Category: rough ideas

Two Japanese friends from the restaurant Omen-Azen visited today. Their outing to look at pots and see our home/studio opened an ocean of memories. It’s as if each series of pots I have made for Omen-Azen over the last 40 years might be a different beach on the ocean of our friendship. Some adventures with Mikio were like jumping off a cliff. We may not have known why we were going, but if he was going so were we. Our travels together to look at art, food, pots, and culture included Maryland, Japan, Washington DC, Virginia, New York, New Jersey, and Maine. Today, with our visitors we walked in wet leaves and ate potato leek soup with the last of the dill from my garden. In the studio we pulled out old and new bowls and imagined future seasonal restaurant menus.

For me, poetry is like the Atlantic Ocean. There are many beaches and strands and cliffs, all looking over the vastness of that salty water mass. You can love the Atlantic Ocean simply by having one favourite beach. You can visit many beaches. You can ignore the beach and watch it from a cliff. You can look at it from Ghana, Trinidad, or Ireland. Iceland? Yes. Cabo Verde? Yes, too.

— Pádraig Ó Tuama, A Conversation “Ahead of the New Season of Poetry Unbound

In a conversation with a friend today we touched on the subject of another friend getting hearing aids. We also talked of gardens and our parents. My memory went to my Dad who was deaf as a door nail without his hearing aids. One day right after my mother died I went to talk to him. I was very upset and we sat on the porch of the Maine house. At first my lip began to quiver, then I cried and ranted and felt as if I was drowning, gasping to expel the fluids in my lungs. When I got to a stopping point and caught my breath I floated for a moment in silence in the sun as my dad held my hand. Finally, he said to me, “I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I feel for you, and I am completely in your corner.” The bad news is that I don’t have my hearing aids in and I didn’t hear a word you said. It was amazing his sitting and not hearing, with his hand on my hand, conveyed complete understanding, a heartfelt raft of support. It helped me navigate the waters which lay in front of me.

We straighten when his lip begins to quiver.

It’s not my place to tell you what he shared that day.

But I can tell you how M. put his hand on B.’s back

and said, maje, desahógate,

which translates roughly to un-drown yourself,

though no English phrase so willingly accepts

that everyone has drowned, and that we can reverse that gasping,

expel the fluids from our lungs.

I sit quietly as the boys make, with their bodies, the rungs of a ladder,

and B. climbs up from the current, sits in the sun

for a few good minutes before he jumps back in.

The dice finish the round and we are well over time.

I resist the urge to speak about rafts, what it means to float.

Good, I tell them, let’s go back to class.

After handshakes and side hugs, I’m left alone in the small room

with a box of unopened tissues, two starburst wrappers on the ground.

–Benjamin Gucciardi, excerpt from The Rungs in West Portal, University of Utah Press, © 2021 by Benjamin Gucciardi

Sometimes making things and writing these posts comes naturally. I collect seeds in the garden and photograph them in the right pot and the appropriate poem is already in my memory. Other days it’s like having to skewer intentions and slow roast them on the heat from my walks around the pond. I draw on our history of kiln firings which requires not only hard work but the shoveling of laughter and ribbing as well as encouragement from friends and family. When the pots and pages, clay and camera come together at the right angle, I feel like dancing in the privacy of the studio. But in the end standing on the porch watching the last light drain from the sky while noticing the new moon is the reminder to keep going.

Making Things

Suddenly I had to skewer all my prayers
and slow-roast them in
the open-air kitchen of my imagination.
I had to shovel fire into my laughter
and keep my eyes from blinking. I had to fuss
like a cook simmering storms.
I had to move like a ballet dancer but without the vanity
and self-consciousness of tradition.
I had to blur my scars so I could write into time,
and carry the sensation of walking like a morose
and heavy American sporting a yellow ascot
over Pont Saint-Michel. I want to be
all razzle-dazzle before the dark-cloaked one
arrives for a last game of chess.
My font of feelings is a waterfall and I live
as if no toupees exist on earth or masks that silence
the oppressed or anything that does not applaud
the sycamores’ tribute to the red flame like the heat
beneath my grandmother’s heart who never raised a ghost
but a storm. So, look at me standing on the porch laughing
at the creek threatening to become a raging river.

–Major Jackson, in Razzle Dazzle: New and Selected Poems, © 2023 by Major Jackson

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