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.
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 96th 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.
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.
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
When we first moved to Virginia we let the grass grow tall in front of the house. I remember wondering if we had a new kind of thistle that was yellow. Then I realized it was goldfinches perched on each purple flower head. Yesterday morning I walked the dog down to the end of a nearby gravel road. At the road’s end with its circular turn around, all I could hear were blue jays, robins, and crows. The birds had flown up into the tops of the bare branches of the willows, persimmons, and dogwoods. When I think back to growing up in New York City roller skating in Central Park I never imagined that poetry would be part of how I understand the world.
It’s the Season I Often Mistake
Birds for leaves, and leaves for birds. The tawny yellow mulberry leaves are always goldfinches tumbling across the lawn like extreme elation. The last of the maroon crabapple ovates are song sparrows that tremble all at once. And today, just when I could not stand myself any longer, a group of field sparrows, that were actually field sparrows, flew up into the bare branches of the hackberry and I almost collapsed: leaves reattaching themselves to the tree like a strong spell for reversal. What else did I expect? What good is accuracy amidst the perpetual scattering that unspools the world.
On my morning walk in the damp mist the trees were black silhouettes against a grey sky like loose brushwork on a bowl. I see the outlines of pots everywhere I look. But I have spent my life as a potter trying to see the inside volume. So much of my early training was focused on bowls that it took me a long time to arrive at a place where I could throw bowls intuitively without working against the voice of my education.
First Sight
I see an outline of you everywhere I look. We spend our lives trying to see our insides. Have you ever watched the trees turn black before the sky?
–Victoria Chang, in The Trees Witness Everything, Copper Canyon Press
I am grateful my father taught me to draw the mundane things in our life. He taught me to see plants and more specifically leaves, the chairs, our shoes, the dog, his children, and my mom all as fodder for art. His line was bumpy and exaggerated but based on what he was really looking at. He was after a poetic beauty to his document. He loved the soul of things, the humor, the quirky, not slick prettiness.
After Dad died and we cleared out the loft my daughter encouraged me to keep one of the many Dracaena plants that lined his south facing windows. Drawing my neglected plant in the fading light of December in Virginia connects the threads of our lives. I am grateful for the practice of drawing in my life. It keeps me looking and not taking things for granted. Drawing helps me to write, when I draw there is space in my mind for words and things I couldn’t articulate before, become clear. Drawing helps me to remember details which live in the past but just as much help me to write about tomorrow.
It Is March
In the upper leaves, it is already next month. I am still writing yesterday’s poems, waiting for clarity to come. But yesterday is clotting, next month won’t come down. How do I live in the past but write about tomorrow?
–Victoria Chang, The Trees Witness Everything, Hachette, 2022
It must be December again. This must be the day when you start getting images and poems from me again in a calm progression until the 21st, the shortest day of the year in this part of the world.
Darling
The days fall out of your pockets one after the other. Soon you’ll need a new jacket with tougher leather
and seams no one has felt. Soon you’ll bring the old books into your bed and sleep easy
and alone. It must be December again. This must be the part of the story where you
refuse to say how the bodies you’ve walked toward continue walking in you. With heavy black boots
in a calm procession of darling and honey— they walk up and down the narrow streets of your heart.
–Alex Dimitrov from Begging for It, Four Way Books, 2013
Today on the longest day of the year, I wore my raincoat to walk the dog. This year’s summer solstice is a welcome wet green day. Today’s rain soaked walks reminded me of a photo of Zoë and my mother in raincoats in Maine. My parents taught us to always have good rain gear so that no matter the weather we could get out and enjoy the day. I have talked to several old friends and relatives this week who all have such fond memories of my parents and the magical way my brothers and I were raised. It’s as if mom and dad carried umbrellas that allowed us to grow in idiosyncratic creative directions. A recent visitor saw my father’s sculptures in our house and she said, “oh that’s where you got your talent.” I thought to myself, no that’s where I got the permission to make the things I dream of. As a kid I danced until the downstairs neighbors complained. Stephen played the drums. Shawn wrote songs and played every instrument he could get his hands on. Nick was ready to play every sport. Each of us filled sketchbooks as a form of breathing.
Dahlia
The Raincoat
When the doctor suggested surgery and a brace for all my youngest years, my parents scrambled to take me to massage therapy, deep tissue work, osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine unspooled a bit, I could breathe again, and move more in a body unclouded by pain. My mom would tell me to sing songs to her the whole forty-five minute drive to Middle Two Rock Road and forty- five minutes back from physical therapy. She’d say, even my voice sounded unfettered by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang, because I thought she liked it. I never asked her what she gave up to drive me, or how her day was before this chore. Today, at her age, I was driving myself home from yet another spine appointment, singing along to some maudlin but solid song on the radio, and I saw a mom take her raincoat off and give it to her young daughter when a storm took over the afternoon. My god, I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel that I never got wet.
–Ada Limón, in The Carrying: Poems, Milkweed Editions
I don’t ever remember having fresh peas as a kid. I do remember my father describing being in a market in France in the early 50s when he and my mother were in art school. He said the moment when fresh peas arrived in the market it ignited a special kind frenzy.
I love growing peas. The early possibility of planting the seeds, the sprouts and tendrils, the first pods. But I find picking them requires a special kind of patience and looking. I have a chair I pull into the garden to sit on so I can slowly look for all the peas. Shelling peas requires the kind of serenity and attention to detail that reading poetry does. The effort is careful, full of breaks, but something happens beyond the utility of the task. I return again and again to another pod, splitting each one, admiring the nestled peas, and dropping the fresh green bit into the bowl.
A background of breaths
Whether or not we are seeing the tide of poetry’s popularity ebb or flow seems to be somewhat up in the air. But what I do know, and what I am most intimately familiar with, is that poetry helps, that on days when I feel overwhelmingly bullied by the ongoing barrage of vitriol and pain in the world, there is a very real and significant joy that occurs when I return to, or discover, a really good poem. But explaining why it matters, or how it helps, is difficult. It’s like trying to explain to someone why walking into a stand of trees helps, or why going to the water helps, or seeing that one kind burst of blue sky among the terrifying scrapers helps.
Perhaps why it matters, how it lifts us, and why some of us return to it again and again is, unlike any other form of writing, poetry has breath built right into it, thanks to the line break, and the stanza. “And here we breathe a little,” the poem says, “and here we breathe a lot.” Right now, as a society, I think we need that breath. That necessary pause that allows for our own wrecked little selves to enter the poem, or even just return to the room we are presently in, that particular moment is where the real brilliance of great poetry happens.
