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.
Bowl with cabbage
We talk so much of light, please let me speak on behalf
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
