Rough Ideas

Over the last week as I drive and walk I see daylilys along the roadsides, in ditches, or garden beds. To me they signal summer. They also make me think of my mother. She liked to pick a single blossom and stick it in a cup. It seemed like a flower brought into the house created its own vibration. My mother taught me about the art of everyday things–the ritual of plates on the table, the flowers in the cup, a plant on the window sill, the child in the playground, quick words on a page, and always a sunset to be seen. All were part of the poetic correspondence of everyday things. The daylily was a thing to draw and a thing to celebrate.

I Wanted Music

I wanted music   yes

but I also wanted the music

of everyday things

a plate    an arm    some dirt     a chair

how a plant is related to a window

how a window is related to a chair

small words with purpose

correspondences

of everyday things

the music of combustible objects

one day ending

not tracking for posterity

but loosening like a fig


--Sarah Ruhl in Max Ritvo and Sarah Ruhl, Letters From Max: A Poet, A Teacher, A Friendship, Milkweed Editions, 2019

The air today felt like we were near the shore. It could have been Maine, California, or Long Island, New York. Warren and I went a mile down the road to share a meal with friends. Then we wandered out to their blueberry patch to pick at dusk. I felt a bit like Sal in the children’s book, Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey, by putting one berry in my bucket for every three that I ate while my friend focused on picking efficiently. It was fun to be the child.

“her mother walked slowly through the bushes, picking blueberries as she went and putting them in her pail. Little Sal struggled along behind, picking blueberries and eating every single one.”

–Robert McCloskey, from Blueberries for Sal, Viking Books, 1948

I remember putting a slide talk together for a workshop many years ago. It was like branches of ideas arrived in the form of images. As I worked from photographs of pots and the landscape the words arrived. After I presented the talk I felt like I had been summoned to put my current work where my words had been. I walked our property and gathered grasses. I worked from the specific blades, identifying species like deer tongue grasses and switch grass. These names began to feel like poems. The moment of describing the intimate studio efforts tied together the memory of my experience of painting in France with the current days of studying the view out the window in my Virginia workshop. I found myself translating the panes of glass framing tall grasses into poetic individual plates.

And it was at that age … Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

–Pablo Neruda, excerpt from Poetry in “Neruda: Selected Poems,” Ecco, 1990

I am home to my own porch, trees, and garden. The car is still full of all the materials I took to teach a weekend workshop. I loved being in another garden and studio, with its own particular views, fences, light, and potential. Then it is always good to be home to rub my dog’s ears, to share dinner with Warren, and shoo a few deer away from the hydrangea at the corner of the garden.

I like to think that it is the poet’s
love of particulars,
the things of this world,
that lead to universals.

—Stanley Kunitz, in Conversations with Stanley Kunitz, edited by Kent Ljungquist, University Press of Mississippi, 2013, page 95

I am in Maryland this weekend teaching a workshop in a friends studio. We are making hand built pots and experimenting with materials. I told my students that as they pinch their pots they have to listen to the clay and imagine that their forms breathe. These pots speak of our time together in and amongst majestic beech oak and tulip trees

Poems are like trees…They let us breathe together. In each line break, caesura, and stanza, there’s a place for us to breathe. Not unlike a redwood forest or a line of crepe myrtles in an otherwise cement landscape, poems can be a place to stop and remember that we too are living. W.S. Merwin wrote in his poem “Place”: “On the last day of the world, I would want to plant a tree.” I think I would add that I would also like to write a poem. Maybe I’d even write a poem about a tree?

— Ada Limón, editor and introduction for You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, Milkweed Editions and the Library of Congress, 2024, page 3.

We have a few blueberry bushes. I planted the first ones the summer our daughter finished eighth grade. They have limped along, either being eaten by deer or shaded out—first by a white pine tree and then crowded by over eager forsythia. This week each morning when I take the dog out for her first spin I pick a handful of berries. Luna sniffs around the base of the bush in hopes I might have dropped some. I didn’t think I liked big high bush blueberries, but I love the moments of harvesting. I relish taking a photograph of them in a new small bowl or plate. It’s my personal blueberry holiday, a celebration of the mundane morning walk amidst the early days of June in Virginia.

As a beginning potter I made many covered jars. It seemed like part of the vocabulary of what a potter should create, but every jar once brought home to my parents lost its lid. It was as if my family did not understand the concept of enclosure. Sometimes I thought they looked better without their lids, so I took it as a criticism of my potting abilities.

As a kid I liked the idea of jars with labels. I liked the organization that it represented. The sugar was on the counter or the cookies were there for after school. But now as I make lidded jars I like their poetic potential. I have considered them capable of capturing tears. Our friend Mikio once told me he was going to keep secrets beneath his woodfired lid. The other day a friend stood in our kitchen and took the lid off of a soft gray jar. She was surprised by the bright yellow stash of my daily vitamins hidden inside. Once another friend brought a film maker for a visit and she made sure to point out the multi-sized jars on the wooden cabinet that stored the dog food, cat kibble, and rice. Loading the kiln several weeks ago the smallest lidded jar got tiny clay wads to keep the lid from sticking. My helper asked, “What are you going to use that for?” I told her it was to hold my wish for peace.

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