news

I've been pretty remiss about posting here recently. Lots going on family wise that intervenes as it must. And summer is whirling past me in sad and good ways. And always too fast. So it goes, Billy Pilgrim wisely pointed out.

And so it goes that I have news to share. In one of my incarnations I get to work with one of the best small museums around -- The Katonah Museum of Art, where I've been giving workshops as a visiting writer. For the past few years, young writers, from 3rd grade through high school, actually bring their notebooks to the museum's galleries and write--poems, other stuff. It's a pretty wonderful collaboration indeed. The folks in the museum's education department are completely into exploring how writers and visual artists collide, how poems and other kinds of writing can arise from the experience of close looking, how we learn how to think by looking and then writing.

The exhibitions at the museum range from contemporary artists using glass to ancient Buddhist texts to this summer's California Impressionists. In another life maybe I was or will be a visual artist. However, in the here and now, I can't draw worth a hoot. But I love the stuff -- the brushes and pencils, the palettes of messy colors bumping into each other, the darkroom, the kiln, the drawing board. I like to get lost in the looking, to visit places in my imagination when I look and write. And working at the museum lets me breathe in all kinds of visual works.

And now I'm officially writer in residence...ta da! I'm excited about the unfolding of this endeavor, about creating more collaborations. Who knows -- dance and writing and visual art, music and art and writing. It's a work in progress. Above, I've posted a painting from the summer exhibition, All Things Bright and Beautiful: California Impressionism.

One more small headline -- another poem accepted by the online journal qarrtsiluni! Do visit and read some of the work there. The latest issue on water has been compiled as a podcast. Take a listen and you're bound to feel as if you've had a nice long swim in the surf. Good things happening there, so I'm pleased to have my poem, "Anecdote of Air," included in the upcoming issue on "transformation." I'll note its posting here.

one more from Matthea

Museum of the Middle

You're walking down the middle of the road when you start sinking.

Each white stripe gets successively softer, like strips of gum left out

in the sun.  You pass daffodils, coffins, and fossils until you're at the

earth's core.  The doorknob burns your hand but inside is the usual

cool, museum-ish hush.  A tapestry (2' x 48') charting the rise and fall

of the middle class is backlit so that the stitched line fluoresces like a

heartbeat on a monitor.  Most prized is a worm segment in the foyer,

a pink accordion mounted on black velvet and framed in gold. They

say a worm can live if you cut it in half but not if you extract its exact

middle.  In the next room and spilling into the one after that is the

ever-expanding gallery of middle-management--almost all white

men.  Today there are two special exhibits--to your left, Hermes

and Other Intermediaries; to your right, The Middle Distance: For-

gotten Focus. In each painting, the foreground and background have

been blacked out, leaving fragments of fields, flagstones, the occa-

sional midsized sheep.  But why are you here? Do your parents love

you exactly 5 % less than your brother and 5% more than the dog?

What museum-worthy mediocrity do the curators see in you?

from Modern Life

Reading Harvey's latest is a graphic experience. I'm learning how to lighten up. 

Not that she's funny haha. Rather that she's looser and kind of darkly playful 

in her associations and subject matter. Some of it is spookily goofy, 

if that makes sense.  Anyway, good reading.