And life goes on. With the cold weather, I’ve been doing more indoor stuff like working on some quilt projects. Like this:
Not the best picture, but this is a 17″x13″ placemat. It’s part of a set of four. There no better stress reliever than to cut big things in to small things and sew them back into big things.
Or you can write poetry. I’ll work on one of those later this week.
If you need me, I’m in the sewing room ignoring the news.
This is a series of posts about the music I play while writing. This time I’m up to Don McLean and his song, Vincent. Released in 1971 on McLean’s album AmericanPie and as a single in 1972 it quickly went to number 2 on the Easy Listening chart and rank number 94 for 1972.
Anyone who was a teen in the 70’s has heard and likely loves McLean’s songs like Vincent, and American Pie. I had a number of friends who had memorized American Pie and would endlessly discuss the meanings in the song. I liked it, but not as much as my friends.
Vincent is one of those songs that I didn’t really appreciate as a teenager. I knew it was a great song, but it didn’t really speak to me that much. It wasn’t until I was much older that I began to understand that McLean was describing a real person with real struggles. It wasn’t until after I’d seen a video of Leonard Nimoy’s one play play Vincent I did really begin to appreciate who Vincent van Gogh was and is to the world of art.
Van Gogh was a troubled mind but a great artist. The more you learn about him, the sadder the story becomes.
The brilliance of McLean’s song is to put into words just exactly the struggles van Gogh had. McLean doesn’t dance around the subject with this line in the chorus, “And how you suffered for your sanity.” It doesn’t get plainer than that. McLean also pulls in the details of van Gogh’s paintings with lines like, “Paint your palette blue and grey” and “Flaming flowers that brightly blaze.” I suggest listening to this song while viewing van Gogh’s art. It will make more sense then.
In fact, McLean states that he wrote this song after reading a book about van Gogh and while looking at the painting, Starry Night.
My wife and I once bought a jigsaw puzzle version of Starry Night. I think it was around 2,000 pieces and it took us four or five months to put it together. It was the most difficult puzzle we’ve ever done. Which is a metaphor for van Gogh’s life – complicated and difficult.
In the fall of 2023 Heather and I took a cruise in the Mediterranean and had the opportunity to visit the village of Saint-Remy where the Saint-Paul Asylum is. That is where van Gogh spent a year as a patient. This is where he painted Starry Night and other works. The old monastery with the asylum is now a museum and a draw for tourists and artist alike. Walk from the bus stop by the building, you’ll encounter many painters working while looking at the places van Gogh painted more than a century before.
This song ends up on my playlist because it is a story about a struggling artist and because of the evocative way McLean manages to tell the story. It’s a well told story and the kind of writing I’d like to imitate.
I’ve been neglecting this blog lately. Mostly because I’ve been creative elsewhere. A few weeks ago I started attending an online poetry class that focuses on ekphrastic poetry. Yup, I said ekphrastic. There’s a long version and a short version of what that means. The short version is that you look at a piece of art: photo, painting, sculpture, pottery, quilt, etc. and you write a poem about it. The longer version starts out that ekphrasis is a Greek word that means to explain or describe. I won’t do the full lecture, but it just means that the poet looks at a work of art and then through the poet’s poetry explains or interprets the meaning or message of the art.
So for today, I’d like to briefly share the process I follow for writing an ekphrastic poem and show you an example of a work in progress. I should point out that the class I am taking is a generative class, that is the point is to generate a first draft that can be refined later. The poem I’m sharing below is one of those drafts and has not been edited as a result of the workshop we have each week on our draft poems.
The process is:
There are a few rules to keep in mind when writing a ekphrastic poem. First is detail — the art must be seen in the poem. Next is interpretation — the poet must convey the work and the effect it has on us. Focus is important — the poem must stay with the work of art and it’s effects on the viewer. The artist is important to the poem and should be considered. Finally is the awareness of the audience in that the reader of the poem is also a viewer of the art.
So the poem I’d like to share with you this week is based on the Käthe Kollwitz poster The Survivors. Here’s a link to the picture and some notes about it: https://www.kollwitz.de/en/the-survivors-kn-197
Here’s what I wrote during the free writing time:
———-
The Survivors By Käthe Kollwitz
Charcoal.
Charcoal, on the canvas.
Charcoal on my sleeve.
Charcoal in their heart.
Darkness of the prison.
Darkness of their heart.
Children who should see the light of day see nothing but fear.
See nothing but hate.
No food, no toy, no hope, just bony arms holding them to a ribcage
covered in charcoal soaked cloth.
The only ones who can’t see the scene are the ones who’s eyes are bound by white cloth.
Even her eye sockets are just deep pits of burnt out wood.
Wood that once sprouted leaf and flower.
Wood that once built a home.
Wood that once warmed a hearth.
Wood now corrupted.
Wood now weaponized.
Now turned to despair.
Soon to be a grave.
And here’s the draft poem:
Charcoal
after The Survivors by Käthe Kollwitz
Charcoal outlines a desiccated face
where water and hope have fled.
Hands that once held out apples to smiling children are
blackened holding a few remaining empty stomachs.
Charcoal outlines a mask
covering vision of a world gone cold.
A world where fire no longer enlightens
or transforms desire into soup.
Charcoal pulled from a cold
airless burn pile
carefully built to transform
wood into a dry fragile corpse.
Wood cut from a tree
in a forest where leaf and light
hosted birds, bees and bears.
Where the air was cleansed
and water from the ground was sent to the heights
of mountains for all to drink.
Charcoal is a surviving bird song
that once echoed by a brook.
————
Let me know what you think of the poem and what edits you might make to it.
That’s it for this week. I’ll be posting again sometime.
I live in the west. Cowboys, cows, range land and endless clear skies. Do you remember watching the TV show Bonanza? It’s just one mountain range to the west of where I am currently typing this post. Did you ever watch John Wayne’s last movie, The Shootest? I can drive to where they filmed that. Forests and deserts, lakes and rivers, cattle and horses, all are an easy drive from my home. It’s beautiful here. It’s magical to watch the thunderheads build over Mt. Rose, just south east of my perch on the rim of the Reno basin. An afternoon wind can clear the sky or rise the dust on a dry lake bed.
The burners come back through town this time of year, covered in alkaline dust that will add $250 to their car rental fee.
It is and has always been a dangerous place to live. The desert burns, the mountains freeze, the thunderstorm raises a flash flood to catch the unaware, and that refreshing wind carries the smoke and embers of the wildfires. Fire, it’s always been here, but we build our homes in its path and don’t understand our loss.
Earlier this month Heather and I drove up to see our grandson who has moved to the Seattle area for his first job out of college. Before we left, I checked the weather and road conditions. Being late summer in this part of the world, I also checked the status of the many wildfires that we might drive near. The last count I saw was that this fire season there are 67 major fires burning in the western US. It will go down as the worst fire year in a decade. It hasn’t made the news much, because most of the fires are remote and few homes have burned.
Still, the Bear fire was burning just to the west of the first highway we drove up on our way to Crater Lake. It’s a 16 hour drive from our home to Seattle and we’d decided to do it in two days. We arrived in Crater Lake in the early afternoon and discovered that the north entrance to the park was closed due to the Middle Fork fire. The hotel I’d booked was about 20 miles north of the park. That turned into a 70 mile detour to the south and around the western edge of the park before we could turn north again to Diamond Lake.
We had dinner that night in Diamond Lake and I was impressed by the number of firefighters who had taken the evening off to have a nice dinner. I wasn’t sure if these were crews who’d just been released from duty or were just arriving to join the crews mopping up the fire. They had a map at the resort that showed how close the fire had come to the lake.
When we arrived in Seattle the next day, we started to get the news of a fire closer to home, the Davis fire. It started about 10 miles from our house and was burning up into the Mt. Rose area. That’s the opposite direction from our home. For the next two days we followed the news of the fire as we drove home through eastern Washington and Oregon. Along the way we stopped at the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center and learned more about the American migration into the west during the late 1800’s. That’s a story of hardship and loss. Not all those who sought life in the west prospered. According to the statics we read, one in ten died on the trail before arriving.
By the time we pulled into our driveway, the Davis fire had been burning for three days. 20,000 people had been evacuated, 5,000 acres burned, there were just over 600 firefighters on the fire lines and no containment — just a worry that winds the next day could push the fire over the fire lines where more people were being warned of possible evacuation. The air was hazy, you could smell burning wood and we wondered which of our friends had been forced to leave. It was a week before they lifted evacuation orders.
Since then, there has been rain, cooler winds and the power has been restored to the affected homes. The garbage company parked large dumpsters in the evacuation areas to handle all the spoiled food from refrigerators that went a week without power. We dusted ash and cold black embers off our walkways and garden.
And then the skies cleared. The big puffy clouds are rolling through again and in the mornings the air smells of fresh sagebrush. In the afternoon the breeze comes up and leaves a fait hollow whistling in my ears.
I live in the west, this is our life.
