2D3D Poetry Show Featuring Lady Di, Amelia, Nefertiti Photo Poem Montages

Photographer Robyn Beattie and I are very proud to announce that three of our photo poem montages were chosen to be featured as part of a 2D3D visual poetry show hosted next month by the LH Horton Jr. Gallery at San Joaquin Delta College (Center for the Arts, curator Chandra Cerrito). Authors included as point of departure for the artwork range from Ovid, Rilke, Dickens, Coleridge and Tolkien to more contemporary authors such as Neruda, Ashbery and Alexandra Teague.

Robyn and I will be driving to Stockton for the opening reception on October 4^th, from 5-7. We are thrilled to have this chance to share our work with a larger audience and excited to meet the rest of the exhibiting artists.

 In lieu of the haul to Stockton, the entire show can be viewed via the website.

Our montages chosen for the show: “She Dressed in a Hurry, for Lady Di,” “Amelia,” and our most recently finished montage (just last month), “Nefertiti Among Us.” “Lady Di” and “Nefertiti Among Us” feature my father on piano performing the work of Scriabin and Bartok while “Amelia” features the voice of Lori O’Hara and an original guitar score written and performed by Michael Greenberg.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, while I’ve been somewhat (joyfully) confined to the domestic monastery, Robyn’s burgeoning life as an artist and photographer means we have beautiful crossover and opportunity to include works by other artists as she ventures out into the world with her immaculate eye and records a trail of where she’s been for us to harvest.

Featured within the photo poem montage “Nefertiti Among Us” we have an amazing mummy mask by E. McK. Filmer, dolls by Margaret Keelan, and a detail from Michael Cookinham’s painting, “Mummy Dreams.” “Amelia” contains artwork by Loreen Barry (a frail butterfly and markings we borrowed to imply hieroglyphics) as well as the bronze airplane sculpture and shadow of the same by Monty Monty.

Robyn and I are mid-process creating new montages for a series of poems based on the imagined life of Guinevere as well as a montage to accompany a poem based on the Italian fairytale, The Three Oranges. I hope you’ll stop by the gallery site, either in person or via virtual tour, to celebrate with us and check out the range of artistic response to poetry.

Beauty to Memory and The Scarf Prose Poetry Collaboration with Liz Brennan live at Perhaps, Maybe

Poet Liz Brennan (who I’m happy to claim as my writing buddy for the last five plus years) and I have finally gotten around to collaborating with poetry, thanks to Liz’s gentle invitation and perseverance (I’m eternally grateful as I’ve been suffering from a poetry lull, having allowed the hats of editing, blogging, interviewing, teaching, to eclipse the midnight muse).

Liz’s blog reminds me of a mobius strip; she’s arrived at an ingenious structure, each week posting a tiny prose poem that begins, Perhaps….Followed by a second prose poem that begins, Maybe…

Here are our first two collaborations, with others in the wings:

Beauty to Memory

The Scarf  (here, the obsession with Amelia Earhart—how could it not—goes on, so if you liked this poem and you haven’t seen the photo poem montage yet—a prior collaboration with photographer Robyn Beattie, check it out here: Amelia

Photo Poem Montage for Amelia Earhart live

Amelia (both the poem, and the photo poem montage) in honor of Amelia Earhart, is up at V’s place, a new website hosted by E. Victoria Flynn. (updated May 2014: is up now at YouTube).

I met Victoria several years ago over at She Writes when I joined the invaluable writing thread she hosts at She Writes, titled Mother Writer!, and conversely, I invited Victoria to put up our very first guest post at Mother, Writer, Mentor: A Straw Hat for Mama; I hope you’ll stop by and give her a read and a comment if you are in the mood.

To create the photo poem montage Amelia, I had the continued luxury of working with the beautiful photos of Robyn Beattie. How to convey an expansive sky, but without using sky photos per se? How to imply the body but not use the human body? We are up to our usual tricks in this montage, abalone sky, metal sculpture for body, the work of several Sonoma County artists slipped in too: Loreen Barry (butterfly) and Monty Monty (look for his tiny dark bronze-colored airplane, as well as the shadow of one of his other sculptures across a wall in muted beige tones). I may be somewhat tethered to the domestic monastery, but Robyn—her eyes do the ferreting when I can’t during these projects.

New to this collaboration: original guitar music by Michael Greenberg, who I have to thank here for recording the tracks for She Dressed in a Hurry (for Lady Di) and Nefertiti on the Astral as well as a number of tracks for upcoming photo montages in the works. Not only did we pull Michael into our creative process with his original guitar score, but his wife (our friendship goes back to high school), as my voice was shot the day we went to record. Lori O'Hara , a talented writer and blogger herself, stepped up to the plate and hence we have her dreamy, smooth voice reading the poem.

At one point in our process last year, a sensationalist article made it into Yahoo’s headlines reporting the possible discovery of Amelia Earhart’s remains on a South Pacific island, but when I “fell for it” and followed the link,  the article quickly degenerated into trivia:  were the remains in fact turtle parts, and what to make of the random make-up found nearby, raising questions concerning Earhart’s make-up product use…

I have little faith our Amelia would bring such vanities onto her airplane; she doesn’t strike me as the type, rugged beauty that she was. But Robyn and I both enjoyed the nod to the montage we were quietly, secretly making. Perhaps, more likely, Amelia would don a scarf…if you want a bit of the read deal, here’s her actual scarf (San Diego Air and Space Museum), though it’s a shame it isn’t gracing the neck of an aviatrix right now…

The Tenth Stair and the Making of “Amelia”

Lately, I’m Owl in Arnold Lobel’s children’s story “Upstairs and Downstairs” from the collection, Owl at Home, in which Owl spends the evening rushing from his downstairs to his upstairs, calling, whenever he arrives in either location, “Owl, are you there?!” only to rush madly to the opposite spot to ask the same question of himself in the new spot. He never answers (how can he?) and finally, in exhaustion, sits on the middle stair, where he can best survey both destinations

The Tenth stair is not a bad location, and who wouldn’t want to live in any one of Lobel’s settings (given the sloping ceilings of Frog and Toad’s worlds, the moonlit path extending before solitary Grasshopper, the armchair and hot bowl of soup waiting—once Weasel’s outsmarted—for Mouse, arched neck of lamp with blossom shade warming head and book).

While the tenth stair’s a good metaphor for our psychic position, I have little desire to write about our family’s two-city dilemma nor the siphon of creative energy resulting from missed airplanes, trips to the ER, work obligations, the overlay of possible new grids and patterns to forge in a new city while still driving the old--you know, the human minutae song of what needs to be done, done better, now, while slicing cucumbers for lunches, peeling bandaids for skinned foreheads and vacuuming bobby pins up in the wake of the Sunbeam Fairy on her way to weekend Nutcracker practice.

I sequestered a day, though, to sit beside Robyn, my accomplice, so we could preview her images for the making of three new photo-poem montages.

And mercifully, within moments of sitting beside her with my double-bergamot Earl (tea housed in a substantial globe-bottomed Barbara Hoffman muted orange and grey gold petalled mug), I’m “home”—at peace, and the images for the poem “Amelia” take an order in my mind: here, opalescent mounds of buried pearls in an abalone shell will echo a line of cream buttons down the waist of a crepe dress will echo the silver rivets of an airplane’s wing.

Since the poem names its own set of images, it’s tricky which photos to choose…not overstate, not understate or compete with the words. What furthers the dream? Like here, these milk tendrils of brushed wool, so like incense rings, barely present enough to touch.

Because the poem isn’t about flying, or lovers, directly. But transport past thresholds alone. “And god approving” before the sun breaks through that sliver of sky-time, pre-dawn (finite! mercurial!) when hearing the sound of your own breath is enough.

Photo, abalone: Robyn Beattie www.robynbeattie.com

Link to our first photo montage:
at the Mom Egg.

To view more of Barbara Hoffman’s work:

http://www.occidentalpotteryandwood.com/

A Summer Solstice Promise

I bark the admonition about non-retrievable body parts to my son for the third time as we course in a four-door car over the blue bridge into Coronado, his elbow and hand buffeted by the air current inches from the concrete dividers. I’m thinking about an article I read on the airplane the day before about some kind soul in China employed solely to out-sprint prospective suicides as they scale a bridge probably about this height. No sentry guards this California bridge, but suicide counseling signs--bearing an 800 number--flank north and southbound traffic on-ramps.

The look on my son’s face (his fun so wrecked, his experiment in partial flying so hammered) pulls me out of my free association. While I feel in the right as a parent, I see evidence of a self better shed, like the rich merchant in Heinrich Zimmer’s The King and The Corpse who refuses to give up a pair of battered slippers. The merchant, though he can certainly afford a new pair of slippers, focuses his attention instead on greater and greater money making schemes. At length, he accidentally dons a pair of fine slippers that do not belong to him. Then his misfortunes begin as his original slippers refuse to be buried, forgotten, and left behind much to the merchant’s dismay and eventual ruin.

Zimmer’s analysis of the tale equates the slippers with an aspect of the self the merchant did not heed letting go of at the appropriate time: “He [the merchant] is one of those who will not let themselves pass with the passing of time; but clutch themselves to themselves to their own bosom and hoard the self which they themselves have made. They shudder at the thought of the consecutive, periodic deaths that open out, threshold after threshold, as one passes through the rooms of life, and which are life’s secret (p. 17) ."

That’s kind of a lofty comparison to make with my hyper vigilant parenting skills, but I’m thinking I’d have more fun if I could, say, act like my husband does in the pre-boarding area at the airport. In his defense, he was not on his cell phone updating his profile on Facebook while my two sons, standing side by side on padded seats, left palm, nose, and most of their cheeks’ prints to the windows as the airplanes landed (to the heavy machine gun fire emitting from their thumb and finger guns)--no, he was making reservations for us so when we landed we’d have a place to stay.

As my blood pressure rose (flight delayed) and I failed to get my sons to sit next to us for the extra 45 minutes, I continued to marvel at how calm my husband remained. You’d never have guessed he had kids, not until he struck up a conversation with one of the stewardesses about smuggling in his sons early using his A pass. Or as he sprinted later that night across two lanes of traffic to hold the shuttle for us, one son following blindly into the intersection, the other teetering at the edge of the down escalator as I shrieked for him to wait for me (think background images from Denise Duhamel’s collection Ka-Ching! in which she graphically describes an escalator accident involving more than a dozen people, including her parents--backs of heads, hair in machine parts, etc). I reached my 4 year old just as we hit the bottom escalator stair, grabbed the scruff of his t-shirt as he turned to go back up the down-grinding stairs with its stoic and grumpy row of men (with their neat black bags on wheels) advancing.

Once I quelled the hysteria about the 7 year old crossing the intersection alone, silhouette visible against the bank of headlights (taxis and air porters halting for his dash), and muscled the rest of us up onto the shuttle, I glared at my husband. We’d spent the prior weekend, our first 3 days and nights in a row in 10 years away from the kids, so the contrast from the selves we resurrected as lovers and equals took a hard left turn back into the familiar--siblings at best, co-parenting rivals. My fallback, in almost all situations involving my children in public, entails either catastrophizing about potential dangers or dwelling in a perpetual state of embarrassment regarding the amount of noise we make and the lack of control we exercise.

Clearly hyper-vigilance, then, isn’t sustainable over the long haul. I’m no longer interested in being right, or in the hair color drain and toll on the adrenals. But how about spending more of my life’s hours in simple states of joy? New mothers need that vigilance when their babies are crawling towards light sockets or edges of decks. But my youngest is four now; aside from the occasional escalator to spar with, he’s pretty much launched.

Next day, sitting on the North Island Breakers Beach, kids cavorting at water’s edge twenty yards away, I made a solstice promise to try on my husband’s air of detachment.

First chance: the Museum of Air and Space, where, behind us my husband lingered alone near the entrance on his cell and both sons skirted the astronaut suit in glass case, tripping over electrical wires and velvet ropes to escape into the Alien’s Exhibit you needed special tickets to enter. I just smiled at the two docents in red jackets blocking me, and said, “But you see I think you want me to retrieve my boys.“ “Boys," I called once, then sauntered to the outdoor atrium where the helicopter and biplanes hung, without even worrying if they’d follow or whether or not my husband would find us.

How peaceful. No adrenaline zing, no harsh words for the husband when he caught up to us 3 minutes later, no one electrocuted. I took my time, lingered over what mattered to me: a case containing a scarf and shirt worn by Amelia Earhart. Did they really need to put her clothing on display? A little grim--but better: propped up beside the scarf: her book, For the Fun of It: Random Records of My Own Flying and of Women in Aviation , which she wrote about the compulsion to fly, why it mattered to try.

I lagged behind to watch some footage of Amelia arriving in the states after crashing one of her airplanes, affirming to the waiting press her commitment to persevere with dreams of further, greater flights. Then I moseyed with my daughter through the stewardesses of time exhibit, with its 8 or so mannequins sporting each decade’s garb. I fired a photo off to a friend, who responded wryly, “Thank god we don’t have to dress like that in order to be a real woman.”

But I didn’t even try to talk my daughter out of her favorite stewardess--the one in the fitted jacket, matching orange, red and pink miniskirt, so much visible thigh above a pair of knee-high red boots. I had to admit I kind of liked the boots myself.

Photos: Taken at The Museum of Air and Space, San Diego, CA