the time I just wanted to stand stock still so my brother would not see me while I watched him drop things off the sixth floor roof in the dark. I remember writing about a nest made of wind–not knowing how to spell the word wind–but I knew I wanted the wind to hold me while we watched the sunset from the roof.

Nest

Sometimes I am afraid if I step close
   my brother will take me, the way a fox

carries a small crow in his jowls,
   over hillside, under shed, wherever

fox go. Some part of me wants
   to belong inside– mouthful of feather,

a tuft of dark that makes us both.
   Sometimes I am afraid if I stand heron-

still, my brother will not see me
   at all, no matter the light, not hear me

no matter how pitched the shriek.
   Between fears, between wants,

I am building a nest out of wind.
   I am asking the wind to hold us.

—James Hoch

There comes an evening in December when I leave the studio and there is no light on in the house. And so I have to face the dark. It’s not late. I don’t need a watch to tell me that, or a friend. These days I have a phone which can double as a flashlight, but I try to pause, to feel the dark, the habits of my steps on the driveway, my routine direction through the leaves. It’s a simple moment that I tend to cringe at, but if I remember to drop my shoulders and zip up my coat I can trust my foot will find the path.

 To Face the Dark

To face the dark,
one does not need a light.
Nor does one need a watch,
a feather, a melody, a sword, a pen.
One doesn’t even need a friend.
To face the dark,
one needs only to face the dark.
There is something easier then
about the facing, when we know
we need no preparation.
Nothing is asked of us except
the willingness to face the dark,
the willingness to pause
in that moment when we
cannot see, cannot know,
cannot float on the sea of habit,
cannot fly on the feathers of routine.
But already, I’ve taken this too far.
It’s so simple, the invitation,
that it’s easy to miss what is asked.
Not a journey. Not even a step.
Just the chance to face the dark,
to meet yourself in that facing—
and to notice what being erased
and what’s doing the erasing.

–Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, poem/video

I forgot that my mother made books with me as a child until I found (after my father died) the remnants of my drawings and her words in a folder in the basement. I loved discovering these small construction paper efforts, because I had made so many books with my daughter– tiny folded and stapled pages with scribbles and words. The books I made as a child were clearly not evidence that I was a poet, but testimony that my mother was paying attention even though I was the third child.

The little books I made with my mother attest to the way I wrote backwards and highlight my love of drawing. No one was keeping score but these scribbles captured my particular gestures. The books were boundaries within which to explore.

When I make pots I love the constraint of making functional pottery, but simultaneously I have a very broad definition of the idea of function. Today’s vase maybe seen as a shard. It began as a circle and then became a shape one can slip through– and yet the pot is something you can hold in your hand and turn.

What is grandeur? Who is keeping score?

I believe in the circle, in light that surprises me, when I can

   believe nothing. The palm reaching out is a gesture, 

       a boundary, a circle one could slip through, or something

you could hold and in turn it could hold you back.

–Ada Limón, excerpt from “In the End Everything Gives.” The full poem, properly formatted can be found at this link thanks to the National Gallery of Art