Celebrating Artists – Beyond Book Covers
So today, I wanted to talk a little bit about some artists I love – and why I think as important as it is for writers to be plugged into a writer’s community, they should also strive to connect to the visual art community. And it’s not just so they have slamming art to use the next time they have a book cover coming up! (Although that is a positive side-effect…)
Tonight, I’m going to the reception for artist Yumiko Kayukawa, whose new show is opening at terrific Seattle gallery Roq La Rue. (She also graciously allowed me to use her piece, “Zen Cracker,” for this web site.) You can see some preview art for the show here. So many people talk about the SAM, the Seattle Art Museum, or maybe they mention the Henry Art Gallery at UW, which hosts some kickin’ literary events as well. Both deserve a visit, but this quirky downtown gallery always has something up on its walls that makes me wish I could afford to buy more art.
And soon, I’ll be reading October 21 at a reception for local painter Deborah Scott, whose fairy tale series “Waiting for Prince Charming” is a combination of subversive pop culture wit and traditional stunning painting techniques. Check out this review of her show here. It starts today as well – click here for more information about viewing her work! You can see why I’d like her work.
I’m hoping to meet up with the cover artist of my first book (Becoming the Villainess) Michaela Eaves, at the opening tonight, and I just wish I could follow Rene Lynch (the cover artist of She Returns to the Floating World) around because her exhibitions are always in fancy places like Germany and NYC.
I think poets have a lot in common with visual artists, whose work necessarily taps into the subconscious, whose images are often drawn from the same sources (history, mythology, pop culture) as ours. Yumiko’s work draws on old eighties record covers, Japanese anime, and ecological concerns; Rene Lynch clearly focuses a lens on fairy tale tropes, as does Deborah. Michaela’s pop-goth-with-a-twist sensibilities might suit, say, a speculative writer. I think we can benefit from hanging out with each other; poets can be inspired to write based on the striking visual input, and artists (maybe, hopefully) can be inspired by our writing. (Well, like I said, we can hope!) I think about Frank O’Hara, who used to write for fancy art magazines as well as book reviews and poetry, who wrote the poem “Why I Am Not a Painter.” I’ve loved this poem since I was a kid, and I swear I’ve actually had the conversation in the poem. “It needed something there.” “There should be so much more, not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is and life. Days go by. It is even in prose, I am a real poet.” So today I encourage you poets to go out this weekend and find some local art and try to talk to a real live artist!
Reading Reports, haibun and Seattle Adventures
A few little reading report details and Seattle adventures. Needless to say I am drowning in new books!
I was so happy to get my copy of American Poet (The Journal of The Academy of American Poets) Spring 2011, which contains a wonderful article by Aimee Nezhukumatathil on haibun, featuring some sample haibun…including Basho’s from The Narrow Road to the Interior, Aimee’s “When Mountains Fang the Sky,” Kimiko Hahn’s “Untitled,” Lee Ann Roripaugh’s “Inquiline” and my haibun, “The Fox-Wife Describes Their Courtship” from She Returns to the Floating World. A great article if you teach haibun! Thanks Aimee! I feel honored to be in such great company.
So a few notes from my four days of whirlwind readings:
C. Dale Young’s poetry reading was funny, dark, moving…Torn is a completely great book. My husband says it was some of the best poetry he’s heard at Open Books. I also got to see Tacoma poet Jeff Walt and Rick Barot, who says he is working on both another book of poems AND a book of prose, so yay for that!
Rae Armantrout read some from Money Shot, and I clocked references to True Blood, Buffy, the financial scandals, Little Red Riding Hood, pornography, and that was just in the first couple of poems! Her poems are full of little inside jokes and references to pop culture, which can seem difficult, but when she reads them, just seem like the natural progression of her thoughts. Glenn also got to catch up with Rae’s very sweet husband (another supportive poetry husband – got to love those guys)
Maya Zellar’s new book, Rust Fish, (http://www.amazon.com/Rust-Fish-Maya-Jewell-Zeller/dp/0984451099/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1305555769&sr=1-1)captures a girl’s coming-of-age in the Pacific Northwest. One of my favorite poems from the book involves an argument about using Round-Up.
I also got ahold of a few other books, Jeremy Halinen’s What Other Choice (who, among other things, reconstructs the story of the garden of Eden in interesting ways) and a totally charming chapbook about travelling through Japan by Matthew Thorburn called Disappears in the Rain. I also got Eaven Boland’s A Journey of Two Maps, which has a whole essay about the underworld and the character of Nausicaa, so I had to buy it.
In the few spare minutes in between going to poetry readings, we managed to visit Golden Gardens park, going to the beach and pier and seeing the beautiful snowy mountains against the ocean, Pike Place Market (acquiring some giant pink tulips) and my favorite Seattle art gallery Roq La Rue, that was doing an exhibition of tiny sculpted cities and another of Victorian daguerreotype of family members posing with, say, yetis or a giant squid. That was mostly during our four hours of sunshine on Saturday. It’s been a cold and nasty spring, as I think I’ve mentioned, so when the sun shines at all, all of Seattle goes crazy to get out in it. Oh, and a quick fundraiser during Capital Hill’s Art Walk for the Japanese earthquake disaster, at which I got a crazy cute art toy designed by Yumiko Kayukawa and two of her posters.
Yes, on top of finding a new place to live in a new city in a new state, plus starting a new job, I’ve been re-designing the web site. I’m going for a kind of whimsical-yet-subversive-feminist thing with the wonderful art of Yumiko Kayukawa, who kindly gave me permission to use “Zen Cracker” which we altered to make a banner (it’s actually more rectangular – here’s an online version –http://www.sweetyumiko.com/files/zencracker.gif) Her other art work is great too – I encourage you to browse her art work.
I used to have a technical site and a poetry site, and now I just have one, more writing-centered, site. (You might want to update any links you have to my poetry site, by the way…)
Yesterday was a mournful day, with the passing of Reginald Shepherd, and the eerie memories of another sunny September 11th. I spent most of the day getting rid of things. I’ve been doing that a lot lately. It turns out I’m not as attached to most of my stuff as I thought – except my books – and maybe my shoes. At night I played hooky for an hour from packing and sorting to see Peter Pereira and Rebecca Loudon read at Port Townsend’s Northwind series. They both read new work that I really loved. Peter has so much good energy it just radiates when he reads, and Rebecca is always electrifying (plus she had really great hair last night – I was all, how does she get her curls to lay like that? I know, a really serious poet shouldn’t have been thinking about hairstyles.) So that was a nice poetry break in my insane-moving-world of right now.
And I have to learn new educational software for my job and read two textbooks before the class starts! OK breathe, breathe, breathe…
So, let me know what you think of the new site, and if you find any problems or missing links, tell me!
Art and Poetry Reviews, and more about the Move…
Yesterday, because soon we will be living over two hours away from the mecca of Seattle arts and culture, Glenn and I snuck out at lunch time to a downtown art gallery called Roq La Rue, which specializes in art they call “pop surrealism,” which, if you think about it, doesn’t only explain the art I like, but is also a good description for the kind of poetry I write (and like.)
The art exhibit was by a Japanese artist named Yumiko Kayukawa, who does these acrylic/oil paintings that kind of look like Japanese candy ads but also illustrations of Japanese fairy tale books or eighties rock album covers. Here was my favorite from the exhibit, called “Zen Candy,” which features a girl, two wolf kits, and some floating pink rice crackers…
http://www.sweetyumiko.com/display.php?collection=20&art=3
but there was an equally cool one of a girl running with a herd of hyenas. I think this artist’s work would look great on the cover of my as-yet-unpublished Japanese-pop-folk-tale book, when it gets published, don’t you? She’s probably out of my price range, though, as her pieces run between two and three thousand dollars. If you want to go see her, her show is only open til tomorrow, November 3rd.
Rachel Dacus’ new chapbook from Small Poetry Press, “Another Circle of Delight,” on a related note, had a dark, nature/religion/science-y tinge, and the two poems I really latched onto were about bones: one, called “Green Heart” about the fossilization of dinasaur bones
(“After sixty-eight million years, the collagen
in your bones might just begin to ossify…
Now she sees that she too
might leave behind a body green at heart
in a hardening world…”
and the other, about an x-ray and a missing bone in the body, “Wish Bone:”
“The absent bone in my spine x-ray
leaves a delicate arch of emptiness,
impied bridge over epidural space.
The gone bone is a bone of wish
that my walk wouldn’t pinch and wobble,
that I wouldn’t know I am incomplete?
How much else was missing at my birth?
…Now the missing piece
just keeps pulling and pulling
and only the words snap.”
Mmm, I just love the words “ossify” and “epidural” in poetry. Don’t these little poem pieces make you want to run out and buy this chapbook?
The Move: the Saga Continues…
Keep having nightmares about the move, which often happens to me around moving time. One involved a serial killer stalking the owners of different houses in my new neighborhood, and another involved shooting a rat. In real life, yesterday the headlines of the small-town paper of the place I’m moving to ran something like “MSRA! Deadly bacteria shuts down local high school” and “Level 3 Sex Offender Moves to Town.” Eek!
I am setting up new utility accounts, boxing up books, cleaning and wiping down furniture, deciding what to pitch and what to keep. Seriously, I should write a women’s magazine feature article called “How To Move – by someone who’s moved every freakin’ six months on average over the past ten years.” Unfortunately, I have not yet learned how to make moving easy and painless. It always seems effort-y and painful. I am going to sell back some stacks of books and magazines I’ve accumulated today. On the plus side, moving does make you clean and organize, and probably has some other benefits too. I do like the town I’m moving too, and the new rent for a modest little ranch house is downright affordable, which is a clear sign from the universe I should continue being a poor poet instead of a practical technical writer, right? Of course, if the universe wants to start throwing monetary poetry prizes and poetry jobs at me, I’ll take those too…
