Accused of Harboring an Unlicensed Dog? Take a Lesson from Writer E.B. White

February 22, 2012 in Words with 1 Comment

 

Writer E.B. White and his dachshund Minnie--the subject of White's hilarious letter to the ASPCA

 

“Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog,” says the writer E.B. White. “Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.”

It’s been years since I’ve read White’s classic books Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little. I had forgotten how funny the author could be until yesterday, when I nearly choked on my breakfast because I was laughing so hard at this letter written by White, currently posted on Shaun Usher’s wonderful site Letters of Note.

In 1951 the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals accused E.B. White of not paying his dog tax and “harboring” an unlicensed dog. White wrote the following letter in response to the ASPCA…


12 April 1951

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
York Avenue and East 92nd Street
New York, 28, NY

Dear Sirs:

I have your letter, undated, saying that I am harboring an unlicensed dog in violation of the law. If by “harboring” you mean getting up two or three times every night to pull Minnie’s blanket up over her, I am harboring a dog all right. The blanket keeps slipping off. I suppose you are wondering by now why I don’t get her a sweater instead. That’s a joke on you. She has a knitted sweater, but she doesn’t like to wear it for sleeping; her legs are so short they work out of a sweater and her toenails get caught in the mesh, and this disturbs her rest. If Minnie doesn’t get her rest, she feels it right away. I do myself, and of course with this night duty of mine, the way the blanket slips and all, I haven’t had any real rest in years. Minnie is twelve.

In spite of what your inspector reported, she has a license. She is licensed in the State of Maine as an unspayed bitch, or what is more commonly called an “unspaded” bitch. She wears her metal license tag but I must say I don’t particularly care for it, as it is in the shape of a hydrant, which seems to me a feeble gag, besides being pointless in the case of a female. It is hard to believe that any state in the Union would circulate a gag like that and make people pay money for it, but Maine is always thinking of something. Maine puts up roadside crosses along the highways to mark the spots where people have lost their lives in motor accidents, so the highways are beginning to take on the appearance of a cemetery, and motoring in Maine has become a solemn experience, when one thinks mostly about death. I was driving along a road near Kittery the other day thinking about death and all of a sudden I heard the spring peepers. That changed me right away and I suddenly thought about life. It was the nicest feeling.

You asked about Minnie’s name, sex, breed, and phone number. She doesn’t answer the phone. She is a dachshund and can’t reach it, but she wouldn’t answer it even if she could, as she has no interest in outside calls. I did have a dachshund once, a male, who was interested in the telephone, and who got a great many calls, but Fred was an exceptional dog (his name was Fred) and I can’t think of anything offhand that he wasn’t interested in. The telephone was only one of a thousand things. He loved life — that is, he loved life if by “life” you mean “trouble,” and of course the phone is almost synonymous with trouble. Minnie loves life, too, but her idea of life is a warm bed, preferably with an electric pad, and a friend in bed with her, and plenty of shut-eye, night and days. She’s almost twelve. I guess I’ve already mentioned that. I got her from Dr. Clarence Little in 1939. He was using dachshunds in his cancer-research experiments (that was before Winchell was running the thing) and he had a couple of extra puppies, so I wheedled Minnie out of him. She later had puppies by her own father, at Dr. Little’s request. What do you think about that for a scandal? I know what Fred thought about it. He was some put out.

Sincerely yours,

E. B. White

 

Writer E.B. White and his dachshund Minnie (Photo courtesy Wikipedia)

 

I Was Allergic to Platforms, and Still Am

Elwyn Brooks White grew up as one of six children in Mount Vernon, New York. As Michael Sims details in his article The Nature of E.B. White in the The Chronicle of Higher Education, the young Elwyn was passionate about animals from a young age. He “kept pigeons, chickens, a turkey, ducks, geese. He had a succession of beloved dogs. He helped with the horses, tended his rabbits in their hutch, watched the predatory antics of a stray cat that sometimes camped out under the stable. And sneaking around the stalls, as well as nesting under them, were thieving rats that crept into the subterranean pathways of his imagination as the embodiment of gluttonous dishonesty.”

In 1969 White told the Paris Review that his childhood “lacked for nothing except confidence.”

“I suffered nothing except the routine terrors of childhood: fear of the dark, fear of the future, fear of the return to school after a summer on a lake in Maine, fear of making a appearance on a platform, fear of the lavatory in the school basement where the slate urinals cascaded, fear that I was unknowing about things I should know about. I was, as a child, allergic to pollens and dusts, and still am. I was allergic to platforms, and still am. It may be, as some critics suggest, that it helps to have an unhappy childhood. If so, I have no knowledge of it. Perhaps it helps to have been scared or allergic to pollens—I don’t know.”

 

 

Self-doubt afflicted White throughout his career. As Sims says in his book, The Story of Charlotte’s Web: E. B. White’s Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic,  White was “afraid of commitment and romance and confrontation; he hid behind animals even in his early love poems and letters to his wife.”

“I was twenty-seven or twenty-eight before anything happened that gave me any assurance that I could make a go of writing,” he told the Paris Review. “I had done a great deal of writing, but I lacked confidence in my ability to put it to good use.”

But White persisted, and before long, he was receiving a regular stream of checks from The New Yorker. He went on to publish many books, including the widely-used English language style guide, The Elements of Style, also known as “Strunk & White”.

But even after several successful publications, White struggled with a sense of inadequacy, and a nagging feeling that he had seldom written anything worthwhile. ”When you consider that there are a thousand ways to express even the simplest idea, it is no wonder writers are under a great strain. Writers care greatly how a thing is said—it makes all the difference. So they are constantly faced with too many choices and must make too many decisions.”

 

E.B. White in his boathouse in Allen Cove, Maine. "I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world," White once remarked. "This makes it hard to plan the day.” (Photo by Jill Krementz)

 

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The Sunday Poem: Seamus Heaney

February 18, 2012 in Sunday Poem, Words with 3 Comments

 

Seamus Heaney at a turf bog in Bellaghy wearing his father's coat, hat and walking stick (Bobbie Hanvey Photographic Archives, John J. Burns Library, Boston College)

 

I must admit that I have a soft spot for the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. I scored a copy of his book Poems: 1965-1975 when I was a teenager. The collection is a compilation of Heaney’s earliest books, Death of a Naturalist, Door into the Dark, Wintering Out, and North. Along with the collected poems of T.S. Eliot, Heaney’s book was a volume I turned to again and again in my youth.

By that point, I had read my share of classic poetry in school. The conservative religious school I attended was particularly fond of 17th and 18th century poets like Alexander Pope, Edward Taylor, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Anne Bradstreet. (We skirted right past Byron and Shelley for obvious reasons—they were considered too racy for the eyes of good boys and girls).

Until college, I had never been exposed to contemporary poetry in school. In fact, I don’t think we ever covered 20th century literature in our English classes. The 19th century was fraught enough. (There was Walt Whitman’s homosexuality and those seemingly benign, but dangerous, transcendentalists to contend with). 20th century literature brought further complications for my teachers—religious doubt, the breakdown of traditional hierarchies, plus radical, new poetic forms. It was easier to avoid such topics entirely.

 

 

At a time when I was drowning in heroic couplets, ballads, and Christian allegories, Heaney and Eliot were lifelines in my education. They were my introduction to contemporary poetry. Eventually I would discover poets like William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Adrienne Rich, and Robert Creeley, but Heaney was an essential lynchpin. Heaney taught me that any type of life experience, including that of a farmer’s son in rural Ireland, is fodder for the writer.

In his earliest books, you can sense that Heaney is a man caught between worlds—the slogging, rural life of his Irish youth and the world of letters he aspired to be part of. His father was a farmer and cattle-herder, while his mother’s family worked in a local linen mill.

“Digging,” the first poem in Heaney’s first book Death of a Naturalist, is a fine example of Heaney’s ability to evoke the gritty toil of his rural upbringing. It is a nod to his family and neighbors, and yet there is often a sense of discomfort in these early works—the discomfort of an observer who has set himself apart by choosing a different path: the life of a writer. The final line of “Digging” shows the poet attempting to reconcile these conflicted roles.

Heaney is a master of rhythm and language, and his skill is most apparent when his work is read aloud. This video is a montage of various archive clips of Seamus Heaney reciting “Digging.” The montage was put together by the BBC NI and was broadcast in 2009 on “Seamus Heaney: A Life in Pictures.”

(If you’re reading this post in an email, click here to watch the video.)

 

 

 

 

 

About Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney is widely recognized as one of the major poets of the twentieth century. A native of Northern Ireland, Heaney currently lives in Dublin. Heaney taught at Harvard University from 1985 to 2006, where he was a Visiting Professor, and then Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University (1985-1997) and Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet in Residence (1998-2006).

Heaney has attracted a readership on several continents and has won prestigious literary awards and honors, including the Nobel Prize. As Blake Morrison noted in his work Seamus Heaney, the author is “that rare thing, a poet rated highly by critics and academics yet popular with ‘the common reader.’” Part of Heaney’s popularity stems from his subject matter—modern Northern Ireland, its farms and cities beset with civil strife, its natural culture and language overrun by English rule.

The New York Review of Books essayist Richard Murphy described Heaney as “the poet who has shown the finest art in presenting a coherent vision of Ireland, past and present.” Heaney’s poetry is known for its aural beauty and finely-wrought textures. Often described as a regional poet, he is also a traditionalist who deliberately gestures back towards the “pre-modern” worlds of William Wordsworth and John Clare.

Heaney was born and raised in Castledawson, County Derry, Northern Ireland. The impact of his surroundings and the details of his upbringing on his work are immense. As a Catholic in Protestant Northern Ireland, Heaney once described himself in the New York Times Book Review as someone who “emerged from a hidden, a buried life and entered the realm of education.”

 

"If poetry and the arts do anything,” Heaney has said, “they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness." (Photo by Felix Clay courtesy The Guardian)

 

Eventually studying English at Queen’s University, Heaney was especially moved by artists who created poetry out of their local and native backgrounds—authors such as Ted Hughes, Patrick Kavanagh, and Robert Frost. Recalling his time in Belfast, Heaney once noted: “I learned that my local County Derry [childhood] experience, which I had considered archaic and irrelevant to ‘the modern world’ was to be trusted. They taught me that trust and helped me to articulate it.”

Heaney’s work has always been most concerned with the past, even his earliest poems of the 1960s. According to Morrison, a “general spirit of reverence toward the past helped Heaney resolve some of his awkwardness about being a writer: he could serve his own community by preserving in literature its customs and crafts, yet simultaneously gain access to a larger community of letters.” Indeed, Heaney’s earliest poetry collections— Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969)—evoke “a hard, mainly rural life with rare exactness,” according to Parnassus contributor Michael Wood. Using descriptions of rural laborers and their tasks and contemplations of natural phenomena—filtered through childhood and adulthood—Heaney “makes you see, hear, smell, taste this life, which in his words is not provincial, but parochial; provincialism hints at the minor or the mediocre, but all parishes, rural or urban, are equal as communities of the human spirit,” noted Newsweek correspondent Jack Kroll

As a poet from Northern Ireland, Heaney used his work to reflect upon the “Troubles,” the often-violent political struggles that plagued the country during Heaney’s young adulthood. The poet sought to weave the ongoing Irish troubles into a broader historical frame embracing the general human situation in the books Wintering Out (1973) and North (1975). While some reviewers criticized Heaney for being an apologist and mythologizer, Morrison suggested that the role of political spokesman has never particularly suited Heaney. The author “has written poems directly about the Troubles as well as elegies for friends and acquaintances who have died in them; he has tried to discover a historical framework in which to interpret the current unrest; and he has taken on the mantle of public spokesman, someone looked to for comment and guidance,” noted Morrison. “Yet he has also shown signs of deeply resenting this role, defending the right of poets to be private and apolitical, and questioning the extent to which poetry, however ‘committed,’ can influence the course of history.”

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Sibylle Baier’s Colour Green: An Accidental Classic

February 17, 2012 in Sounds with 5 Comments

 


 

(Note: This article is one of the first posts I wrote for Gwarlingo. I thought Sibylle Baier deserved more attention than she was getting, so I’m resurrecting this post from depths of the archive with the hope that you’ll check out this entrancing album. Colour Green is the perfect music for a Saturday in February. Enjoy!)

 

One of my favorite discoveries this winter was the German singer Sibylle Baier. The story of how her wonderful record, Colour Green, came to be is as interesting as the music itself.

She grew up in Germany in the 50s and 60s. During a particularly low period in her early life, a friend tried to cheer up Baier with a road trip to Strasbourg and the Alps in Genoa. The excursion had a lasting impact. When she returned home, she wrote her first song, “Remember the Day,” in response to her travels with her friend Claudine.

Baier continued to write music for herself and her family. Between 1970 and 1973 she recorded a number of songs on a reel-to-reel tape recorder at her home in Germany. Although her music was featured in the film Umarmungen und andere Sachen, and she played a role in Wim Wenders’ 1973 movie Alice in the Cities, Baier chose not to pursue an acting or music career in the end. Instead, she moved to America and focused on raising her family.


 

These songs might never has seen the light of day if it weren’t for Sibylle’s son Robby. Some 30 years after Baier made these intimate recordings Robby compiled a CD of his mother’s early music to give to family members as gifts. He also gave a copy to J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr., who passed the disc along to Orange Twin, a record label in Athens, Georgia. In 2006 Baier’s music rightfully earned a loyal following when Orange Twin released the songs as the collection Color Green.

Sibylle Baier and her son Robby

The fourteen original songs on the album feature Baier singing and playing acoustic guitar. There are no background vocals or session musicians; the recordings are just as she made them in the early 70s. It was a wise decision to let these lovely home recordings stand on their own–overdubbing only would have muddied her clear, pure vocals. Everything about Colour Green is memorable, most especially Baier’s unique, haunting voice and the intimate lyrics that tell simple stories about daily life.

Baier has a wonderful eye for small, everyday details. One minute, she sings about buttered bread, apple pie, and feeding the dog and cat, and the next, she is quoting the poet T.S. Elliott. And she shares these intimate details with none of the sentimentality or false nostalgia that mars so much acoustic folk music. Baier gently evokes the experience of riding in a car, coming home from work, or visiting the zoo with her daughter and son.
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Filmmaker Hiroshi Teshigahara: Gaudi Made Me Realize the Lines Between the Arts Are Insignificant

February 16, 2012 in Images, Spaces with 0 Comments

 

In Barcelona Hiroshi Teshigahara came face-to-face with Gaudí. "The magic of it overwhelmed me."

 

In the West, Hiroshi Teshigahara is best known as the avant-garde director of the 1964 film Woman in the Dunes–an erotic, surreal film that was nominated for an Academy Award and won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Teshigahara’s haunting shots of sand, skin, and water amid the advancing sand dunes have stayed with me over the years. But there is another Teshigahara film, one that is less well-known, that left an even greater impression on me.

Antonio Gaudi is like no other movie I can think of. Teshigahara’s 72-minute meditation on the Spanish Art-Nouveau architect is essentially wordless. He avoids conventional  narrative and instead, lets Gaudi’s buildings do the talking.

Before watching this film, I didn’t consider myself a fan of the Spanish artist. (George Orwell described Gaudi’s cathedral, La Sagrada Familia, as “one of the most hideous buildings in the world.”) But my judgment was based on ignorance–on some vague, false impression that Gaudi’s work was not much more than bulbous, overdone kitsch.

But after viewing Teshigahara’s breathtaking film, my opinion of the Spanish architect has been entirely transformed. Anotnio Gaudi was nothing less than a visionary genius–an original, madly brilliant artist who was unappreciated and misunderstood in his own time.

 

Teshigahara's passion for Gaudi's work comes through on every frame. He's a patient, attentive director with a craftsman's eye for details. He takes the time he needs, allowing the camera to linger.

 

 

Gaudi's Casa Batllo, Barcelona, Spain (Photo by Roby Saltori via Flickr Commons)

 

 

A still from Teshigahara's "Antonio Gaudi" (Photo courtesy The Criterion Collection)

 

 

Gaudi's Casa Batlló in Barcelona. The roof, terminating in a turret and cross, could represent the sword or spear of Saint George (patron saint of Catalonia), which has been plunged into the back of the dragon. (Photo by Marcel Germain via Flickr Commons)

 

 

A still from Teshigahara's "Antonio Gaudi" (Photo courtesy The Criterion Collection)

 

 

The Casa Milà is Gaudi’s second most visited building in Barcelona. The roof of this apartment building and office block is one of the city’s hidden treasures, for its view of the nearby Sagrada Familia, as well as for its whimsical and imposing sculptures.

 

Teshigahara’s passion for Gaudi’s work comes through on every frame. Once he has set the scene with opening shots of contemporary Barcelona, Teshigahara brings his camera into Gaudi’s universe, taking us up a characteristic Gaudi spiral staircase. He’s a patient, attentive director with a craftsman’s eye for details. He takes the time he needs, allowing the camera to linger. Blue tiles shift in the light like water moving. Mosaics morph into a dragon’s scales. Güell Park, a planned garden village, feels like a surreal, fairy-tale landscape.

Teshigahara moves his camera slowly through these fluid, organic spaces. Slow tracking shots give us a sense that we’re actually inhabiting these bizarre, sublime places. Gaudi’s curved, organic designs are shockingly surreal and erotic. Like Woman in the Dunes, Antonio Gaudi pulses with human sensuality, and yet there is also something of the divine in both Teshigahara’s film and Gaudi’s fertile imagination.

Hiroshi Teshigahara

This meditation on the power of and beauty of nature is enhanced with music and sound effects by the renowned Japanese  composer Toru Takemitsu and two collaborators, Kurodo Mori and Shinji Hori. As the critic Stephen Holden explains, Takemitsu was an eclectic impressionist “whose music blended avant-garde Western techniques, electronics and random compositional methods with more conventional symphonic music and Japanese traditional instruments.”

The spiral motif, associated with the seashell, is emphasized in Takemitsu’s soundtrack, which incorporates the sound of the distant sea. “The score for Gaudi is a kind of free-floating East-meets-West impressionism,” says Holden, “whose organic flow mimics the sprouting curvilinear shapes of Gaudi’s buildings. The score includes four Catalan folk pieces, electronically altered and combined with other sounds.”

Antonio Gaudi is a tactile film–a visual poem that lingers in your memory long after its over. If you have the patience to listen and look and to defer any pressing questions you may have about Antionio Gaudi the man until the DVD extras, you will find the melding of Gaudi’s inventive architecture, Teshigahara’s sensitive camerawork, and Takemitsu’s haunting score a rewarding experience.

 

A spiral staircase in the bell tower of Gaudi's Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. The spiral motif, associated with the seashell, is emphasized in Toru Takemitsu’s soundtrack, which incorporates the sound of the distant sea. (Photo courtesy SantiMB via Flickr Commons)

 

 

The atrium of Casa Mila (Photo by Chong Ming courtesy WikiCommons)

 

 

The Park Güell bench as seen in Teshigahara's "Antonio Gaudi" (Photo courtesy the Criterion Collection)

 

 

Gaudí’s structures, Teshigahara once said, "made me realize that the lines between the arts are insignificant. Gaudí worked beyond the borders of various arts and made me feel that the world in which I was living still left a great many possibilities."

 

 

Tile patterns from the Park Güell Bench, designed by Gaudi (Photo courtesy Make Mine Mosaic)

 

 

The staircase at Casa Batllo (Photo by Chong Ming courtesy WikiCommons)

 

But how exactly did the avant-garde, Japanese filmmaker Hiroshi Teshigahara develop such an intense appreciation for the architecture of Antonio Gaudi? I was curious to know more.

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Ansel Adams: I Know What Love Is

February 14, 2012 in Images, Words with 3 Comments

 

A portrait of photographer Ansel Adams, which first appeared in the 1950 Yosemite Field School yearbook (Photo by J. Malcolm Greany)

 

Today is Valentine’s Day–a day for candy hearts, sentimental cards, flowers, garish lingerie, and romantic dinners for two. It’s another holiday aimed at consumers, a holiday especially tortuous for my friends who are “single and still looking.”

So today, out of respect to the singles of the world, I’m bucking the trend and sharing a post that’s fit for everyone, regardless of your romantic status.

 

Ansel Adams, photographing in Yosemite National Park from atop his car in about 1942 (Photo courtesy the Cedric Wright Family)

 

The website Letters of Note is a treasure trove of interesting correspondence. I recently came across this moving letter written by the legendary landscape photographer Ansel Adams in the Letters of Note archive…

In 1936, in the midst of an overwhelming workload and the near-demise of his marriage, Adams suffered a nervous breakdown. After a stay in the hospital, desperately in need of escape, Adams returned with his family to the one place where he could find solace: Yosemite, California.

Some months later, as his health returned, he wrote this letter to his best friend, Cedric Wright. A violinist and wilderness photographer, Wright was Adams’s mentor and closest friend. In his autobiography, Adams described Wright as “almost an occupant of another world and a creator and messenger of beauty and mysteries. Perhaps his greatest gift was that of imparting confidence to those who were wavering on the edge of fear and indecision; often it was me.”

 

Ansel Adams, Cedric Wright, and Adams' son Michael packing for a trip in 1941

 

June 19, 1937

Dear Cedric,

A strange thing happened to me today. I saw a big thundercloud move down over Half Dome, and it was so big and clear and brilliant that it made me see many things that were drifting around inside of me; things that related to those who are loved and those who are real friends.

For the first time I know what love is; what friends are; and what art should be.

Love is a seeking for a way of life; the way that cannot be followed alone; the resonance of all spiritual and physical things. Children are not only of flesh and blood — children may be ideas, thoughts, emotions. The person of the one who is loved is a form composed of a myriad mirrors reflecting and illuminating the powers and thoughts and the emotions that are within you, and flashing another kind of light from within. No words or deeds may encompass it.

Friendship is another form of love — more passive perhaps, but full of the transmitting and acceptance of things like thunderclouds and grass and the clean granite of reality.

Art is both love and friendship, and understanding; the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of Things, it is more than kindness which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is the recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the inter-relations of these.

I wish the thundercloud had moved up over Tahoe and let loose on you; I could wish you nothing finer.

Ansel

 

Ansel Adams, Half Dome, Merced River. Mural sized (Photo courtesy Sotheby's-Click to Enlarge)

 

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The Sunday Poem: Naomi Shihab Nye

February 11, 2012 in Sunday Poem, Words with 1 Comment

 

 

Naomi Shihab Nye (Photo by Kin Man Hui for the San Antonio Express)

 

This Sunday I have a humorous, poignant poem by Naomi Shihab Nye to share.

Nye’s found poem, which is comprised entirely of statements made by her young son, is a reminder that we’re surrounded by comic, inventive language on a daily basis, but that we often overlook the poetry in these everyday encounters.

In her introduction, Nye quotes the poet William Stafford. When people asked him, “When did you become a poet?” he would respond, “That’s not the right question…The question is, ‘When did you stop being a poet?’”

I laughed out loud more than once while watching Naomi Shihab Nye read “One Boy Told Me.” One of the best things about having a blog like Gwarlingo is that I can pass Nye’s hilarious poem along to you.

Enjoy your Sunday.

(If you’re reading this in an email, click here to watch the video. If you want to leave a comment, click the link and scroll to the bottom.)

 

 

 

 

About Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye was born on March 12, 1952, in St. Louis, Missouri, to a Palestinian father and an American mother. During her high school years, she lived in Ramallah in Palestine, the Old City in Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she later received her B.A. in English and world religions from Trinity University.

Known for poetry that lends a fresh perspective to ordinary events, people, and objects, Nye has said that, for her, “the primary source of poetry has always been local life, random characters met on the streets, our own ancestry sifting down to us through small essential daily tasks.”

Nye is the author of numerous books of poems, including You and Yours (2005), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, as well as Fuel (1998), Red Suitcase (1994), and Hugging the Jukebox (1982).

After the World Trade Center bombing in 2001, Nye became an active voice for Arab-Americans, speaking out against both terrorism and prejudice. The lack of understanding between Americans and Arabs led her to collect poems she had written which dealt with the Middle East and her experiences as an Arab-American into one volume. 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2002) received praise for the timeliness of its message.

Nye gives voice to her experience as an Arab-American through poems about heritage and peace that overflow with a humanitarian spirit. About her work, the poet William Stafford has said, “her poems combine transcendent liveliness and sparkle along with warmth and human insight. She is a champion of the literature of encouragement and heart. Reading her work enhances life.”

In addition to her poetry collections, Nye has produced fiction for children, poetry and song recordings, and poetry translations. As a children’s writer, Nye is acclaimed for her sensitivity and cultural awareness. Her book Sitti’s Secrets (1994) concerns an Arab-American child’s relationship with her sitti—Arabic for grandmother—who lives in a Palestinian village. Hazel Rochman, in Booklist, praised Nye for capturing the emotions of the “child who longs for a distant grandparent.” In 1997 Nye published Habibi, her first young-adult novel. Readers meet Liyana Abboud, an Arab-American teen who moves with her family to her Palestinian father’s native country during the 1970s, only to discover that the violence in Jerusalem has not yet abated.

Nye has received awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, the Carity Randall Prize, the International Poetry Forum, as well as four Pushcart Prizes. She has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow. In 1988 she received The Academy of American Poets’ Lavan Award, selected by W. S. Merwin.

Her poems and short stories have appeared in various journals and reviews throughout North America, Europe, and the Middle and Far East. She has traveled to the Middle East and Asia for the United States Information Agency three times, promoting international goodwill through the arts.

She currently lives in San Antonio, Texas. She was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2010.

Nye told Contemporary Authors: “I have always loved the gaps, the spaces between things, as much as the things. I love staring, pondering, mulling, puttering. I love the times when someone or something is late—there’s that rich possibility of noticing more, in the meantime…Poetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer, on its own.”

 

 

This video is part of the Poetry Everywhere project airing on public television. Produced by David Grubin Productions and WGBH Boston, in association with the Poetry Foundation. Filmed at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. “One Boy Told Me” © Naomi Shihab Nye. Biography courtesy The Poetry Foundation and the Academy of American Poets.

How To Feel Miserable As An Artist

February 9, 2012 in Process with 2 Comments

 

Edward Hopper, "Automat," 1927. Oil on canvas, 28 in × 36, Des Moines Art Center.


This week a reader sent me a copy of “How to Feel Miserable As An Artist.” This marvelous list was created by illustrator Keri Smith and is part of The Artist’s Survival Kit, which Keri wrote and designed.
 
I like Keri’s list because it emphasizes the ways in which we tend to stay in our safe zones as artists. As I’ve discussed previously, pushing ourselves takes courage and risk, which is inevitably uncomfortable.

Sometimes we need a reminder that it’s okay to fail. It’s alright to disappoint people if it means we are working deeply and stretching the boundaries of our comfort zone.

Regardless of your artistic discipline, I suspect you’ll find a few things on this list that resonate…

 

 

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Creative Spaces: Painter Kim Uchiyama

February 7, 2012 in Creative Spaces, Images, Spaces with 5 Comments

 

Kim Uchiyama in her Tribeca studio (Photo by Michelle Aldredge)


 
Kim Uchiyama’s studio is located on a quiet, tree-lined side-street in Lower Manhattan. On a crisp fall day in mid-November over tea and brunch, I visited Kim in her Tribeca apartment. We spent the day looking at art and discussing her new painting series, her artistic development and influences, and the ups and downs of the creative life.

Her space is decorated in a minimalist, modern style, but is also intimate and warm–the perfect blend of Kim’s Iowa roots and vibrant life as a New York painter. The bedroom is the coziest room in the apartment with many personal photos, mementos, and artworks that have special meaning to Kim. The focal points of the living room are Kim’s marvelous art collection, her books, and the striking view of the Hudson River glimpsed through the windows.

The painting studio is in a separate room from the living space. It is tidy, but functional, and in many ways is the heart of the apartment. Bright canvases are stacked and spread throughout the studio; painter’s tape, paint, and brushes are close at hand. Postcards of favorite paintings and places are pinned to the walls.

 

Kim Uchiyama's apartment and painting studio is on a quiet Tribeca sidestreet overlooking the Hudson River. (Photo by Michelle Aldredge)

 

 

Kim Uchiyama, "Excavation," 2010. Oil on canvas, 20" x 16" (Photo by Kevin Noble)

 

 

Over tea and brunch at the dining room table, Kim and I discussed her new painting series, her artistic development and influences, and the ups and downs of the creative life. (Photo by Michelle Aldredge)

 

For those of you unfamiliar with Kim Uchiyama’s work, a short introduction may be useful.

Patient, attentive viewers will find a lot to enjoy in Uchiyama’s paintings. Art works that could be mistaken for simple, colorful designs at first glance unfold into a deeper and richer experience upon close observation. Layers bubble beneath layers, colors recede or emerge from the canvas. Music is a useful parallel, since Uchiyama creates variations on a theme, much like a composer or jazz musician would–texture, rhythm, timbre, and harmony are integral to each piece. There is an exciting tension between order and variation.

As she explains in our interview, place and landscape are central to Kim’s work. Whether she is influenced by the light of southern Italy or the color of the sky or sea, her work is an expression of her own experience within a landscape. She is not trying to capture a place literally, as a realist painter might, or make some grand political or personal statement, but is instead, trying to convey something deeper and more mysterious.

When viewing an abstract painting like Uchiyama’s, it is useful to quiet the mind and let the senses take over. Only then can you begin to appreciate the complexities, nuances, and visceral pleasures of her work.

Uchiyama’s art owes something to Josef Albers’ chromatic interactions with concentric, colored squares and to Hans Hofmann and Nicolas Carone’s ideas about spatial illusion and color relationships. But the writings of painter Agnes Martin are also strikingly relevant:

It is quite commonly thought that the intellect is responsible for everything that is made and done. It is commonly thought that everything that is can be put into words. But there is a wide range of emotional response that we make that cannot be put into words. We are so used to making these emotional responses that we are not consciously aware of them until they are represented in artwork…

Beauty illustrates happiness: the wind in the grass, the glistening waves following each other, the flight of birds – all speak of happiness.

The clear blue sky illustrates a different kind of happiness, and the soft dark night a different kind. There are an infinite number of different kinds of happiness.

The response is the same for the observer as it is for the artist. The response to art is the real art field.

Composition is an absolute mystery. It is dictated by the mind. The artist searchers for certain sounds or lines that are acceptable to the mind and finally an arrangement of them that is acceptable. The acceptable compositions arouse certain feelings of appreciation in the observer. Some compositions appeal to some, and some to others.

Like Martin, Uchiyama’s earliest paintings were landscapes. (You can see two of Kim’s early works below). Both artists eventually found a deeper, more power expression through abstraction. After all, it is not the actual sky or ocean that interests these painters–it is more elusive qualities like light, space, and color, and the ways in which these visual sensations affect the attentive observer.

We’ve all seen a vivid, memorable sunset. The impulse to capture such a sunset through painting or photography is as much about capturing the sensation of being there as it is about capturing a beautiful scene. These perfect and elusive moments of awareness are an underlying force in both Agnes Martin and Kim Uchiyama’s work.

Kim has many fascinating things to say about her creative development and about painting itself. Enjoy the interview and this special tour of her studio…

(Click images to enlarge)

 

Kim Uchiyama, "Archeo," 2010. Oil on canvas, 20" x 16" When viewing an abstract painting like Uchiyama's, it is useful to quiet the mind and let the senses take over. Only then can you begin to appreciate the complexities, nuances, and visceral pleasures of her work. (Photo by Kevin Noble)

 

 

Many of the art works on the living room wall were created by friends or by some of Kim's favorite artists. The piece above the bookcase is from the "Archaeo" series, completed by Kim in 2010. Her new series of paintings (resting on the floor) are much larger in scale and brighter in color. (Photo by Michelle Aldredge)

 

 

Music is a useful parallel, since Uchiyama creates variations on a theme, much like a composer or jazz musician would--texture, rhythm, timbre, and harmony are integral to each piece. There is an exciting tension between order and variation. (Photo by Michelle Aldredge)

 

Michelle: How long have you lived and worked here in Tribeca?

Kim: I’ve been living and working continuously in Tribeca since the mid ’90s. Originally I started here in 1976, two blocks from the newly constructed World Trade Towers, before the area even had a name. Then came studios in Chinatown, the East Village, upper Chelsea and finally, back to Tribeca.

 

Do you have any particular work routine that is best for you? Is it difficult to live and work in the same space? Do you limit your computer and phone use while you’re painting or drawing?

Where possible, I prefer to wake up and start the day in the studio. Straight from sleep and not yet conversational with the rest of the world, I find it’s easier to become immersed in my thoughts and connect to the language of painting. I’ve had outside studios at various points, but I do prefer to live and work in the same space for this reason. Living where you work also facilitates some very off-the-cuff glimpses and sideways glances — sometimes in the middle of the night — at the work in progress, which can be really illuminating because you’re not expecting anything.

 

"My choices in painting are intuitive. I spend a lot of time looking at the canvas I am working on. I will first "see" a color, and then depending on the color, I will have a sense of the shape of that color." (Photo by Michelle Aldredge)

 

 

Kim Uchiyama, "Light Study #4," 2011. Oil on canvas. (Photo by Kevin Noble)

 

 

"I was always drawing as child and very much wanted to become an artist, though I wasn't really sure how to go about it. Drake University had a program in Florence, Italy which I attended in 1975-76 with the idea of studying art history. Living there, and standing before the great originals I'd seen only in reproduction, inspired me to paint." (Photo by Michelle Aldredge)

 

Did you grown up in an artistic household or did you have to make your own way as a young artist? You have a small image of Florence in your studio. Was Florence significant to your artistic development in some way?
 
Continue Reading…

Brittany Howard & The Alabama Shakes: From Postal Worker To Powerhouse

February 6, 2012 in Sounds with 5 Comments

 

 

One of the albums I’m most anticipating this spring is Boys and Girls, the first full-length record from the garage-soul band the Alabama Shakes.

Brittany Howard’s soulful, sandpaper voice channels the likes of Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, and Aretha Franklin, with a touch of Billie Holiday thrown in. It’s true I have a soft spot for soulful Southern singers from my own neck of the woods, but I can’t think of a more memorable voice to emerge on the music scene in ages. There is so much passion, ache, and groove in Howard’s voice, that she makes the microphone bleed. The range of emotion she imparts is nothing less than remarkable. She can be ferocious, but also incredibly tender.

Howard started writing songs at age four with her older sister, who died of a brain tumor in 1998. “After she passed away, I didn’t have anybody to do that with,” she told Rolling Stone, “But I found her guitar, started playing and never really stopped.”

Only six months ago, the Alabama Shakes’ lead singer was working as a postal worker. But after the band debuted these four jaw-dropping tracks on an EP last fall, Howard and her band mates Heath Fogg, Zac Cockrell, Brittany Howard and Steve Johnson, suddenly found themselves thrust into the limelight.

 


 
The band’s live show has been receiving rave reviews. After their debut performance at the Bowery Ballroom, Jon Pareles in The New York Times described their set as “a thunderbolt dressed in bluejeans.” David Byrne, Adele, and Booker T. Jones are all fans of the Alabama Shakes. Three upcoming concerts in London are sold out, and the band is already the talk of of South by Southwest, and they haven’t even performed yet.

“When I get to play with Zac, Heath and Steve, I feel invincible,” Howard recently explained to The South Rail. “I love them as musicians and I love them as people. It’s like, I get to sing into this microphone about whatever I want and I got a 42 decibel rock ‘n roll band that’s gonna give me courage and back me up on it. I feel free and easy. I don’t care what someone is thinking, I forget if I’m hurting, I’m not worrying about bad news, and I don’t care for that little while about those bills I have to pay back at home. I’m just reveling in my own world.”

I can’t wait for summer to come around so I can play these songs with the window rolled down. Keep an eye on the Alabama Shakes. This new band is going places.

You can check out their four-song EP right here:
 


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The Sunday Poem: Rodney Jones

February 4, 2012 in Sunday Poem, Words with 2 Comments

 

 

 

The Eviction

 

My privilege to have witnessed this, so late in the middle
      of the twentieth century
that already it seemed historical, almost like having seen
      Erasmus or Thucydides:
a shack at the end of a field road, an eczema of garden,
      domineckers on the porch–
the whole place stank of sweat, coal oil, and excrement,
      and under it, the ghosts
of things rotted and desiccated so far past the organic
      there remainded only
the stark elemental testimony of sulfur and ammonia.

Why were we there? Because the wife, the principal filth,
      big-man big
and raccoon mean, had been bootlegging and pimping
      the grown daughters,
and the husband, the little cross-eyed gimp with the chaw
      mark like a burn scar
down the neck creases, who might have been the father
      of seven or eight
of the fourteen living children, like to lay up drunk
      while the udders
of the Jerseys wilted and Johnson grass choked the cotton.

What else? Feuds, wrecks, debts, petty thieveries, arm-
      twistings, and beatings–
When my grandfather, at the behest of my grandmother,
      told the woman to get out,
she had sulled up, there had been a quarrel, a death threat;
      he had taken out a warrant,
and now that the thirty days of the warrant had expired,
      and he might
physically evict them, move their belongings out of the house
      and set them on the road,
with what care they loaded these things onto the wagon.

First the brown sofa with the springs working out of it,
      then the cable-spool table,
cane chairs nailed together or bound with baling twine,
      fruit jars, kettles, and pots–
A straining and grunting with eyes–but the girl Sheila–
      she was my friend–
and Paul–he would go to college and become something–
      an architect? an engineer?
With what omissions do I lard memory? By what secret
      jurisprudence
do my inner committees invent logic and a sentence?

Almost half a century, what does it matter that the terrible
      mother of sharecroppers
who prayed to Bacchus to become anything other than rows
      of cotton
has turned into a stand of pines and risen into a paper factory?
      The shack is gone.
One night three drunk volunteer firemen came and set a fire
      to practice putting it out.
I know the man who puts his neighbor out in the road
      is a cold son of a bitch,
yet I am no sweeter than my grandfather. I study the ground.

 

 

 

About Rodney Jones

Rodney Jones was born in 1950 in rural Alabama. He has described his childhood and youth as “very much like being a part of another age. Our community still did not have electricity until I was 5 or 6 years old.” His poetry frequently celebrates the relationships and events of the small, agrarian community he was born into, as well as preserves the kinds of vernacular speech he grew up hearing.

Jones has noted of his youth in Alabama, “Many of our neighbors were illiterate, but books were the alternative and, even among the illiterate, there was a vital oral tradition: stories, jokes, music, memorized scripture.” Jones’s work is known for its investigation of place and memory, and its use of narrative, anecdote, and image. In books from his first celebrated debut, The Story They Told Us of Light (1980), which was chosen by Elizabeth Bishop for the Associated Writing Programs Award series, to the Pulitzer-prize nominated Elegy for the Southern Drawl (1999) and Salvation Blues (2006).

His most recent book is Imaginary Logic (2011), which includes the poem “Eviction.” The poem also appears in the 2011 edition of the Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses.

Jones has written narrative poems that are also philosophical meditations. In an interview with Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum, Jones noted that his “narratives tend to be double-narratives, which not only involve a story, but also an idea of the story, or a philosophical counterpoint that sort of tags along and pipes up now and then…”

Jones studied at the University of Alabama and the University of North Carolina, where he earned his MFA. Since 1985 he has taught at the University of Illinois-Carbondale, where he is professor of English.

His many honors and awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He received the Harper Lee Award in 2003 and the prestigious Kingsley-Tufts Award in 2007.

Celebrated for his rigorous, thoughtful, and yet accessible style, Jones has earned high praise throughout his career. Robert Wrigley called him “a poet whose work is intellectually sparkling and at the same time beautifully readable.” In Poetry critic David Baker said Jones was “one of the best, most generous, and most brilliantly readable poets currently making poems in America.” And the New York Times Book Review noted, “Jones is a rowdy sort of poet who packs his language with noise. His poems balance on the edge of cacophony, then slip back into a clarity that is sometimes astonishing.”

 

“The Eviction” appears in Imaginary Logic by Rodney Jones. Copyright © 2011 by Rodney Jones. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Rodney Jones biography courtesy The Poetry Foundation.

 

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