I have been making plates with my students. I try to explain about the way our fingers touch clay. I aim to touch just right, to create expressive edges. I am letting the past inform what I make for the future, leaving fingerprints like fossils left behind by the sea.
There’s a soft spot in everything Our fingers touch, the one place where everything breaks When we press it just right. The past is like that with its arduous edges and blind sides, The whorls of our fingerprints embedded along its walls Like fossils the sea has left behind.
–Charles Wright, from “Two Stories,” The Other Side of the River (Random House, 1984)
I am teaching a workshop this weekend at Snow Farm in Western Massachusetts. We have been making what I call dust prints while talking about materials and the seeds of ideas.
“You begin with the possibilities of the material.”
I picked blueberries before breakfast today and meant to bring them with me as a gift. But I think my mind was with the cardinals and the sparrows writing poems on branches. I ate them all before I got to my destination.
“Sometimes lines of poems I’d read long ago would flutter up from the air and perch in my brain like sparrows.”
My garlic looks terrible this year. So the scapes in this year’s image were purchased at the local farmers market. I dug up the few bulbs I could find of one variety to use as green garlic (delicious with a Meyer lemon on cauliflower). Next year I will try new garlic in a different location. The other variety I planted might have a few scapes. I think they were hindered by too much rain at the wrong moment. My disordered love for this looping growth thirsts for something I cannot name.
The grass resolves to grow again, receiving the rain to that end, but my disordered soul thirsts after something it cannot name. –Jane Kenyon, from “August Rain, after Haying,” Constance (Graywolf Press, 1993)
Given the news I’ve been in need of local sustenance.
Last week when we got home from the woodfire conference in Star, North Carolina I felt overexposed. We were out of the practice engaging in so much conversation and in so many days of meeting people. I got home and all I could do was mow the grass, leaving untouched a small triangle full of clover and bees. Later I went back and picked a few blossoms, watching my bee friends enjoy the flowers.
In other news around our house the mulberries are ripening. Every time I look out at the mulberry tree there is a young buck with fuzzy antlers eating berries. Every year we have a young buck who we’ve come to call Mulberry. One might think I could come up with another name each year like Shadrack or Buffy or Zanzibar. But Mulberry suits us just fine.
Too Many Daves –by Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel)
Did I ever tell you that Mrs. McCave Had twenty-three sons and she named them all Dave? Well, she did. And that wasn’t a smart thing to do. You see, when she wants one and calls out, “Yoo-Hoo! Come into the house, Dave!” she doesn’t get one. All twenty-three Daves of hers come on the run! This makes things quite difficult at the McCaves’ As you can imagine, with so many Daves. And often she wishes that, when they were born, She had named one of them Bodkin Van Horn And one of them Hoos-Foos. And one of them Snimm. And one of them Hot-Shot. And one Sunny Jim. And one of them Shadrack. And one of them Blinkey. And one of them Stuffy. And one of them Stinkey. Another one Putt-Putt. Another one Moon Face. Another one Marvin O’Gravel Balloon Face. And one of them Ziggy. And one Soggy Muff. One Buffalo Bill. And one Biffalo Buff. And one of them Sneepy. And one Weepy Weed. And one Paris Garters. And one Harris Tweed. And one of them Sir Michael Carmichael Zutt And one of them Oliver Boliver Butt And one of them Zanzibar Buck-Buck McFate … But she didn’t do it. And now it’s too late.
Today was the kind of day when shadows spoke many languages. There were green words with graphic edges, elongated shapes, faded patterns and more. At the beginning of the pandemic I gave myself small drawing assignments so that I would pay attention to fence lines, tree branches, clouds, or horizon lines. Then, at the end of the day I would make four small, quick sketches. I have kept up the four-sketch habit, but the focus is more on the day’s activities. Today’s crispness was a great reminder of the value of simple personal assignments.
I THINK
I will write you a letter, June day. Dear June Fifth, you’re all in green, so many kinds and all one green, tree shadows on grass blades and grass blade shadows. The air fills up with motor mower sound. The cat walks up the drive a dead baby rabbit in her maw. The sun is hot, the breeze is cool. And suddenly in all the green the lilacs bloom, massive and exquisite in color and shape and scent. The roses are more full of buds than ever. No flowers. But soon. June day, you have your own perfection: so green to say goodbye to. Green, stick around a while. — James Schuyler
Today was a perfect June day. Cool temperatures for this time of year mixed with blue sky and small clouds. Warren and I drove over the Blue Ridge mountains to revisit a kiln we have fired many times helping out a good friend. The hills of Virginia flowed with tall grass. It was as if each new view melted into the next. As we drove there and back each vista was layered with memories and the fresh light of a clear June day.
June Wind
Light and wind are running over the headed grass as though the hill had melted and now flowed.
Making these photographs of pottery with combinations of food, flowers and painted backgrounds is like writing a late spring visual letter. The peas are the star of the garden at the moment. I want to nominate their crisp flavor to be a holiday. Putting them on a plate becomes a constellation mixing painting and June air.
“It is your duty in life to save your dream.”
― Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920, Italian painter/sculptor working in France)
I want to be that friend who can look at something and say that it is a poem. Perhaps a single pea in a plate, a cup on the table, an abstract patterned wall in a parking lot where there used to be a sign, or a magical meal of simple ingredients. When I put flowers in a vase I am not following instructions for a utilitarian object but paying attention to the syntax of the object, its contents, and the surroundings. I want to be like ee cummings who says “Yes” to both the poem and the tangible things on the table.
[since feeling is first]
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
-- e e cummings
