At Life and Legends

Issue two

Thank you to poet Jennifer Reeser for soliciting poems for Life and Legends. As I am a wee bit lazy about sending out, it is helpful to be asked. Here is a link to my poems in the issue, and a glimpse of the start of each:

Sangréal

Bird the color of rose,
  Sanguinary dove,

and

The Rain Doves at Birkenau

The little white house in a field,
The little red house in a field,

and

Something Like a Memory

You’re there, white tinged with blue like watered milk.
The ink seed planted in your brain in life

***

Not the Graham Ward piece I was dreaming
about, but it has much the same spirit,
suggestive of Eucharist and Sangréal. 

It's barely up, and a few things need to be tweaked by the tech mavens... The stanza lines in the first poem are not indented properly (should be staggered), and the last poem does have a title, so those things will be corrected. The photograph of me is by Paul Digby.

***

Notes, if you are so inclined:

The Rain Doves at Birkenau
Wikipedia, "Auschwitz concentration camp": The first gas chamber at Birkenau was the "red house" (called Bunker 1 by SS staff), a brick cottage converted into a gassing facility by tearing out the inside and bricking up the walls. It was operational by March 1942. A second brick cottage, the "white house" or Bunker 2, was converted some weeks later. These structures were in use for mass killings until early 1943.

Sangréal
The holy grail.
Here and here are some pieces about Graham Ward by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.

And you know, it's getting quite cold enough for this chilly poem, turned into a video by Paul Digby... Here's a belated addition to the post:

Blues and resolves

Under the tree for Canadian artist Marja-Leena Rathje!
Love being on Christmas (or any time) wish lists...

It's the 6th day of Christmas, and I am feeling a wee bit, just a tad depressed. Maybe I need to spend less or more narrowly focused time on the internet because I am heartily sick of bumping into language focused on creative entrepreneurship for artists, on how every artist has to be a business person now, on art as "product," on sales and marketing, on attention-wresting hooks, on the leveling of taste in contemporary democracy, and so on. It packs my head with lint!

In that context, in that world, perhaps I am simply insane. I felt a call. Twelve books so far are my passionate answer to that call. I am devoted, obsessed, committed (another insane word), enraptured, and bound. Playing with language is my great joy and a very large part of what makes my life meaningful to me. Having readers complete the work by reading is splendiferous. (That said, my least favorite part of my life is the weariness of travel to promote books, though I love doing events if people turn out for them in good numbers.) Clearly I do not fit particularly well in the bright-and-shiny-and-brave new world of self-promotion, entrepreneurship, and business. Maybe that is what "insane" means for me, then...

And here's a copy at the house of nihongan
painter Makoto Fujimura. I'm wondering
about the book underneath--Conversations?
About form, it seems.

But who cares? I'm not going to stop, am I? Not at this late date, surely... And so here are my word-related resolutions for 2015: I will

• Pick up extended work that has been sitting, almost finished, for years. Finish it! Particularly The Book of the Red King. Maybe cobble together another poetry manuscript out of the mountains of poems lying about in disorderly fashion. Maybe finish the book for young people, The Aerenghast Trilogy, which has been almost done for long eons of the sun and will be dedicated to my youngest child. He'll probably be of legal age before it's published!
• Begin that secret, utterly enticing novel that is in my head.
• Quit festering (as I don't normally do but did this year) and enjoy readers and friends in the arts more. (Thanks for the mail and tweets and messages, kind readers.) Go to lunch with painter and writer friends more often.
• Make more effort to keep up with the friends in the arts elsewhere who are inspiring to me (and I to them, equally important, as tossing thoughts back and forth is fruitful.)
• Get Catherwood into ebook form without using any of the kind publishers who have offered to do it for me.
• Figure out the right amount of help that a book needs. Don't go nuts trying to get the word out about Maze of Blood next fall--it's a university press book, after all, not a mass-market paperback bestseller.

All right, now I must do that not-very-writerish but quite humanish thing and get back to cleaning house for my in-laws. (True blues source? Maybe. Still trying to reconcile truth, beauty, and housework.) And I must do it with a will and then have a merry 6th day of Christmas...

For the second day of Christmas: the river of culture

Yolanda Sharpe
Watercolor by a local friend--
soprano, painter, SUNY-Oneonta professor in studio art.
Blue, Red, and Yellow, 26 by 40 inches, watercolor on paper, 2014

And words by another friend--nihongan painter Makoto Fujimura, founder of International Arts Movement and The Fujimura Institute:

The words at left and below are
from Makoto Fujimura's Culture Care,
the lovely result of his Kickstarter campaign.
Available here.

An industrial map in the mid-twentieth century colored New York's Hudson River black. The mapmakers considered a black river a good thing--full of industry! The more factory outputs, the more progress. When that map was made, "nature" was widely seen as a resource to be exploited. Few people considered the consequences of careless disposal of industrial waste. The culture has shifted dramatically over the last fifty years. When I share this story today, most people shudder and ask how anyone could think of a polluted river as good.

But today we are doing the same thing with the river of culture. Think of the arts and other cultural enterprises as rivers that water the soil of culture. We are painting this cultural tier black--full of industry, dominated by commercial interests, careless of toxic byproducts--and there are still cultural mapmakers who claim that this is a good thing. The pollution makes it difficult for us to breathe, difficult for artists to create, difficult for any of us to see beauty through the murk.

It is widely recognized that our culture today is not life-giving. There is little room at the margins to make artistic endeavors sustainable. The wider ecosystem of art and culture has been decimated, leaving only homogeneous pockets of survivors, those fit enough to survive in a poisoned environment. In culture as in nature, a lack of diversity is a first sign of a distressed ecosystem.

Many of the streams that feed the river of culture are polluted, and the soil this river should be watering is thus parched and fragmented....

Yolanda Sharpe, Neighborhood, encaustic on panels
(center panel: 23 by 22.5 by 3 inches), 48 by 43.75, 2013

Readings and thoughts for the first day of Christmas

"The Angel Door"
Here is a Christmas commission by a friend from college, artist
Mary Boxley Bullington. I suggest to those of you who love
and collect art that she is highly collectible and, indeed,
under-valued at this time. Her work is full of energy and beauty.
Click for a large version.

I heard this sung by Fr. Mark Michael last night, in a church that has for several centuries been a notable home to writers--novelist James Fenimore Cooper, nature writer Susan Cooper, poet W. W. Lord, essayist Fae Malania, children's author Paul Fenimore Cooper, and many more. It is one vision of things that have eternal life and power:

The Proclamation of Christmas

Today, the twenty-fifth day of December, unknown ages from the time when God created the heavens and the earth and then formed man and woman in his own image. Several thousand years after the flood, when God made the rainbow shine forth as a sign of the covenant. Twenty-one centuries from the time of Abraham and Sarah; thirteen centuries after Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt. Eleven hundred years from the time of Ruth and the Judges; one thousand years from the anointing of David as king; in the sixty-fifth week according to the prophecy of Daniel. In the one hundred and ninety-fourth Olympiad; the seven hundred and fifty-second year from the foundation of the city of Rome. The forty-second year of the reign of Octavian Augustus; the whole world being at peace, Jesus Christ, eternal God and Son of the eternal Father, desiring to sanctify the world by his most merciful coming, being conceived by the Holy Spirit, and nine months having passed since his conception, was born in Bethlehem of Judea of the Virgin Mary. Today is the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ according to the flesh.

And here is a clip from the discussion of another vision of immortality--cultural immortality--yoked to its debunking:

On the presumed immortality of fame as a cause of art and cultural significance.

Fame, according to Socrates, is therefore a form of reproduction. For those who can achieve it, it is far superior to the messy biological kind. Who, when he thinks of Homer and Hesiod and other great poets, would not rather have their children than ordinary human ones? Who would not emulate them in the creation of children such as theirs, which have preserved their memory and given them everlasting glory? Socrates is here expressing a fundamental belief of the Greeks: that acts of heroism or epic poems are not only nobler than mere sprogs, but also considerably more durable. Where living things fall like leaves in autumn, our cultural objects can endure. Kingdoms, titles and honour survive to be passed from one generation to the next; stories persist to be told by new generations of bards; bronze statues do not fall sick. Unlike human children, cultural offspring promise to be ‘everlasting’.  --Stephen Cave, Everlasting glory: There are few fantasies so absurd as the idea of living on through fame. So why does immortality still beckon?

Thoughts on literary immortality

Mary Boxley Bullington,
Winged Creatures,
Acrylic and mixed media collage on paper, 22" x 25"
December 2014

Some day the glacial lake some hundred yards from my door will vanish; some day a mountain may stand where it sank in earth. All things on Earth pass and change, as do we. 

Stephen Cave's vision of humanity's striving to be noble (or simply plain old famous for being famous, like a Kardashian) or make lasting art as an absurd quirk of biology and evolution is interesting, but in the end it means little to me. I do not write for glory or to have my name enrolled in stone. I write because it gives me joy, and because as I pursue something larger than myself, I also become larger than myself. What I am on the inside is then better and bigger than it was before. So I write to redeem the time and give a gift to a world in which I have sometimes been harmful or mere useless lumber--as we all are at times, more or less. 

In thinking so, I am far closer to the sentiments of a figure like the ignored, scorned, solitary artist of Hawthorne's "The Artist of the Beautiful," who creates the beautiful mechanical butterfly that flies with grace and natural motion but who also catches a "far other" butterfly--who becomes greater than he was before because he has participated in creation. The soul has long been compared, in art and words and on tombstones, to a butterfly. Like Hawthorne, the artist gives the creation of his heart and soul away, knowing it may be accounted a trifle, knowing it may be mocked. But he gives it freely in love.

Christmas wish

Experience sublime and beautiful things and be alchemically transformed to metaphysical gold, be in surpassing peace, love one another, be merry...

Butterflies on Mary Boxley Bullington's
cherry tree in Roanoke, Virginia.