“… The Poetry of Earth”

Over the past two months I have intensified time in the studio, guided by the trust in attentive response. Responding to exactly what is in front of me in my painting will guide the next movement of brush stroke.  Narratives and expectations are left at the door like  shoes removed at the Zendo.  Interesting things about shoes; they cover feet,  Feet plant us on the earth, they ground us and carry the symbolic iconography of “what we stand for.”  Removing one’s shoes is a sign of respect.  It also removes the barrier, how ever functional or lovely, between me and what grounds me.  Leaving my narratives and expectations at the studio door is respect for my painting and a portal to clearer experience.

My ongoing search for ways to talk, write and think about my work and where I position myself as an artist has brought me to two new books released this summer;  The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar – essays on poets & poetry. by Helen Vendler  (2015  Harvard University Press)  and  The Pilgrim’s Bowl (Giorgio Morandi) by Philippe Jaccottet (2015  Seagull Press).

In the first chapter of her latest book, Helen Vendler writes about Wallace Steven’s 1943 poem: “Somnambulisma”.  The title of her book, and of the first chapter in the book, comes from  the imagery of this poem.

Vendler writes:

Without the bird and its generations, the ocean, says the poet, would be a “geography of the dead” — not in the sense of the dead having gone to some other world, but in the sense of their being persons who were emotionally and intellectually sleepwalking, dead, while alive, who lacked a “pervasive being.” To lack a pervasive being is to fail to live fully.  A pervasive being is one that extends through the brain, the body, the senses and the will, a being that spreads to every moment, so that one not only feels what Keats called “the poetry of earth” but responds to it with creative motions of one’s own.

“Somnambulisa” is the illustration of Steven’s adage “Poetry is the scholar’s art.”  What is necessary, asks “Somnambulisma,” for creative effort?  Emotion, desire, generative energy, and learned invention —these, replies the poem, are indispensable for the artist.

Study on Blue Paper, 2015