Ghostly demarcations of the land under cloud cover, taken over the US midsection during a recent cross country flight. My very clever and well read niece Rebecca Ricks sent me a link to an essay published in Frieze Magazine last year. Titled Of Ourselves and of Our Origins: Subjects of Art, it is an edited […]
Poetry
Consciousness of the Mountain
The poet Robert Hass has won the National Book Award, The National Book Critics Circle award and the Pulitzer Prize. I have admired his work for some time. So when a good friend enthusiastically suggested that I explore some of his prose as well, I took her up on it. What Light Can Do: Essays […]
Small Swishings of Joy
The last page of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations . . . Life Is Not What You expected — cows ruminate by the highway even in rain or bat their ears forward and back and how you thought the story of your life would get told: the children you thought you’d already have by now partially grown […]
What the World Can Do Without
Another passage from Christian Wiman* that speaks to poetry writing but could apply to all the rest of us who are inveterate makers: Reality doesn’t need us. A poet knows this, and then, in the midst of a poem, when reality streams through the words that would hold it, doesn’t quite. W.S. Di Pietro, probably […]
Wimanian Wisdom, Part 2
Whether Utah (like this image) or Wiman’s West Texas, the desert can be a crucible for poets and pietists This is a continuation of the theme from my previous post…Here are a few more passages from Ambition and Survival, Becoming a Poet by Christian Wiman. His insights into creating—poetry and painting share so many aspects […]
Wimanian Wisdom
Christian Wiman I wasn’t familiar with the poet Christian Wiman before watching his interview with Bill Moyers. But his tone in that conversation—the comfort with the “don’t know” mind, a willingness to drop into the interior landscape in spite of many prevailing cultural trends that favor distance and detachment, a fearlessness in facing up to […]
Slow Gestations
Images of emergence: Hall’s Pond in January The gestation of a project or a body of work—how it starts, forms and then comes into existence—is mysterious and unpredictable. Some jump into their fullness quickly, in a flash. My poet friend Nicole Long describes this process as egg-like: A whole thing that emerges out of us […]
Enduring the Mystery
A close up view of Candara, from a painting series inspired by space and planetary bodies 1. Tina says what if dark matter is like the space between people When what holds them together isn’t exactly love, and I think That sounds right—how strong the pull can be, as if something That knows better won’t […]
Holding it All
Hold Everything Dear as the brick of the afternoon stores the rose heat of the journey as the rose buds a green room to breathe and blossoms like the wind as the thinning birches whisper their silver stories of the wind to the urgent in the trucks as the leaves of the hedge store the […]
Fresh Coat
Unfolding If there is no spirit unfolding itself in history, No gradual growth of consciousness Beneath the land grabs and forced migrations, The bought elections, the betrayal of trust By party faction in the name of progress— What about spirit in the personal realm Unfolding slowly inside us, so slowly That our best days seem […]