Craft Heaven
The cusp: a potter at her wheel, wood turner at his bench, weaver and loom, blacksmith and forge, fiddler and fiddle, glass-maker and fire, writer and page.
As I prepare to teach Crafting Words at the J. C. Campbell Folk School (August 22-24), I am drawn to what unites artists. How does a poet meet a photographer? With awe and respect. We share ideals: perseverance, attentiveness, desire, delight, despair, communication, and the ability to acknowledge the muse and at times, let her have her way.
We have Brasstown, Penland, Black Mountain, Saluda, Hendersonville, and Asheville in close range. These communities are small heavens open to ordinary and extraordinary people. Other craft communities I’ve known are Berea, Kentucky, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. We don’t have to travel to New Mexico for turqouise and silver. (Do go for the opera!)
The heavens in our vicinity are everywhere: Grove Arcade, Biltmore Village, The Arboretum, The Folk Art Center on the Parkway, and downtown Asheville. In fact, there are more venues with crafts available than there are venues without crafts. What restaurant doesn’t have a water color or photograph of a waterfall? My dermatologist’s waiting room is a gallery of photographs. It almost makes a biopsy worth the trouble (almost).
This is how we are supposed to be in this world: present and in awe. ~ Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird)
Artisans are struck with awe by the weave, center, turn, piece, and color in their work. Writers are too. All crafters share tools: line, rhythm, form, articulation, color, content, rhythm and melody. I get melody! You don’t have to have a dulcimer to sing. I have known clay pots to sing to me, turned bowls to call my name (oh, so quiet they are); a shawl at the Folk Art Center swayed my way once.
How can I leave them behind? I carry their song to the page. Poet means ‘maker.’ Our craft is wordsmithing.
The Poet Dreaming in the Artist’s House: Contemporary Poems About Visual Art, published by Milkweed Editions in 1984, is a romp of poems written by observers from Florence, Italy, to Chicago. Writers enter the artist’s realm, hook, line and sink there. “We make a difference in what we see,” suggest editors Emilie Buchwald and Ruth Roston.
There is a long tradition of literary pictorialism. Add your name to the list. There is no lack of museums, galleries, shops, dentist’s offices, restaurants, or studios where you will be welcome to observe and respond.
The Painter Dreaming in the Scholar’s House
In memory of Paul Klee and Paul Terence Freely
The painter’s eye follows the relation out.
His work is not to paint the visible,
He says, it is to render visible.
– – –
For such a man, art is an act of faith:
Prayer the study of it, as Blake says
And praise the practice; nor does he divide
Making from teaching, or from theory.
The three are one, and in his hours of art
There shines a happiness through darkest themes,
As though spirit and sense were not at odds.
A section of a four verse poem by Howard Nemerov from “Poets Dreaming In The Artist’s House”