Week II: Course Blog & Personal Websites

Carrie Mae Weems, Self-Portrait, Santiago de Cuba

Good class last night. Some of you (all of you) are pushing yourselves on the work. That's great. A little more conversation  from your end--immediate reactions are always good, no matter where they take us. And, as I said to Monica, it's fine when you find yourself contradicting me! (Read that sentence again!)

Here's the class blog url:   http://anthonydubovsky27.blogspot.com/

I'll post our words, and the poems--and whatever else seems appropriate to my end of the class--week by week.

I want each of you to set up a blog as well. On blogger.com (you need gmail password for this). Post work each week--and post writing to go with it--100 words is fine. What to write? I have no idea--but let the words emerge as you're working on the visual work. We live in a world where words tend to take precedence (even with all the lip-service to visual culture)--so a fluidity in writing your own way--that is, finding your own way(s) to write remains important. Your own voice. Especially in concert with the rest of your work...

_____

Regarding  Carrie Mae Weems (a wonderful artist). Has a show at the Guggenheim right now. Read Holland Cotter's review in  the NYT. He's a very good (and sympathetic) writer...you can learn from how he writes as well as from what he says...

Week II: PROVIDE

Roger Minick, from Delta West (1968)

Back from the Fields

Peter Everwine

Until nightfall my son ran in the fields,

looking for God knows what.

Flowers, perhaps. Odd birds on the wing.

Something to fill an empty spot.

Maybe a luminous angel

or a country girl with a secret dark.

He came back empty-handed,

or so I thought.

Now I find them:

thistles, goatheads,

the barbed weeds

all those with hooks or horns

the snaggle-toothed, the grinning ones

those wearing lantern jaws,

old ones in beards, leapers

in silk leggings, the multiple

pocked moons and spiny satellites, all those

with juices and saps

like the fingers of thieves

nation after nation of grasses

that dig in, that burrow, that hug winds

and grab handholds

in whatever lean place.

It’s been a good day.

Poem copyright ©2004 by Peter Everwine, whose most recent book of poetry is From the Meadow: Selected and New Poems, Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2004. Poem reprinted from The Place That Inhabits Us, Sixteen Rivers Press, 2010, by permission of Peter Everwine and the publisher.

Roger Minick

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"...see that ye love one another with a pure heart fervently..." (I Peter 1:22)

 

 

Week I: TOUCH

Albert Pinkham Ryder

The word: TOUCH

Hi everyone--good first class. Nudge drawing discussion. Good group. I have numbers down to 10--should work. We'll see about Room 101, 6pm sharp next Tuesday, bring a small candle. (Someone bring matches too) Discuss alternatives following, if need be.

Also--I want you to know that I don't see 280 as therapy--or at least I wouldn't use that word. Rather, when the emphasis is on work--beautiful work, made with the hands, with feeling--that takes us to the place we need to be. It's my reason for doing the course (and, I'd hope, for everything else I do). It's ALL creative--art, music, poems, life...

That's our goal...

________

Here's Theodor Roethke: 

The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.   

I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?   

I hear my being dance from ear to ear.   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?   

God bless the Ground!   I shall walk softly there,   

And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?   

The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do   

To you and me; so take the lively air,   

And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.   

What falls away is always. And is near.   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   

I learn by going where I have to go.

Theodore Roethke, “The Waking” from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. Copyright 1953 by Theodore Roethke. Reprinted with the permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.


Source: The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (Doubleday, 1961)