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
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.
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.
