Fifteen years ago, I was at a reading being given by Tony Hoagland. It was my first exposure to his work. For the first half of the reading, I was delighted by the penetrating humor and bite of his poems. But then he read his poem “Lucky”, a raw and complex summation of his lifelong struggle with an overbearing mother. He read this poem with what I can only describe as an impossible degree of tenderness; a tone which seemed in pitched conflict with the sometimes very sharp teeth of the poem’s content. When it was done, I began sobbing uncontrollably, as if an explosive had been detonated inside my chest. A young mother sitting next to me spontaneously pulled me into her arms, offering consolation as I wept for ten minutes. I couldn’t have seen it coming, and didn’t quite understand what had happened for a long time. All I knew at that moment was that this experience forever expanded my understanding of what poetry can do.
My god, what a story. Thank you Geoffrey. Tony Hoagland seems to have dwelt at the edge: of himself, and others. There's a book of the poems he wrote before he died coming out soon. I never met him, but he was a close (and sometimes spiky, complicated) friend of friends. I'll pass this story onto them. I know they'll be moved. What moves me in your story is how you remember the tension with which he held the poem: tenderness about a poem of pain. And that neighbour of yours who offered consolation. My god.
Thank you for this, Pádraig. Yes, it was exactly that tension between the words themselves and how he spoke them in that specific moment, which made it most powerful. Of course, the state of my inner life was also primed by experience and circumstance to receive what that reading invoked, confronting me with a grief I was only dimly aware that I carried. As a postscript, I'll also say that the morning after his reading I encountered him by chance alone at the conference we were both attending, giving me the opportunity to thank him and describe how his reading of that poem affected me, just as I had above. After a moment of reflection, he responded by saying that he thought my experience, and what it had given me, might be one of the greatest complements of his work he could ever hope to receive. He asked me which poem it was. When I told him, he just nodded poignantly, saying nothing further. We thanked each other and shared a hug. It was the only time he and I ever spoke. I remain immensely grateful for what passed between us in those two brief encounters. When he died several years ago, the grief I felt was unexpectedly potent.
This is wonderful, what a gift. Something, some emotion in your unconscious was ignited and let loose. It grew in size and so will you seeing this new aspect of yourself that you didn’t formerly consciously recognize. I think it would be so interesting to delve deeper and see where the connections take you in your past? But obviously only if you feel the need and want to. I’ve done allot of imagery work in the past and it’s very rich and interesting
When I was 14, our English teacher assigned us an artist to research for a paper. Everyone was given a different artist: Manet, Monet, DaVinci, etc. I was assigned Georgia O'Keefe. In researching her at CSULB library, I discovered a series of photographs of O'Keefe taken by Alfred Stieglitz. My suburban, dualistic, things are either right or wrong, upbringing was completely unprepared for them. They were sensual, but not sexy, attractive but not beautiful, unsettling but irresistible. Those images have stayed with me for the last 40 years, and now, in my memory, they were my first exposure to art that both compels and repels and a doorway into the complexity and paradox of human relationship. I hated those pictures at the time, but now, I see them as the first step toward seeing the world as a whole, without moral judgement. The world that art can show us.
I know these photos Laura. I contributed lyrics for a musical collaboration with the Irish musician Duke Special for an exhibition of these very photos at the New York Met. So your story brings me back to that project.
Sensual but not sexy, attractive but not beautiful, unsettling but irresistible. YES. That, too, is how I remember them. I almost felt I could smell her skin when looking at those photos. Uncomfortable and unforgettable.
I know these photos you speak about, viewed some of them just recently. I stayed at Ghost Ranch this last spring, spent hours staring up at the blue hills so familiar in O'Keefe's paintings, rode through the landscape she claimed as her own. I fell completely in love with her work, which before hand had always seemed so simplistic, and she, rather remote. As we age, perhaps, our viewing of art shifts, widens to new vistas. We are perhaps more porous, able to let things in. Hope so.
When my husband Bruce was sixty I gifted him with a painter's workshop - his first. He had always wanted to paint, but had spent his life devoted to music. Viewing the first of Bruce’s paintings, I found myself speechless – a rare occurrence. When you have lived with another person for a long time, you assume you know them well. But nothing I knew about Bruce prepared me for what he had laid out on the blank canvas. It was a humbling lesson on the complexity and richness within the hidden recesses of our being. When I turned to Bruce in astonishment and asked, "Where did all this come from?" he looked equally perplexed and responded, "I have no idea."
The creator, the Creator, the viewer/listener, the medium - all these improbable conversations always morphing and reimagining themselves. Art in all forms is a sacrament. A devotion to it, the highest of calllings.
For most all of my life, I have danced across various forms-tap dance, baton twirling, out in a few clubs, at the state fair, ballet classes, a few modern dance classes, waltzing and polka-ing with my dear husband. Most all that dancing has been with music or to music, using the music’s tempo, beat, rhythm to guide movement. About 4 years ago, I took part in a community dance and performance opportunity. The director/choreographer did not use music to guide our movement, but as “mood” and theme and feeling; some of the background was not music, but recorded sounds. It was challenging to me. But I learned to embrace it. What I remember most about the experience was connecting with fellow dancers’ eyes for cues on movement and direction and what comes next and how long to complete a section of movement. I remember moving around and with other dancers, aware of the spaces we created with and around one another. I cannot remember the music.
That's extraordinary: what that director/choreographer did makes me think of the phrase "negative capability" you find sometimes in poetry: about the way that the blank space of a poem works as a vibrant, almost populated container for a powerful "nothing". Thank you.
I have recently gone through some years of one loss after another, and long illnesses of loved ones, and subsequent health challenges of my own. In the midst of all that I came upon The Sycamore, by Wendell Berry. "In the place that is my own place, whose earth I am shaped in and must bear, there is an old tree growing, a great sycamore that is a wondrous healer of itself......" I feel so well met by this poem, astonished by how it resonates, consoles, disturbs, and ultimately shores me up for living the exact life I have been given, as is. His poem says to me, suffering and fortitude are the natural way on this planet. You will both flourish and be harmed, and nothing is wrong with that. Still to this day when I read this poem it's as if I'm reading it for the first time, for the depth of true vision it grows in me.
Thanks Jen - that's beautiful. "a wondrous healer of itself" - yes. It's a favourite of mine too. I love how you say that flourishing and harm can both be borne.
I am participating in an online art program offered by the National Gallery in London and this week we focused on the meaning of size and scale of paintings. In our discussion, we talked about how many of us who go into a gallery with a limited amount of time to explore, will tend to visit the larger, bolder painted and theatrical pieces and bypass the smaller, quieter works, particularly still life paintings. During the session we sat with a small painting for an hour and I discovered that there were so many gifts, surprises, wonder, questions in these paintings and became aware of how much I really have missed by focusing on the big, loud pieces.
During the same week, I attended a play reading at the Shaw Festival in Ontario Canada. The play was short, quiet, and one that would not be shown at the Shaw, where mainly big well known productions are staged. Again, I was struck by what this small play had to offer and the questions that it posed. I have been poking away at it all week and thinking about its messages.
Both art experiences were AHA moments for me as I realized that in many parts of my life, I focus on the big moments and that there are so many small, quiet moments which have just as much richness, joy, teachings, and I have not paid them the attention they deserve. A very, very, large lesson from a very small encounter! At 70, I still have much to learn but I guess the time was right for this lesson to be learned! I chuckle as it appears that I really did not get the lesson looking at the painting, so I got a second opportunity to learn at the theatre later that week. I am a slow learners I guess!
I love what you're saying here Karen - giving time to the smaller thing in the corner allows it to unfold itself. It reminds me of what Elizabeth Bowen (20th century Irish modernist writer) said "To turn from everything to one face is to find oneself face to face with everything"
In 2008, we went to see “To Be Straight With You” by DV8 dance company at the National Theatre in London. The performance’s dance and visual art happened alongside dialogue taken verbatim from interviews with dozens of people who spoke about their personal experiences of sexuality, religion, love and rejection. The production told stories that were familiar to me as a gay Christian yet the way of telling the stories, the use of movement, music, and projected images/video, alongside the very genuine interview excerpts impressed me as wonderfully creative and fundamentally hopeful. I left the theatre optimistic - my sexuality and the way I lived it in the world had the potential to be a creative act in itself. My thinking about how I engaged with the world fundamentally changed - I found a sort of community alongside these travelers who had told their stories that night and I began thinking in solidarity with them.
How lovely - and what a connection that made. I'd heard about that performance, but never saw it. And that phrase "my sexuality and the way I lived it in the world had the potential to be a creative act in itself" - yes. That is the strange power of art. To make art in places where it had been exiled.
Oct 9, 2022·edited Oct 10, 2022Liked by Pádraig Ó Tuama
Also Yeats.
From A Prayer for My Daughter:
May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end.
These words have held and still hold an acutely powerful "place", a strange and uneasy home for me in the context of where I come from. I grew up in a family and an environment with many mixed messages about physical beauty and striving in ways in which my gifts often felt diminished. Mine were quieter and invisible, even invisible to me. I was growing into my gifts. They were not easy to pinpoint in the conventional measures of my surroundings. I have gone back to these words which affirm a world of beauty beyond the physical and the more shallow things considered beautiful in culture. But there is so much beauty in the physical world. So art for me is sometimes the splendid tension between the physical world and what lays beyond.
It's a complicated poem isn't it? That it comes from a man makes it even more limited, and yet there may be something else that's happening in that it's from a parent to a child, a parent who knows the world he's inhabited (and helped shape). Perhaps there's a confession in this about what men have done to beauty.
I love how you say that art is the "tension between the physical world and what lays beyond" - so true. Thank you Amy.
Oct 10, 2022·edited Oct 10, 2022Liked by Pádraig Ó Tuama
so complicated yes, and I cringe when I read the whole poem in recent years even as it still comforts me in certain ways. It is filled with love and limitations, and there is also forgiveness found there for me because of the warmth and attentiveness of the prayer. . It tugs at my own complicated relationship with my father which enabled me as a young woman to reflect on beauty, its many facets, and how paternalistic views of beauty have impacted my sense of self. Thank YOU for this exercise.....
Every week I meet with a group of eclectic beach friends and we write poetry at the edge of the pacific ocean’s shore. Each week we have a word we infuse to tie our art together.
I swoon and gasp and hold my heart at the stunning beauty of the words juxtaposed with imperfection and impermanence. Beach goers pause, seagulls leave their footprints, and the waves wash the messages into the sea.
Art is wholehearted for me. Makes me feel more myself.
And also, it is Thanksgiving Weekend in Canada, and Padraig's WONDERFUL - sorry to shout - new book on audible is the accompanying sound track to baking pumpkin pies and stuffing the turkey. The beautiful recording - such rich writing - is somehow bathed in grace, often reducing me to tears - the special sauce of all good cooking. As our family says, BIG LOVE! to everyone on our celebratory weekend, complex and bloodied as is its history, still, grateful for the beauty of the day and this sweet new offering of a book into the world. Blessings, CJ
In John Masefield’s poem “Sea-Fever,” I feel the powerful mystery of nature. Water is both attractive and fearsome. A whole other world lies beneath its surface. The sailors who have dared to cross oceans are true adventures. Walking on a beach or gazing at the water is to sense what perhaps called to them. Masefield’s poem is a siren song for boat and water lovers everywhere. For those unfamiliar, find it at poetryfoundation.org and enjoy.
I work as a Chaplaun in mental health trust . I held a poerty group where an elderly man wanted to read Kiplings 'If'. He struggled through as the group held silence willing him through . The end brought relief ,applause and a recognition that he had achieved the poem ..lived it ,held it to his heart all his life and as it came to close shared it
It's like I can hear his struggling, and the kindness of the group holding silence. Thanks for sharing this Mike. I'm moved. And that relief and applause and recognition and achievement. Yes.
Oct 9, 2022·edited Oct 9, 2022Liked by Pádraig Ó Tuama
I work in the First Peoples Portfolio at a Brisbane University. In that space I am surrounded and feel embraced by artwork that continues to remind me of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture that still, to this day is impacted by colonialism, racism and injustice. I pray that the artwork and its people will find a "voice" in our Constitution through the Australian Parliament and that this "voice" will be welcomed with open hearts
Yes! Thank you Narelle. I, too, have been looking from afar in the hope that a re-stated constitution could be written.
Do you know the preamble to the Uniting Church in Australia's constitution? They re-wrote it about 10 years ago. It's extraordinary - both the process of consultation, dialogue and writing, as well as the outcome.
Thank you so much Padraig. I can't believe I have never seen this before. I belong to St Mary'c in Exile in South Brisbane. We were forced into exile some thirteen years ago by two Priests who refused to wear vestments and follow the Eucharistic Prayer word for word. For the past thirteen years we have met in the Trades and Labour Council "Upper Room" and relish the continued action for social justice, inclusive liturgies and genuine community. The last newsletter "Thirteen Years in Exile" is a great read:https://stmaryssouthbrisbane.com/st-marys-matters
I am an artist now. But in the fall of 1988 I was a 21-year old architecture student studying in Italy for a year with other students of RISD from other disciplines within the school. We were on a tour of northern hill towns and in Sansepolcro after walking into one of the large rooms of a palazzo, I turned to look at the wall behind me and there was Piero Della Francesco's masterpiece mural, "The Resurrection of Christ". My knees buckled and I literally staggered. I am not now a religious person, nor was I then. But the fresco somehow moved me to the edge of my emotional being. That day has stuck with me. My test as to whether my paintings are any good is typically, that once I've finished one (or think it may be finished) I set it on the fire place mantle and wander off. I then come back to the room many times over the course of days and try to gauge how impactful it is each new time I see it. I haven't had a "Resurrection of Christ" moment yet!... but it seems as thought it will always be the test.
Oh thank you for this John - I just called the image up on google to look at it again after reading your comment. I love your practice of setting a painting of yours on the mantel and coming back for conversations, seeing-it-for-the-first-time-again glances, meetings - to see what it has learnt to see and show back to you.
I just looked some of your art up - I love 'Hula Hoop' -- what chaos and movement, and focus. Like a tornado, and a person, and a wheel spinning on a wheel.
Hah hah! Thank you, Padraig. I love that little sketch. It's of my daughter. "chaos and movement and focus like a tornado" is a good way to have described her then!
There is also the opposite of the "impact" of the first impression of a piece of art. The slow uncovering over time of what it means to you in all it's depth, even when it seemed unremarkable at first, is another kind of gift that art provides. Teaching patience and asking you to come back again and again.
Thanks Cathy! It's an interesting cause and effect about where I paint and gather subject matter. I often paint on the Brewster Flats on Cape Cod where at low tide you can walk in ankle deep water a 1/4 mile out or more. The boats are moored and rarely pulled up onto the beach, unless they are tiny skiffs or sunfish. Drawing and painting this for years has caused me to observe this "tenuous holding" that you describe. This alternating relationship to the sand and water, as the moon lifts and sets the boats down again, provides endless subject matter for visual and metaphorical consideration!
Ah, but these words of T.S. Eliot, from the Four Quartets, have stayed - stuck - with me since college. But why? Why do they resonate so? Perhaps because they infer, to me, not only the mutability of words, but of life itself. And as I go in life, l realize more and more the inevitability of change and the solace in accepting it - of aging, growing, gaining, losing, yearning and learning.
Those are true and complicated words, Diane: aging, growing, gaining, losing, yearning and learning. So true. That grief we all grow into at some stage or another. It reminds me of Patrick Kavanagh's lines from the lesser-known "In Memory of My Mother" (he had two poems of the same title; one very well known, this less so)
We will be choked with the grief of things growing,
Thank you for your thoughts, Cathy. You bring up the conflict many of us have regarding art versus creator. Can we appreciate a work of art yet revile the artist? Can I still enjoy MichaelJackson's songs knowing full well his violation of children? The masterpiece of Prufrock vs the anti-semitic poet? I suppose we make exceptions based on our own perceptions, and glean from art what we need to fulfill and sustain us. Hence, the "strangeness" of art.
Fifteen years ago, I was at a reading being given by Tony Hoagland. It was my first exposure to his work. For the first half of the reading, I was delighted by the penetrating humor and bite of his poems. But then he read his poem “Lucky”, a raw and complex summation of his lifelong struggle with an overbearing mother. He read this poem with what I can only describe as an impossible degree of tenderness; a tone which seemed in pitched conflict with the sometimes very sharp teeth of the poem’s content. When it was done, I began sobbing uncontrollably, as if an explosive had been detonated inside my chest. A young mother sitting next to me spontaneously pulled me into her arms, offering consolation as I wept for ten minutes. I couldn’t have seen it coming, and didn’t quite understand what had happened for a long time. All I knew at that moment was that this experience forever expanded my understanding of what poetry can do.
My god, what a story. Thank you Geoffrey. Tony Hoagland seems to have dwelt at the edge: of himself, and others. There's a book of the poems he wrote before he died coming out soon. I never met him, but he was a close (and sometimes spiky, complicated) friend of friends. I'll pass this story onto them. I know they'll be moved. What moves me in your story is how you remember the tension with which he held the poem: tenderness about a poem of pain. And that neighbour of yours who offered consolation. My god.
Thank you for this, Pádraig. Yes, it was exactly that tension between the words themselves and how he spoke them in that specific moment, which made it most powerful. Of course, the state of my inner life was also primed by experience and circumstance to receive what that reading invoked, confronting me with a grief I was only dimly aware that I carried. As a postscript, I'll also say that the morning after his reading I encountered him by chance alone at the conference we were both attending, giving me the opportunity to thank him and describe how his reading of that poem affected me, just as I had above. After a moment of reflection, he responded by saying that he thought my experience, and what it had given me, might be one of the greatest complements of his work he could ever hope to receive. He asked me which poem it was. When I told him, he just nodded poignantly, saying nothing further. We thanked each other and shared a hug. It was the only time he and I ever spoke. I remain immensely grateful for what passed between us in those two brief encounters. When he died several years ago, the grief I felt was unexpectedly potent.
I felt similarly when I read his poem "Voyage".
Beautiful!
This is wonderful, what a gift. Something, some emotion in your unconscious was ignited and let loose. It grew in size and so will you seeing this new aspect of yourself that you didn’t formerly consciously recognize. I think it would be so interesting to delve deeper and see where the connections take you in your past? But obviously only if you feel the need and want to. I’ve done allot of imagery work in the past and it’s very rich and interesting
When I was 14, our English teacher assigned us an artist to research for a paper. Everyone was given a different artist: Manet, Monet, DaVinci, etc. I was assigned Georgia O'Keefe. In researching her at CSULB library, I discovered a series of photographs of O'Keefe taken by Alfred Stieglitz. My suburban, dualistic, things are either right or wrong, upbringing was completely unprepared for them. They were sensual, but not sexy, attractive but not beautiful, unsettling but irresistible. Those images have stayed with me for the last 40 years, and now, in my memory, they were my first exposure to art that both compels and repels and a doorway into the complexity and paradox of human relationship. I hated those pictures at the time, but now, I see them as the first step toward seeing the world as a whole, without moral judgement. The world that art can show us.
I know these photos Laura. I contributed lyrics for a musical collaboration with the Irish musician Duke Special for an exhibition of these very photos at the New York Met. So your story brings me back to that project.
Sensual but not sexy, attractive but not beautiful, unsettling but irresistible. YES. That, too, is how I remember them. I almost felt I could smell her skin when looking at those photos. Uncomfortable and unforgettable.
I know these photos you speak about, viewed some of them just recently. I stayed at Ghost Ranch this last spring, spent hours staring up at the blue hills so familiar in O'Keefe's paintings, rode through the landscape she claimed as her own. I fell completely in love with her work, which before hand had always seemed so simplistic, and she, rather remote. As we age, perhaps, our viewing of art shifts, widens to new vistas. We are perhaps more porous, able to let things in. Hope so.
I too did the O’Keefe New Mexico experience to taste and see some of she…delightful indeed.
Art initiates improbable conversations.
When my husband Bruce was sixty I gifted him with a painter's workshop - his first. He had always wanted to paint, but had spent his life devoted to music. Viewing the first of Bruce’s paintings, I found myself speechless – a rare occurrence. When you have lived with another person for a long time, you assume you know them well. But nothing I knew about Bruce prepared me for what he had laid out on the blank canvas. It was a humbling lesson on the complexity and richness within the hidden recesses of our being. When I turned to Bruce in astonishment and asked, "Where did all this come from?" he looked equally perplexed and responded, "I have no idea."
The creator, the Creator, the viewer/listener, the medium - all these improbable conversations always morphing and reimagining themselves. Art in all forms is a sacrament. A devotion to it, the highest of calllings.
How wonderful. To behold the strange in self, and in another. For him to have no idea about where the art came from. Yes. Gorgeous. Thank you Candice.
For most all of my life, I have danced across various forms-tap dance, baton twirling, out in a few clubs, at the state fair, ballet classes, a few modern dance classes, waltzing and polka-ing with my dear husband. Most all that dancing has been with music or to music, using the music’s tempo, beat, rhythm to guide movement. About 4 years ago, I took part in a community dance and performance opportunity. The director/choreographer did not use music to guide our movement, but as “mood” and theme and feeling; some of the background was not music, but recorded sounds. It was challenging to me. But I learned to embrace it. What I remember most about the experience was connecting with fellow dancers’ eyes for cues on movement and direction and what comes next and how long to complete a section of movement. I remember moving around and with other dancers, aware of the spaces we created with and around one another. I cannot remember the music.
That's extraordinary: what that director/choreographer did makes me think of the phrase "negative capability" you find sometimes in poetry: about the way that the blank space of a poem works as a vibrant, almost populated container for a powerful "nothing". Thank you.
I have recently gone through some years of one loss after another, and long illnesses of loved ones, and subsequent health challenges of my own. In the midst of all that I came upon The Sycamore, by Wendell Berry. "In the place that is my own place, whose earth I am shaped in and must bear, there is an old tree growing, a great sycamore that is a wondrous healer of itself......" I feel so well met by this poem, astonished by how it resonates, consoles, disturbs, and ultimately shores me up for living the exact life I have been given, as is. His poem says to me, suffering and fortitude are the natural way on this planet. You will both flourish and be harmed, and nothing is wrong with that. Still to this day when I read this poem it's as if I'm reading it for the first time, for the depth of true vision it grows in me.
Thanks Jen - that's beautiful. "a wondrous healer of itself" - yes. It's a favourite of mine too. I love how you say that flourishing and harm can both be borne.
I am participating in an online art program offered by the National Gallery in London and this week we focused on the meaning of size and scale of paintings. In our discussion, we talked about how many of us who go into a gallery with a limited amount of time to explore, will tend to visit the larger, bolder painted and theatrical pieces and bypass the smaller, quieter works, particularly still life paintings. During the session we sat with a small painting for an hour and I discovered that there were so many gifts, surprises, wonder, questions in these paintings and became aware of how much I really have missed by focusing on the big, loud pieces.
During the same week, I attended a play reading at the Shaw Festival in Ontario Canada. The play was short, quiet, and one that would not be shown at the Shaw, where mainly big well known productions are staged. Again, I was struck by what this small play had to offer and the questions that it posed. I have been poking away at it all week and thinking about its messages.
Both art experiences were AHA moments for me as I realized that in many parts of my life, I focus on the big moments and that there are so many small, quiet moments which have just as much richness, joy, teachings, and I have not paid them the attention they deserve. A very, very, large lesson from a very small encounter! At 70, I still have much to learn but I guess the time was right for this lesson to be learned! I chuckle as it appears that I really did not get the lesson looking at the painting, so I got a second opportunity to learn at the theatre later that week. I am a slow learners I guess!
I love what you're saying here Karen - giving time to the smaller thing in the corner allows it to unfold itself. It reminds me of what Elizabeth Bowen (20th century Irish modernist writer) said "To turn from everything to one face is to find oneself face to face with everything"
In 2008, we went to see “To Be Straight With You” by DV8 dance company at the National Theatre in London. The performance’s dance and visual art happened alongside dialogue taken verbatim from interviews with dozens of people who spoke about their personal experiences of sexuality, religion, love and rejection. The production told stories that were familiar to me as a gay Christian yet the way of telling the stories, the use of movement, music, and projected images/video, alongside the very genuine interview excerpts impressed me as wonderfully creative and fundamentally hopeful. I left the theatre optimistic - my sexuality and the way I lived it in the world had the potential to be a creative act in itself. My thinking about how I engaged with the world fundamentally changed - I found a sort of community alongside these travelers who had told their stories that night and I began thinking in solidarity with them.
How lovely - and what a connection that made. I'd heard about that performance, but never saw it. And that phrase "my sexuality and the way I lived it in the world had the potential to be a creative act in itself" - yes. That is the strange power of art. To make art in places where it had been exiled.
how you live in the world being a creative act - yes, yes, love this - and love your own sense of discovery in the gathering.
Through your poetry and writing, I feel I know you as a friend. Thank you.
Exposing me to so many different poems and your explanations has helped me to seek wisdom and learn more about myself. Thank you.
Ah, thanks Dennie. How kind.
Also Yeats.
From A Prayer for My Daughter:
May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end.
These words have held and still hold an acutely powerful "place", a strange and uneasy home for me in the context of where I come from. I grew up in a family and an environment with many mixed messages about physical beauty and striving in ways in which my gifts often felt diminished. Mine were quieter and invisible, even invisible to me. I was growing into my gifts. They were not easy to pinpoint in the conventional measures of my surroundings. I have gone back to these words which affirm a world of beauty beyond the physical and the more shallow things considered beautiful in culture. But there is so much beauty in the physical world. So art for me is sometimes the splendid tension between the physical world and what lays beyond.
It's a complicated poem isn't it? That it comes from a man makes it even more limited, and yet there may be something else that's happening in that it's from a parent to a child, a parent who knows the world he's inhabited (and helped shape). Perhaps there's a confession in this about what men have done to beauty.
I love how you say that art is the "tension between the physical world and what lays beyond" - so true. Thank you Amy.
so complicated yes, and I cringe when I read the whole poem in recent years even as it still comforts me in certain ways. It is filled with love and limitations, and there is also forgiveness found there for me because of the warmth and attentiveness of the prayer. . It tugs at my own complicated relationship with my father which enabled me as a young woman to reflect on beauty, its many facets, and how paternalistic views of beauty have impacted my sense of self. Thank YOU for this exercise.....
Every week I meet with a group of eclectic beach friends and we write poetry at the edge of the pacific ocean’s shore. Each week we have a word we infuse to tie our art together.
I swoon and gasp and hold my heart at the stunning beauty of the words juxtaposed with imperfection and impermanence. Beach goers pause, seagulls leave their footprints, and the waves wash the messages into the sea.
Art is wholehearted for me. Makes me feel more myself.
How wonderful to write with that company of sound!
And also, it is Thanksgiving Weekend in Canada, and Padraig's WONDERFUL - sorry to shout - new book on audible is the accompanying sound track to baking pumpkin pies and stuffing the turkey. The beautiful recording - such rich writing - is somehow bathed in grace, often reducing me to tears - the special sauce of all good cooking. As our family says, BIG LOVE! to everyone on our celebratory weekend, complex and bloodied as is its history, still, grateful for the beauty of the day and this sweet new offering of a book into the world. Blessings, CJ
ha! Thanks Candice! Happy Canadian thanksgiving for yesterday.
In John Masefield’s poem “Sea-Fever,” I feel the powerful mystery of nature. Water is both attractive and fearsome. A whole other world lies beneath its surface. The sailors who have dared to cross oceans are true adventures. Walking on a beach or gazing at the water is to sense what perhaps called to them. Masefield’s poem is a siren song for boat and water lovers everywhere. For those unfamiliar, find it at poetryfoundation.org and enjoy.
Thanks Shelly - I don't know this one but will go looking for it.
I work as a Chaplaun in mental health trust . I held a poerty group where an elderly man wanted to read Kiplings 'If'. He struggled through as the group held silence willing him through . The end brought relief ,applause and a recognition that he had achieved the poem ..lived it ,held it to his heart all his life and as it came to close shared it
It's like I can hear his struggling, and the kindness of the group holding silence. Thanks for sharing this Mike. I'm moved. And that relief and applause and recognition and achievement. Yes.
I work in the First Peoples Portfolio at a Brisbane University. In that space I am surrounded and feel embraced by artwork that continues to remind me of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture that still, to this day is impacted by colonialism, racism and injustice. I pray that the artwork and its people will find a "voice" in our Constitution through the Australian Parliament and that this "voice" will be welcomed with open hearts
Yes! Thank you Narelle. I, too, have been looking from afar in the hope that a re-stated constitution could be written.
Do you know the preamble to the Uniting Church in Australia's constitution? They re-wrote it about 10 years ago. It's extraordinary - both the process of consultation, dialogue and writing, as well as the outcome.
https://assembly.uca.org.au/images/stories/covenanting/PreamblePoster-web.pdf
Thank you so much Padraig. I can't believe I have never seen this before. I belong to St Mary'c in Exile in South Brisbane. We were forced into exile some thirteen years ago by two Priests who refused to wear vestments and follow the Eucharistic Prayer word for word. For the past thirteen years we have met in the Trades and Labour Council "Upper Room" and relish the continued action for social justice, inclusive liturgies and genuine community. The last newsletter "Thirteen Years in Exile" is a great read:https://stmaryssouthbrisbane.com/st-marys-matters
I’ll read it. And if I’m in Brisbane next year I might come along. (I’m in Australia in late April early May)
I am an artist now. But in the fall of 1988 I was a 21-year old architecture student studying in Italy for a year with other students of RISD from other disciplines within the school. We were on a tour of northern hill towns and in Sansepolcro after walking into one of the large rooms of a palazzo, I turned to look at the wall behind me and there was Piero Della Francesco's masterpiece mural, "The Resurrection of Christ". My knees buckled and I literally staggered. I am not now a religious person, nor was I then. But the fresco somehow moved me to the edge of my emotional being. That day has stuck with me. My test as to whether my paintings are any good is typically, that once I've finished one (or think it may be finished) I set it on the fire place mantle and wander off. I then come back to the room many times over the course of days and try to gauge how impactful it is each new time I see it. I haven't had a "Resurrection of Christ" moment yet!... but it seems as thought it will always be the test.
Oh thank you for this John - I just called the image up on google to look at it again after reading your comment. I love your practice of setting a painting of yours on the mantel and coming back for conversations, seeing-it-for-the-first-time-again glances, meetings - to see what it has learnt to see and show back to you.
I just looked some of your art up - I love 'Hula Hoop' -- what chaos and movement, and focus. Like a tornado, and a person, and a wheel spinning on a wheel.
Hah hah! Thank you, Padraig. I love that little sketch. It's of my daughter. "chaos and movement and focus like a tornado" is a good way to have described her then!
There is also the opposite of the "impact" of the first impression of a piece of art. The slow uncovering over time of what it means to you in all it's depth, even when it seemed unremarkable at first, is another kind of gift that art provides. Teaching patience and asking you to come back again and again.
Yes, how things change as we change. Hallo to your (now older) tornado daughter!
Thanks Cathy! It's an interesting cause and effect about where I paint and gather subject matter. I often paint on the Brewster Flats on Cape Cod where at low tide you can walk in ankle deep water a 1/4 mile out or more. The boats are moored and rarely pulled up onto the beach, unless they are tiny skiffs or sunfish. Drawing and painting this for years has caused me to observe this "tenuous holding" that you describe. This alternating relationship to the sand and water, as the moon lifts and sets the boats down again, provides endless subject matter for visual and metaphorical consideration!
“Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.”
Ah, but these words of T.S. Eliot, from the Four Quartets, have stayed - stuck - with me since college. But why? Why do they resonate so? Perhaps because they infer, to me, not only the mutability of words, but of life itself. And as I go in life, l realize more and more the inevitability of change and the solace in accepting it - of aging, growing, gaining, losing, yearning and learning.
Those are true and complicated words, Diane: aging, growing, gaining, losing, yearning and learning. So true. That grief we all grow into at some stage or another. It reminds me of Patrick Kavanagh's lines from the lesser-known "In Memory of My Mother" (he had two poems of the same title; one very well known, this less so)
We will be choked with the grief of things growing,
The silence of dark-green air
Life too rich - the nettles, docks and thistles
All answering the prodigal's prayer.
https://www.tcd.ie/English/patrickkavanagh/inmemoryofmymotherucdb4.html
Thank you for your thoughts, Cathy. You bring up the conflict many of us have regarding art versus creator. Can we appreciate a work of art yet revile the artist? Can I still enjoy MichaelJackson's songs knowing full well his violation of children? The masterpiece of Prufrock vs the anti-semitic poet? I suppose we make exceptions based on our own perceptions, and glean from art what we need to fulfill and sustain us. Hence, the "strangeness" of art.