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.
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AuthorI am a Northwest artist making collages from mulberry papers stamped by hand from original images that I have carved. Archives
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