In primordial earth's igneous seas,
fantastical creatures sprouted; weaving through the filtering net of time and carried by the ocean's roll and sway, these nascent ancestors—lightning borne-- were delivered from eons of subtle charms when exultant waves ferried the beasts to the beckoning lightness of air washed over by a ripple of stars. Fledgling pilgrims swept onto land-- colonists to continents of variegated hues-- who learned to creep, to jump, to run, to fly, and finally, with feathers, soar. Of our relations who stayed behind, a glimpse is sometimes granted: drummed out by the thump of waves, small gifts of whimsy, heirlooms, memories-- upended, displaced—are abandoned on the shore. Unwilling exiles from a heaving world of scales, fins, staring eyes, and pearls, amber (the color of quince) marooned jellyfish (drifting voyagers shipwrecked and scuppered) mix with lines of seaweed to mark the ocean's retreat while pierced and broken shells make the notes-- reclaimed, scattered, then restated-- the same revolving music creates the moon's palimpsest, summoning and transforming all. Nancy Christiansen
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Amy Clampitt, Elizabeth Bishop, Blaise Cendrars, and Derek Walcott
I began this poem intending to write about the long striding shadows of winter and the intersecting patterns of animal tracks across the sand, but the poem found its way to becoming one about time. In his book about the poet Amy Clampitt, Nothing Stays Put, Willard Spiegelman notes that "writing has a mind of its own." Before she became a poet, Clampitt was surprised and "rather frightened" when "sentences broke in a way that was not my usual style" and "they had begun to reach out for rhymes" as she was writing about mortality. In Elizabeth Bishop's poem "Sandpiper", the bird stares at the sand which is "black, white, tan, and gray mixed with quartz grains, rose, and amethyst" while Amy Clampitt observed in "Beach Glass" that the ocean "goes on shuffling its millenniums of quartz, granite, and basalt." In the same poem, Clampitt records the "amber of Budweiser, chrysoprase of Almaden and Gallo, lapis by the way of (no getting around it, I'm afraid) Phillip"s Milk of Magnesia...." Blaise Cendrars was a novelist, poet, and world traveler. Born in Switzerland, he abandoned his birth name of Frederic-Louis Sauser and became a French citizen. Cendrars adopted a modern style of poetry, sometimes collaborating with French artists. His poem "Fish Cove" observes the "prismatic sway of hanging jellyfish" and the "yellow pink lilac fish taking flight" by the "white bushes of coral." The seashore is a popular motif for painters. Many California artists have depicted the intersection between the ocean and land, with its brilliant light during the day and its more subdued mood at twilight and at night. The Laguna area was a popular site for this endeavor beginning in the early twentieth century. Winslow Homer and Marsden Hartley are just two of the painters of East Coast beaches and Sorolla, Monet, and Matisse also featured beaches in their works. In his poem "The Sea is History", San Lucian poet Derek Walcott compared the Caribbean monuments to those of Europe. Walcott leads the reader through the sea with its "colonnades of coral, past the gothic windows of sea fans to...groined caves with barnacles pitted like stone" that "are our cathedrals...." Walcott was also an enthusiastic painter of seaside scenes. Nothing Stays Put was published by Knopf in 2023 and "Sandpiper" is in Poems/Elizabeth Bishop published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2011. Czeslaw Milosz included "Fish Cove" in his A Book of Luminous Things published by Harcourt in 1996. Derek Walcott's poetry can be found at poetryfoundation.org. "The Sea Is History" was originally published in the Paris Review in 1978. Roberto Burle Marx, Adrian Berg, Edouard Vuillard, Katherine Swift, and Marilyn Krysl
Roberto Burle Marx was a Brazilian landscape designer, plant collector, and artist. He painted, sculpted, and designed tapestries but is best known for his work designing parks, gardens, and the Copacabana promenade on Avenida Atlantica. Hoping to preserve Amazonian flora, he brought back plants to be propagated in the greenhouses surrounding his home. He created a lush garden there and, after his death, Sitio Roberto Burle Marx was donated to the Brazilian government. Two artists who painted public gardens were Adrian Berg and Edouard Vuillard. Enamored with Monet's practice of dedicating a series of works to one subject, Berg spent decades painting aspects of Regent Park in London throughout the changing seasons. Vuillard made sketches, paintings, and panels depicting Place Vintimille, a busy square close to his apartment. Some public gardens have had an outsized influence on my appreciation of gardens. One of the world's best collection of cacti is part of the Huntington Botanical Gardens, which includes many mature specimens from Baja California, the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts, the California deserts, South America, the Canary Islands, and Madagascar, along with South African succulents. Palms and cycads, camelias, roses, and a Japanese garden are some of the other collections with Australian, subtropical, and jungle as the newer gardens. Designed by Antonio Gaudi, Parq Guell is a mix of whimsical buildings and structures located in Barcelona. Its curving benches covered with colorful broken ceramic pieces inspired my first stamps. Seattle Japanese Garden reveals not only the aesthetic of Japanese gardens but also serves as a reminder of the influence that Japanese gardeners have had on private gardens on the West Coast. Both the Van Dusen Botanical Garden in Vancouver B.C. and the J. Paul Getty Museum in southern California provide the luxury of walking through a large expanse of varied plantings, with the added pleasure of being able to move from outdoors into art exhibits and back again at the museum. What gardens have a special resonance for you? In The Morville Hours, Katherine Swift describes her late summer garden's "golden light, like a rich old Sauternes, full and sweet. Sugars caramelize in the leaves—tones of butterscotch, cinder toffee, treacle tart; quince paste, marmalade, toffee apple; Beaujolais, cassis, Lynch-Bages." In her book The Discovery of Poetry, Frances Mayes points out the pleasures of naming things. As an example, she includes Marilyn Krysl's poem "Saying Things." In one section of the poem Krysl asks you to "Say eye, say shearwater, alewife, apache, harpoon, do you see what I'm saying, say celery, say Seattle, say a whole city, say San Jose." She ends her poem by writing that saying words adds "a shimmer and the bird song of its sound...." Which words appeal to you? "The Back Garden" was written for the trees that were cut down to clear the land for development behind my garden. The Morville Hours was published in Britain by Bloomsbury in 2008 and in the United States in 2009 by Walker and Company. The Discovery of Poetry was originally published by Harcourt Brace and a later paperback edition was published by Harvest in 2001. Pressing against the back fence, the laurel grove
unchecked, fecund, divides the garden from the doomed land beyond—the sanctuary of the laurels' sheltering leaves and skeletal limbs welcoming ghosts and refugees. And in the distance rise islands of cedar and fir vertical, ascending, their tiers of drapery undulate above honeysuckle cresting the hedge; hung with morning glory streamers, the vines fling up a tumult of flowery spume-- gold charged with red. Metallic bronze, the garden statue stands bright, hard surrounded by yellow yarrow wedges punctuated by geraniums of blue, the hostas and ferns mingling with anemone, lady's mantle, and Queen Anne's lace overlaid with the scent of sweet peas, lilies, phlox. A rising nucleus of ivory butterflies gathering, detaching, fluttering electrons that spiral up to meet berry blossoms floating down around them into a verdigris ocean of waiting shadows etched with cryptic webs. The complement of resident birds emerges: a shuffling spotted towhee, the blue rattle of jays, the earth tones of blustery chickadees, hummingbirds hovering and hectoring, the robin's white-ringed glare. And when the laurel fruit ripens juicy, magenta, mobs of resolute starlings descend, and two popsicle bright tanagers—flying south-- join in the cacophony of harvesting until that ancient imperative pushes them on again. Thick black and gold dragonflies (and thin blue ones too) posed, still, listen to the wren (cousin to White Rabbit) whispering and sighing over the troubles to come, his warnings of ruin approaching, heads imperiled, as the garden drifts into fall. Nancy Christiansen Peacock feathers, mother-of-pearl,
flickering auroras, the phosphorescent shimmer of sea creatures, beetles, and bugs. Side-by-side on rainbow bands, captured in both copper's iridescence and in the feathers of a teal, blue and green have been celebrated throughout time and around the world. From a glazed blue hippo conceived by the Nile to the garden murals and green chariots of early Rome, from Mexico's jade skulls as repositories of ancient passions to the swirling lines drawn by Gaelic monks in the Book of Kells; the Chinese created both blue-on-white porcelain and the pale green of celadon, while calligraphy graces Middle Eastern ceilings and walls with green as the Prophet's chosen color—symbol of Islam. From a giant blue wave cresting over a miniature Mount Fuji to Europe's brilliant blue stained glass—the pride of Chartres and Saint Denis; precious lapis lazuli was used to paint both the Buddha and the Virgin Mary, and worshippers in Byzantine churches were dazzled by distant mosaic figures arrayed in robes of scattered tesserae of green and blue mixed with gold. Dufy painted racetracks in blazes of blues and greens: a life of gaiety and bright dresses, horses running on spring turf, on canvases garlanded with masses of fresh flowers. His Nice is a scant half-circle of white washed over by deep blue water and sky and Amphitrite waits, a shell pressed to her ear, encircled by a woven cerulean sea. Lorca divined a green ocean in a snail. Green has many guises—new life and renewal but a sign also of envy and bile, the color once of monsters and devils. Blue ranges from sustainer of life to shorthand for a life without hope: Picasso's blue period, Plath's blue saints adrift in a blue void-- colors as catalysts or mirrors of human feeling? Stretching from Fred Williams' Australian shores to the Indian maharajas' royal hunting grounds, from Van Gogh's gardens to the Duc de Berry's Book of Hours-- the passing seasons and the pleasures taken there-- these defining colors of our planet are now jeopardized and under siege, colors of sustenance and consequence-- life depends on our legacy of blue and green. Nancy Christiansen |
AuthorI am a Northwest artist making collages from mulberry papers stamped by hand from original images that I have carved. Archives
April 2024
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