Lisel Mueller, William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, W. S. Merwin, and Loren Eiseley
While working on collages depicting different strata of earth, I became interested in patterns that the roots of different plants create—patterns we usually cannot appreciate from our vantage point above ground, but a realm that raindrops can penetrate and transform. In her poem "What a Dog Might Hear", Lisel Mueller conjectures that a dog might hear " the sound of spiders breathing and the roots mining the earth: it may be asparagus heaving, headfirst, into the light." William Carlos Williams was a doctor as well as a poet. His poem "Spring and All" describes the road to the hospital with the "broad, muddy fields brown with dried weeds" alongside it and "all around them the cold, familiar wind." Today there is grass, but he promises "tomorrow the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf." Change has arrived and "rooted, they grip down and begin to awaken." Elizabeth Bishop is one of my favorite poets. Although she was from New England, she lived in Petropolis, Brazil for many years. In her "Song for the Rainy Season", she writes that "Without water the great rock will stare unmagnetized, hard, no longer wearing rainbows or rain, the forgiving air and high fog gone; the owls will move on...." In another Bishop poem "At the Fishhouses", she says that if you taste seawater, it will be "dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world." Water and patterns associated with it are popular subjects for painters. As might be expected from an inhabitant of a dry land, especially on with a Moorish history, fountains were often featured in the Spanish painter Joaquin Sorolla's works. He seems to have emphasized the patterns of falling and swirling water as much as he celebrated the color of the garden flowers. The water's movement also contrasts with the solidity of the buildings serving as a backdrop for the gardens. Monet is famous for his very large paintings of the reflections on his ponds and the influence they had on subsequent painters. W. S. Merwin was prolific poet and conservationist. Clouds in his poem "Still Water" are the forebears of the "fine rain gathered in rills among the hidden crags." After "taking along flakes of starlight moonlight daylight down through the wild distances", the water finally "lies there at last by its green pasture and cradles the stillness of the empty sky." In The Immense Journey, Loren Eiseley recounts a day when he floated on his back down the Platte River. He writes that turtles, fish, frogs, and humans are "concentrations...of that indescribable and liquid brew that is compounded in varying proportions of salt and sun and time. It has appearances, but at its heart lies water...." Eiseley grew up in Nebraska and later became head of the anthropology department at the University of Pennsylvania. "What the Dog Might Hear" and "Spring and All" are both included in the Discovery of Poetry by Frances Mayes which was first published by Harcourt Brace and a later paperback edition was published in 2001 by Harvest. "Song for the Rainy Season" and "At the Fishhouses" are in Poems / Elizabeth Bishop published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2011. In 2016, Copper Canyon Press published Merton's poem in Garden Time and The Immense Journey was published by Random House in 1957.
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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
April 2024
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