Category: rough ideas

We drove west today through the rolling hills and over the mountains, past the Shenandoah’s Skyline Drive in a pea soup fog to help a friend brick up the door of his kiln. Once he tucked away the last of his work on the kiln shelves we talked about the history of our choices, the risks we take with material, and the imminent heat in the kiln. We have woven real connections through shared work and vision.

The Seven of Pentacles

Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.

Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.

Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.

Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after
the planting, after the long season of tending and growth,
the harvest comes.

–Marge Piercy, in Critical Values, Vol 4, Issue 4, October 1, 2011, p 9

I am someone who always loves a lot of light. The length of June days is a welcome season. In the studio, however, now that we have so many large trees, there is a moment of grief for me when the leaves have filled out and the shade gets green deep inside the studio. This week I have been waking up just before dawn for a few minutes. I have come to love the depth of that moment of dark entered by the first early morning bird who begins to sing. It’s also the moment that wakes up Warren who rises up to close the window to muffle the imminent chorus.

We talk so much of  light, please
let me speak on behalf

of  the good dark. Let us
talk more of how dark

the beginning of a day is.

–Maggie Smith, excerpt from How Dark the Beginning in Poetry, February, 2020

Last week when I was in a slump laying on the porch I reread my journal from a year ago. Often reaching back in my notes gives me perspective on the nature of cycles in my life. But last week it only sank me deeper into my inner workings of doubt. A conversation with a friend sent me looking for an old blog post about materials. In those previously thought out words and images I found several ideas worth revisiting.

In today ‘s New York Times Margaret Renkle wrote about Annie Dillard’s The Pilgrim at Tinker Creek which was published fifty years ago. My mother gave me a paperback copy for my birthday in 1976. When my daughter was in college she read my copy which was still on my shelf at my parents’ loft in Manhattan. Zoë added her own mix of post-it notes and marginalia inside its covers. And, as always, there was a postcard in my mother’s handwriting tucked into the first chapters as a bookmark. During the spring of 2009 I listened to an audio version–actually the first time I read it in its entirety– and found the language inspiring. It created a triangle: one point referenced my life in Virginia, one point represented my daughter’s interest in Dillard’s words, and the third was my mother’s poetic influence on my sensibility.

In the 2009 summer solstice project I used Dillard as a source of quotes to accompany many of the images. In each year’s incarnation of this project it is instructive to revisit earlier ones, to spiral forward intoxicated with language remembering the girl I was, the mother I became, and today’s current point of vision.

Rereading “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” this spring, it was a relief to react to it in much the same way I reacted as a teenager. Reading it again, I am once more intoxicated with language, once more swept away by the violent, intertwined, unaccountable beauty of nature, deeply in love with the whole profligate living world. Reading it again, I am the girl I was then and the woman I am now. Both at once.

–Margaret Renkle, I Reread a Book That Changed My Life, but I’d Changed, Too, New York Times, June 3, 2024

Pottery and poetry are here to say what cannot be said in words. In these images I aim to convey an element of imaginary context with painted backgrounds. When the pieces are more sculptural I hope to show that imaginative use is eminently possible. When the bowl is empty the poetic space remains eloquent.

To a Departing Companion



Only now 

I see that you 

are the end of spring 

cloud passing 

across the hollow 

of the empty bowl 

not making a sound 

and the dew is still here

–W. S. Merlin, in Present Company, Copper Canyon Press, 2007

Welcome to June and the first in a series of 21 posts that trace the lengthening days , lines, and steps of the season.

“I think that everyone is on his own line. I think that after you’ve made one step, the next step reveals itself. I believe that you were born on this line. I don’t say that the actual footsteps were marked before you get to them, and I don’t say that change isn’t possible in your course. But I do believe we unfold out of ourselves, and we do what we are born to do sooner or later, anyway.”

–Agnes Martin, 1976 interview published in John Gruen, The Artist Observed: 28 Interviews with Contemporary Artists, Chicago Review Press, page 82, 1991

I am looking forward to the winter studio, to the promise of new cycles of ideas and to revisiting old ones.

Morning Bell

The eye opens like a curtain rising
In the dark, feet search for something real
Consciousness hasn’t happened yet
And the floorboards are skin temperature
A fresh repetition, today will be one more or one less
An impromptu concert strikes up in the kitchen
Maybe this black coffee is the morning bell-
the prize you win for returning safe from sleep

–Iman Mersal

There were 9 hours and 15 minutes of daylight today. Many of those hours were spent wandering the streets of Brooklyn with our family full of laughs, snacks, scootering and more. When at last we turned towards home it felt as if the streets, the earth, and our bodies shivered. We have passed the shortest day of the year and can now turn towards the light.

December

The white dove of winter
sheds its first
fine feathers;
they melt

as they touch
the warm ground
like notes
of a once familiar

music; the earth
shivers and
turns towards
the solstice.

–Linda Pastan, excerpt from The Months

It was a long city day full of moments of lights and memories of exhaustion. I am always surprised how the surface of a sidewalk can bring back a time and place. On our subway ride home after seeing multiple nighttime light displays in the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens a fragment of a poem on the subway created a song in my imagination.

Subway

As you fly swiftly underground
with a song in your ears
or lost in the maze of a book,

remember the ones who descended here
into the mire of bedrock
to bore a hole through this granite,

to clear a passage for you
where there was only darkness and stone.
Remember as you come up into the light.

–Billy Collins

I had my traveling hat on today. I saw the sunrise on my driveway with our dog. After delivering pots in SoHo I saw the sunset from the Manhattan Bridge on our way to Brooklyn. Luckily the rains are behind us.

The words he wrote on the rim of his homemade traveling hat can be translated, loosely, as these:

Under this world’s long rains, 
here passes 
poetry’s makeshift shelter.



yo ni furu mo sarani sõgi no yadori k

–Basho, translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani

There was an engaging article in The Washington Post about W. S. Merwin and his Hawaiian property. He bought barren land in the 70s and planted palm trees and other natives to restore the local habitat. Our land here in Virginia has similarly been transformed. Once a treeless pasture it is now a sheltering wooded hillside. Yesterday, between intermittent rain squalls we stepped through the leaves with our Japanese visitors pointing out trees, fruits, and feathers. Today, wishing I had an indexing system, I sifted through objects and notes about specific pots from the 90s to summarize the outlines of new, future projects. It was a bit like looking at past footprints for future inspiration. Much of the touch is stored in my mind and the notes serve as clues to bring it all back.

As if I had a system
I shuffle among the lies
Turning them over, if only
I could be sure what I’d lost.
I uncover my footprints, I
Poke them till the eyes open.
They don’t recall what it looked like.
When was I using it last?
Was it like a ring or a light
Or the autumn pond
Which chokes and glitters but
Grows colder?
It could be all in the mind.  Anyway
Nothing seems to bring it back to me.

–W. S. Merwin, excerpt from The Nails, © 1993 by W.S. Merwin