RIDGES

 

Cover of Ridges

On our arrival in Sewanee, TN, we found three boxes of Ridges, a volume of my poetry and Don Thornton’s paintings produced by Pinyon Publishing in Montrose, Colorado. Fortunately, Sister Madeleine Mary, CSM of the Sisters of St. Mary here in Sewanee, TN, had rescued and taken our books into our home on Fairbanks Circle during heavy rain, and all was saved. Since then, I’ve been sending out copies to a few regular readers that I hope will respond to my most-favored book. I sincerely appreciate Dr. Mary Ann Wilson’s salute to the “…blending of natural and human, art and place in a loving tribute to a fellow artist and friend, seeing in those ridges ‘the mudflats of old sufferings…”

The reference is to a volume of poetry and paintings designed by Susan Entsminger, publisher and editor of Pinyon Publishing, whose own artistic talent showcases the work of Don Thornton’s paintings and that which I consider my ultimate book of poetry. I had transported Don’s paintings from New Iberia, Louisiana to Sewanee a year ago where they sat in a box for months until I was able to overcome ennui caused by the threat of Covid disease hovering around everyone in the world. Perhaps the disease itself made me wonder if I’d ever feel like writing again. Only Don’s beautiful paintings could have challenged me to bring his art into book form. And after I sat with his work daily for several months, the Chenier Plain became my place of inspiration.

 

As botanist Dr. Victoria I. Sullivan explained in Ridges, the term chenier (or cheniere) derives from the Cajun word chene for oak. The Mississippi Chenier Plain is an ecological feature composed of coastal ridges 12-18 miles wide and 6-20 feet in elevation. The oak ridges stretch 124 miles from Sabine Pass, Texas, to Southwest Point, Louisiana. This plain is a rich mixture of wetlands, uplands, and open water that developed 7000 to 3000 years BP when water levels stood 16-20 feet lower than at present. Sea level rise between 3000 and 2500 BP submerged the cheniers to the extent we see them today.

The special foreword by Darrell Bourque, Louisiana Poet Laureate, 2007-2011, explains that in Ridges, “each poem takes an artist-poet-teacher to the crossroads of being, that sacred ridged place where Thornton lived most profoundly, most honestly, most deeply…” This morning I rejoice as I re-read Bourque’s foreword and take another long look at the “blue, blue skies, the rosy sand in the mud flats, the yellow he assigned to love, the brooding skies too, the impending storms, the golden, fuchsia, lavender and purple sunsets, each detail springboard for Moore to attach to a life, a marriage, a vocation, the sacred, the obstinate, the tortured, the mendicant, the explorer…”

I am proud of this book, of Don, of Suzi, his wife; of Vickie, who photographed the paintings, of Darrell and his grace-filled poetic introduction to the book; and of Susan, who realized the importance of making Ridges available to poets, biographers, and nature lovers. I hope that Ridges finds a prominent place in Louisiana history and culture as it found its precious place in my love of the Louisiana landscape through the eyes of master artist Don Thornton.

Here is “Blue Skies,” a poem and accompanying painting from Ridges:

 

 Blue Skies

That blue sky so close to the water,

a mirage of ridges behind,

was clear enough to banish bad spirits;

he could hear Ella Fitzgerald …

no, it was Willie Nelson …

singing “Blue Skies” that day.


The scattered frequency

moved his eyes into calmer light,

thoughts cleared of apparitions,

the mud flats of old sufferings,

and the wind, a mouth for Spirit,

created verse void of form within.

 

Oaks on the ridge swayed

while he drifted in the boat,

soon fell asleep

in the color of blue,

awakened to music dissolving,

      his soul spinning on a tuning fork.

Order books by emailing me at deaconwriter@gmail.com or snail mailing at PO Box 3124, Sewanee, TN 37375. 

MIGRARÉ

I looked for my CD of “In A Persian Market” by William Ketelbey this morning so I could play it while I wrote about Darrell Bourque’s newest book of poetry, migraré,  because the volume is a beautiful collection of ghazals evoking memories of my sojourn in Persia during the 1970’s. However, I did not find the CD and had to rely on the music playing in my mind as I re-read the arresting couplets that accompany Bill Gingles’s abstract art.

Bourque uses this ancient form of poetry familiar to readers of Rumi and Hafez, two poets with whom I became fascinated while living in Persia, and in this collection, he addresses the subject of immigration — migraré or “I will move”( in Spanish), referring to mass movements of people either for survival, or for life-threatening reasons, or as messengers called to divine purposes.

Bourque “moves into” the ghazals through the medium of ekphrasis wherein a poet creates a poem by looking at images and builds around “tensions, composition, line, color, and the theater created in expressionistic artworks,” according to Bourque. 

Bourque derives his poems from his experience involving the Immigration Team from Narrative 4, a story exchange program designed to foster empathy and break down barriers among students worldwide, equipping them to improve their communities and the world. Storytellers from around the world met in Arnaudville, Louisiana, where Bourque encountered carriers of the ghazal. He seems to be continually inspired by experiences that explore the histories of people deeply affected by separation and immigration; e.g., his own ancestry dating back to the 19th century when Acadians were expelled from France and Acadie. In a passionate “Foreword,” he writes that humans “must be vigilant and not separate themselves from each other in destructive and debilitating ways…”

Readers enter the sphere of Bourque’s ghazals with poems like “Division Stream,” which I felt was among the finest in this collection and featured his great-grandmother. Lines like 

…When great imperceptibles come to live with you

and you cannot travel far enough to get away, you swim daily in your division stream… 

Taken as a whole, the ghazal impresses readers with Bourque’s philosophical gifts translated (maybe migrated) into poetic form. 

She arrived one day with a small satchel and all her belongings and no husband.

What took him from her she couldn’t even begin to know. Death’s a division stream… 

However, ever the master of sensuality, he describes his great-grandmother’s separations as: 

turn[ing] to clabbers and soft cheeses spread on biscuits in the morning,

with mayhaw jellies and blackberries she picked while praying into the division stream… 

Bourque really “gets with it,” in contemporary language, as he launches into “Sun Choir” (Christ the King Bellevue Choir): 

I sit in one of the back rows with my wife, near Henry Amos. We couldn’t be higher.

There are no names on pews here. I hum. My wife sings out. It, too, is her sun choir. 

I once sat next to both of them at a celebration honoring his wife’s glass work in a triptych of this church and felt the dynamism of the sun choir, so this ghazal resonated with me, and I well understood his line: 

She sings trouble over trouble every Sunday…

The poem reminded me of Rumi’s 

The sunbeam fell upon the wall;

the wall received a borrowed splendor.

Why set your heart on a piece of turf…

When I lived in the sun-baked desert of Khuzestan Province in Persia, I longed to see water: bayou, river, even the aqua blue waters of the Persian Gulf and painted a wall in the dining room of our home a deep blue. I was taken back to that time of blueness when I read Bourque’s “Second Self,” his description of Vermeer’s blue as a way of “finding ways to second self… one self seeking another self…” My own immersion in a blue wall in Ahwaz, Iran led to a self seeking another self in that mysterious mideastern environment to which I had migrated. Expatriates to any country will identify with this ghazal.

Space forces me into brevity, but I hasten to say that migraré is Bourque’s finest gift of poetry, a meditative, mystical work that will “move” readers into the divine afflatus sans forced migration, arriving through phrasings of the same tone as the mystical Persian poets. It’s a beautiful entry into contemplative practice. As I told Darrell after reading migraré “Move over, Rumi.”

As readers can see, the review is not a definitive, scholarly treatment of a beautiful book from Louisiana’s most masterful poet, but it is an appreciative salute to Louisiana’s best ambassador for the mission of celebrating difference. 

Darrell Bourque is professor emeritus in English (University of Louisiana, Lafayette) and former Poet Laureate of Louisiana. He received the 2014 Louisiana Book Festival Writer Award and the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities 2019 Humanist of the Year Award, as well as the Dr. James Oliver-Monsignor Sigur Award by the Louisiana Council on Human Relations for his Social Justice work for minorities and the marginalized.

“THE LOSS OF THE JOY OF COOKING”

The above is the title of a wonderful poem in the latest book of poetry, A Late Spring and After by Robert Shaw, published by Pinyon Publishing in Montrose, Colorado. As I’ve lived in Cajun Louisiana for fifty years, I’m naturally drawn to recipes, stories, articles, and, yes, poems about cooking and food. Mention a pot of gumbo, a slice of pecan pie, or a bowl of bread pudding, and I’m not only sure of my sense of place, I search for an open kitchen and know that good food therein is going to make me happier and more at peace with the human condition. So, a poignant poem about Shaw losing one of America’s finest cookbooks following the death of his wife, with whom he had happily worked in the kitchen, incited my interest.

In every line of this sensual poem about food, we encounter the poet’s longing for his deceased beloved: “We used to work/together at it, each on a different side;/the stirring, measuring, tasting, I/chopping, dicing, mincing as required. /Rocking the blade the way she showed me to, /I freed from each raw thing a smell we liked:/ the garlic’s earthy reek, the ginger’s sting, /the anise, wisping up from celery leaves…” and his ultimate loss of appetite: “the book is missing. Even if it’s found/ and followed to the letter, there will still/be loss, the unlisted ingredient, /throwing the best efforts out of balance. /It bakes itself into what’s left of life. /The cold plate waits. Nothing now tastes the same.” This is a fiercely-controlled poem, and it balances the poet’s pain with sensual detail in a memory that reflects the best of a couple’s life together.

As far as my reading goes, “The Loss of the Joy of Cooking” is by far the most moving poem in the book, but in “Craquelure,” Shaw relates an impression of century-and-a-half portraits of ancestors wearing their Sunday best that also resonated with me. I once published a poem about my great-grandfather’s portrait that hangs in my living room in Louisiana, a similarly “cracked” picture that is aptly described in Shaw’s poem as “radiating fissures forming nets/of lines as delicate as hairs that once/ were snugged together on the artist’s brush-tip…an aging in the surface of the paint/or in the once-protective coat of varnish/belies their images’ arrested aging…” Lines like these evoke ideas that perhaps ancestral voices in a portrait can speak through portraiture, or call forth ekphrastic poetry… another time in history awakening in “filaments as fine as those,/spreading a weft, on each a weightless veil…in either likeness anchored to its canvas.”

An interesting addition to A Late Spring and After is a series of three riddles as translated from The Exeter Book, a collection of Old English Literature and the poet’s suggested answers, which he regards as “renderings influenced by the original verse forms, but allow themselves numerous liberties.” The most decipherable one is entitled “Riddle 70, lines 5-6”: “High on this headland day and night I stand/and show a blushing cheek, but feel no shame. /Men out cruising ogle me, weigh my worth. /Hear my solicitation: what’s my name?” The answer: a lighthouse.

Loss and grief form the central theme of A Late Spring, and Shaw transmits his deepest feelings in a brief, fervent elegy entitled “A Late Spring”: “Those few flowers on her tray, /buds lagging on each tree. /What more is there to say/now when the warming clay/seems pleased to let life be?/She died on Mother’s Day./What more is there to say?” An empty bed beside the poet, cold cereal for breakfast – the emblems of grief face Shaw at every turn, but he transcends his perturbation and ameliorates his pain with remembered happier hours of “unfenced green fields to wander through…”

This is a book of wide-ranging poetry moving between past and present, life and death, to arrive at four cogent lines from “Winter Sunset”: “I’d say this landscape frames/hints of how best to go. /Others may crash in flames. /My goal is afterglow.” With unwavering honesty and passion, Shaw deals with his losses, accomplishing a sometimes sardonic tone, but always revealing his appreciation for “time’s best gifts and heedless of any moment beyond the one we were in.”

Another distinctive volume from Gary Entsminger’s small press, Pinyon Publishing.

Robert Shaw has received the Robert Fitzgerald Award and is a co-winner of The Poet’s Prize. He recently retired from Mount Holyoke College where he was the Emily Dickinson Professor of English. Copies of A Late Spring, and After can be ordered from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403. 

SERENDIPITY IN NORTH CAROLINA

The first summer we set out for Asheville, North Carolina, a friend told me that we were embarking on a busman’s holiday–after all, The Mountain here at Sewanee is 2,000 feet, and we enjoy the same type of scenery in Tennessee. What she didn’t understand was that we needed a “shot of the city” and its culture after living four months in a village of 2,000 people.

For writers who need stimulus, Asheville offers the best of mountain destinations. In 2010 and 2011, The American Style Magazine named Asheville among ten top artists’ destinations, and in 2010, the city claimed the top place on this list. Our first visit to the River Arts District in Asheville confirmed that report, and our visual senses were treated to a plethora of unique art work in ceramics, fiber, glass, jewelry, metal, paint, prints, photography, stone, and wood.

For four years we’ve haunted the district where 175 artists display their work in 24 different historic buildings, most of which are warehouse type studios where artists engage visitors while they work at their craft. Many of the artists have been drawn to and inspired by the Blue Ridge Mountain landscape, which is represented in paintings, sculptures, and photographs.

We wandered into the studio of Constance Williams, an expressionist encaustic painter whose work fascinated me, and within five minutes, the artist and I had connected–as poets and artists often do. Constance, eager to instruct us about the encaustic process, gave us a short course on the luminous art pieces in her studio, explaining that she uses hot fluid paint, a blow torch, and fireproof tools to create conceptual pieces that appear to have captured her subconscious for a complex, poetic effect.

Constance is originally from Somerset, England and dropped out of a course in advanced art because she wanted to veer off course and try new approaches to art. She moved to London, and later migrated to the U.S. where she found her way to the mountains of North Carolina in 2004, working on clay sculpture, then began rendering encaustic paintings. As she had a background of working with clay and knowledge of firing glazes and stains multiple times, encaustic painting was a natural medium for her. She uses a blowtorch to fuse and work on dozens of layers of wax, damar tree resin and pigment, and a brush on birch wood substrates, to achieve an impression of reflecting light out to the viewer from translucent layers. She moves the blowtorch flame continually and manipulates carving and incising tools to create arresting designs.

The technique of encaustic painting was used in Fayum mummy portraits in Egypt in 100-300 A.D., and the word “encaustic” derives from the Greek word “enkalen,” meaning “to “burn into.” Encaustic artists painted on walls and statues, even hulls of ships to waterproof them and to enhance the ships with artistic design. During the 17^th century encaustic painting became a popular medium for the indigenous tribe of Samar Island. Also, during the muralism movement in Mexico, Diego Rivera sometimes used encaustic techniques in his paintings. The technique has burgeoned since the 1990’s, and Constance is among the top artists working in this medium.

Her artist’s statement is a simple one: “Inspiration always exists for me, and it finds me working every day…to create a tactile and emotional response, to open the mind to a world beyond the obvious…” A conversation with her is an adventure in learning about incising, scraping, burning, making luminous sensual effects. A warm, affable person, Constance initiates lively conversations with viewers and gives them lessons in encaustic technique, as well as the story about the artist who created the work. She has created both small and large art forms, some of which can be found at the historic Grove Park Inn in Asheville. A world traveler, she spends most of her time in Asheville and has a second home in Bermuda.

Constance has been featured in Verve Magazine, The New York Times, North Carolina Home and Garden Magazine, and various other publications. Her gallery was filmed in 201l for the Asheville Convention and Visitors Bureau’s tourism campaign, and she served as president of Asheville’s historic River Arts District from 2010-2011. In addition to these credits, she’s a wonderful “people person” and believes in engaging with her viewers when they visit her gallery. I came away from the encounter with a small abstract encaustic painting she gave to me and which is now displayed in the living room of our cottage here at Sewanee.

As I often write ekphrastic poetry–poems that are a response to viewing a painting–I was inspired by this gifted Asheville artist to write the following poem about my prize encaustic painting:

  

UPON VIEWING AN ENCAUSTIC PAINTING BY CONSTANCE WILLIAMS

We swim in the open sea,

gnarled outlines of moon shells,

organ and bone within a dream,

raised sludge forms

revealing contortions of the brain

from which we sprang.

And what are we?

How do we enter the doors

of narrow houses carved

at the bottom of the frame,

saved from solitary life?

They are the frames of places

where we have dared to come on land,

shapes pushing through to another world

to find holiness in everything,

where the air is celestial green,

the ocean, a flickering light,

and the Infinite indulges his play impulse,

his spidery lines defining many lives,

the world we lived in,

the world we live in.

And we will go on and on

despite the shadows whispering,

What are we doing here?

Why have we been summoned

to this provisional place...

this box of translucence on a wall?