In Praise of Artists: Why I Buy Art

"Amsterdam Spring," Denise Ann Saldutti Egielski

After losing my job two years ago, I purged, getting rid of ¾ of my belongings. My remaining possessions: boxes, a few lamps, and a little bit of furniture, are still scattered in a variety of locations in Pittsburgh and New Jersey. Over these past 24 months and throughout my moves to 4 different locations, the only objects I have deeply missed (and continue to miss) are my books and my paintings.

I own a lot of artwork—mostly paintings, some photographs, and some pottery made by living artists. (As opposed to reproductions/plastic replicas/posters by dead artists.) Almost all but two of the artists worked at some point in their lives in my beloved adopted city of Pittsburgh.  As a woman who never made a lot of money—mostly, I have lived paycheck-to-paycheck with little to no disposable income—over the years, I’ve found myself defending my need to buy art. 

Wine Bottle, Terrance Hayes

I surround myself with art. My life feels more abundant, happier, and substantial when I am surrounded by art. I have never viewed artwork as a “frivolous extra,” but as essential for my equilibrium and my quality of life. Yet, I’ve often been astounded by how few people actually buy art and by how many administrators actually want to immediately cut art programs, when our economy begins to tank. (Personally, I’d rather cut the salaries of the bankers and financiers who tanked the economy in half, and take away their gluttonous bonuses, but that’s just me…) Art making and artists of all kinds are essential to the world and have been since the beginning of humankind.  

Years ago, John Berger's "Ways of Seeing" played a role in how I started to view reproductions of art. Although I've certainly bought and hung many posters and reproductions of Van Gogh's, Picasso's, Chagall's and Miro's work over the years, I just don't want to surround myself with them anymore.

Now, I want the texture and brushstrokes of someone’s painting. I want the scent of paint, the signature of the living artist, the flaws (if there are any), the palpable sense of the human hand at work in the art.  I like the knowledge that the person who dreamt up and executed this new creation is still at work painting or printmaking or etching something new. And I learn so much from so many of my friends who are visual artists, who are generous, vibrant, quirky, sometimes neurotic, creative souls, who deserve to make a living at what they do. God help us if our whole lives became about the merely “useful” and practical! 

"Tranquility," Martha Brouwer

And so, I am happy to pay for artists’ inspiration, creativity, time, and labor in making this object that makes me so happy as I drink my morning tea or come in from walking the dog or sit and comment on a pile of student compositions, while snow falls outside. These works of art evoke intimacy and mystery and inspire me to keep writing my own poems. They remind me that there are so many extraordinary ways to see the world we live in!

Simply stated: art makes my soul sing.  My home is buoyant with the creations of people, whose work I admire so much. I select pieces that resonate with me. I can tell, at this point, when I find a work that I can happily live with for years to come. I’m not a trendy gal, never have been, so I don't buy "trendy" art. Then, I find a way to purchase it. Working at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts certainly helped me begin to buy art—getting to know so many artists there, like the printmaker Francis Crisafio, from whom I bought my first etching.  I realized that most artists were more than happy to let me pay a work off in installments. One of my favorite paintings, which I acquired when I worked at the Center, was a work that my friend, the artist, Sigrid Shafagh, was going to toss in the trash. She had painted it the night before as a “demonstration” piece for her students. Luckily, I was walking out to the parking lot with her that day, when she dangled it over the trash can. I asked her if I could have it. Sure, she grinned, why not? It now graces my kitchen wall wherever I live and adds so much warmth, with its vibrant colors, to any winter day. 

"Ovation," Linda Breem

When people walked into my last “real” apartment in Pittsburgh, on Mount Royal Road, they would say they loved how alive the place “felt.”  Karl Mullen’s huge, whimsical PigDogDonkey painting on my living room wall  contributed to that energy (I smile every time I look at that work!), along with Seattle-based artist Martha Brouwer’s stunningly colored and textured painting “Tranquility,” which speaks to hers (and my) belief in the interconnectedness of all living things. John Sokol’s  amazing portrait of e.e.cummings created by using all the words from his Collected Works of poetry (my mother, on a visit with me, once, thought it was a portrait of Yul Brynner from The King and I!) added a note of wonder. Terrance Hayes' gift to me in graduate school, a painting of a wine bottle with graffiti scribbled in the background was part of that vibrancy. And Bill DeBernardi’s “The Ascension,” an earlier painting of  his, of a street at night—with a lone streetlight and one cloud lit and mysterious, moonbeam edging it—as the only points of light. Scott Smith’s photograph—of his old friend, the singer, Tom Waits, all of 19, half smoking, half laughing, his head a mop of curls—has become a favorite touchstone of mine. It’s not just that it’s a picture of Tom Waits; it’s also that Scott has an incredible eye for composition and an incredible talent for invoking place, time and mood in a photograph. My latest purchase: a print called “Amsterdam Spring,” which fairly bursts with new life—tulips, daffodils, pink blooms on the large black-limbed tree above—by Denise Saldutti, a dear friend and incredible artist from New Jersey,  is already a favorite. 

Portrait of E. E. Cummings, John Sokol

I’m also graced by the art work of some of my family members:  a painting of two terriers tunneling under a picket fence, given to me by my Grandma Fagan, when I was about 7; my mother’s delicate pen and ink drawing of a grove of trees, from one of her first art classes (as an adult); my son, Brian’s powerful photographs (he is a professional photographer) of a gospel singer down in Tennessee and of the old mental institution that was being torn down to make way for a Walmart on the highway out toward Sewickley; and his wife, Zoe’s lovely painting of my dog Rosie (the first Christmas gift she gave to me.) These are treasures that speak volumes to me, when I’m missing my family back on the East coast.

So, why don’t more people purchase art? You'll have to explain that to me. I honestly don't understand it, but I'm told all the time by Pittsburgh artists and Pittsburgh gallery owners that art doesn't sell in this city. 

William DeBernardi, Southern Allegheny Museum, 2012

I recently spent a wonderful day with the painter Bill DeBernardi, out in Ligonier, taking in his two art shows out there, one in the Southern Allegheny Museum (he has filled the whole museum with his wonderful work) and one at the G-Squared Gallery on the main street of Ligonier. His works are remarkable studies of light and shadow and discovering the threads (sometimes geometric/angles/lines) that connect a work together.  I have learned so much from him over the years. But, he said to me that day (I'm paraphrasing), "I'm aware that, in the grand scheme of things, art is more like a form of "entertainment." If I needed to be with people, who could help rebuild the world, for instance, I'd want to be with carpenters, masons--people who can build useful things." I love Bill, but I disagree with his statement (though I understand it.) Artists are necessary to this brave new world he imagines-- only their contribution cannot be measured out in rulers and graphs.

Karl Mullen, American Folk Art Museum, NY

Ultimately, it comes down to this: we invest in what we value.  I would rather own a new painting than a new cell phone or a new food processor or a new dress.  I don't need more "stuff" in my life, but more substance. I know how wonderful it is to live surrounded by such colors, such ideas and such life force.  

I love knowing the artists, who are talented and hardworking enough to keep producing such work.  I envy them their skills and tenacity and dedication and oftentimes sigh, thinking that words pale in comparison to being able to visually evoke the illusions of space, light, color, life.  In a world with all its ugly divisive rhetoric, shootings, and endless wars, we would do well to nourish our spirits, paying less attention to the screeds of the destructive energies, and paying MORE attention to our artists, surrounding ourselves with the energy of their joy and creativity. Start a personal insurrection: buy more art.

Summer 2012: The Unquenchable Light

In August 1996, on the morning after my family buried my younger brother, Brendan, I drove, sick with grief, the eight hours from my parents’ New Jersey home, to the Fine Arts Work Center in Cape Cod to work for a week with the poet Yusef Komunyakaa. Only months earlier, in February of that year, after a long, anxious wait to hear whether or not I had been selected (on the basis of 10 poems) to be one of the fifteen poets chosen for Komunyakaa’s workshop, I had finally received the happy news. Now, having lived through the shocking prognosis and dizzyingly swift death of my sweet and funny brother, the workshop seemed insignificant to me.  It was only because of the loving insistence of my mother, brothers and sisters who printed out driving directions, packed my bag and quite literally pushed me out the door (“Brendan would want you to go”) that I found myself heading northeast that morning.

Larkspur, Joni's Yard, 2012

Most of that long drive through upstate New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts is a complete blank to me:  I don’t remember if it was sunny or rainy, whether the traffic was moving or bumper-to-bumper, or whether I ever stopped for lunch or a bathroom break during my journey. And how I followed the driving directions and map is a mystery to me. I assume I was in shock, navigating on autopilot.  When I think back on it now, I am grateful to whatever spirit guided me that day and helped me find my way, without injuring myself or someone else on those highways. Besotted with grief, my mind was erased for hours, until I finally began the drive up U.S. Route 6, the highway that wends its way up Cape Cod, ending in Provincetown—the furthest point east in the United States—and my destination. 

What penetrated the fog of my grief, as I “woke up” on that highway, was the brilliant, corporeal essence of light. It poured through my windshield and glittered on the banks of white sands along the road’s shoulder. It was a quality of light I’d never registered before, active as an echo, reverberating through the air in heightened, “louder” repetitions. As I progressed toward Truro, it cascaded off the dunes that banked the road. Maybe it was my state of grief, but it seemed a tactile presence, otherworldly. Sunlight as a living, breathing body. The dunes quivered with it, shimmering like hills of crushed, illuminated stars. Everything was hyper-clarified and outlined—more than itself--dune grass, car hood, my white hand on the steering wheel. It was a light that held you steady in its gaze. And I followed it like an answer to a long-held question, up to Provincetown. I thought of Edward Hopper’s painting, “Cape Cod Morning,” and how that early morning light in his work gilded everything it draped. There was something ineffable and lonely in that light, as there was on this highway. For the woman in Hopper’s painting, light was playing a Siren song. She stretches herself out the window toward its embrace, slightly dazed, but ready to face the mystery of the day.  I have never forgotten the substance of that Cape Cod light. It intertwines now in my remembrance of my brother, illuminates his memories within me.

                                                            **

Kitchen, Summer 2012

This summer, 2012, as sunlight pummels the parched yards of Pittsburgh, and leaves us walking in a stupor through the 90+ degree days, I find myself thinking a lot about light: how it’s affecting my newly dug gardens, how it overwhelms my apartment, which still lacks blinds and curtains, and how it shapes and colors all that I see. Coincidentally, I find myself reading many poems, mostly poems by women poets, which juggle the whole spectrum of shade and blaze. 

Inside my new apartment, still sparsely furnished, the light takes on a range of characteristics, as morning turns to early afternoon to late afternoon to dusk. Each afternoon, around 5:30 PM, the light pours in through elm branches, through screen and through my rotating fan, and projects a film, an exquisite geometric pattern of shadow and sun, which captures kinetic life unfolding. It’s a sort of documentary short. If I am home at the time, I often stop whatever I’m doing and sit for a few minutes in the 90-degree living room to watch it flickering on the far white wall.  It is mesmerizing, and sometimes leads me into meditation (or sometimes a nap because of the heat!) Breathing deep, my hair stuck to my damp neck, I watch the interplay of silhouettes on the wall: the leaves sway and dip behind the oscillating roundness of the fan. And overlaid on this, the screen’s orderly scrim of tiny squares. The light acts as white space in this dance of moveable shadows. And lately it’s inspired me to read and re-read poems about the light by Mary Oliver, Jane Hirschfield, and Susan Hutton. I want to share two of the poems here, now.

Coneflower, New Garden 2012

In Susan Hutton’s exquisite 10-line poem “Wujakari, Yartijumurra, Arawunga, Tokwampari” from her book On The Vanishing of Large Creatures (2007, Carnegie Mellon University Press), she talks of an incalculable loss, something that disappears from our world with little fanfare or grief:

           

            Before a language dies we record the last speaker

            to capture the sounds of the words. When he dies

            we go on living, and the world is not different. 

Hutton’s poetry may not be filled with images of a literal light, because her subjects are not nature-focused nor about paintings (though both may get referenced.) But there is something in the illuminating intelligence of the poems, which is echoed in the clean block typography of some of the poems (perched elegantly in a sea of white space) that fills her whole book with light for me. Unlike Mary Oliver, whose poetry plumbs the natural world of the Provincetown coastline where she’s lived most of her adult life, Hutton’s mix of beautiful, quirky facts and lyrical observations lights up the complicated world of our inner lives.

And in this poem, Hutton shows us the poignancy of what “the children of Bathurst Island,” the next generation, stand to lose when their culture’s original language dies out. Choosing the words of the title as an example, Hutton translates that they will lose both the idea of and the descriptions of light, in all its nuances and subtle changes. Here are the remaining 7 lines of the poem:

         There is always rain, whether it falls on the grass, on the roof,

            or far out to sea. There is wind, though it sounds bigger

            when it rattles the windows, whips the trees.     

            But the children of Bathurst Island, who now sleep inside,

            can no longer say when it is first light before sunrise

            or when it is the darkness before daylight, when it is

            early morning before dawn or early morning when birds sing.

David's Rooftop, 2012

In our ever-glutted world of new product, cheaper product, faster product, technology replacing itself at warp speed and trying to sell us the newly updated I-Pad, cell phone, whatever, this loss of language may seem trivial.  But, as I often tell my high school students, to lose language, to choose to only use the words we knew in third to seventh grade and refuse all new vocabulary, is to choose to narrow your ideas, and thus, to narrow your understanding of your world.  The beauty of this lost language of Bathurst Island becomes clear, because in naming the subtle differences “early light before dawn,” vs. “early morning when the birds sing” demonstrate such an act of attention to the natural world of the island that the original people settled. They knew the sky, the sun, the water, the whole of their environment so intimately that they put in language each shift and particularity.  And with this loss, it might be suggested, comes a loss of that intimacy and awareness of the natural world.

The light in Mary Oliver’s poem “The Terns” (House of Light) is a literal, witnessed light. Here, she describes the daily ritual of sea birds diving into the Atlantic searching for food:

                        The birds shrug off

                              the slant air,

                     they plunge into the sea

                              and vanish

                        under the glassy edges

                              of the water,

                        and then come back,

                        flying out of the waves,

                              as white as snow,

                           shaking themselves,

                      shaking the little silver fish,

                               crying out

                          in their own language,

                       voices like rough bells—

The light is everywhere in this poem: the air is “slant” with it, as the rays slice through and land in the sea beside the terns. The water has “glassy edges,” and the birds are transformed and illuminated by their journey and “come back…as white as snow.”  The hapless fish, taken from their lives and soon to be a quick meal forgotten, are caught in the sunlight’s net, also glimmering “silver” in their final moments.  There is something airy and elegant, slim and bejeweled in this scene, punctuated only by the cries of the successful scavengers, their “voices like rough bells,” another image that peals metallic and silver, Cape Cod’s amplified light playing a surface to corona.

Monumental, Painting by William DeBernardi, G-Square Gallery, Ligonier


The surprise in Oliver’s lit images is that it leads her, initially, to this observation:

                        This is a poem

                           about death,

                     about the heart blanching

                        in its fold of shadows

                              because it knows

                             someday it will be

                         the fish and the wave

                        and no longer itself—

She has introduced us to the rich darkness, the concept of “duende,” of which the Spanish poet, Gabriel Garcia Lorca wrote.  Oliver’s lines are duende in action, the shading that balances the stark light, adding dimension and depth to the scene. Here, the heart loses all color, and like the birds lifting from the waves, it becomes “blanched,” or bleached white “in its fold of shadows.” The fish is eaten. And by implication, Oliver is reminded that “someday” every living thing in the scene will be gone and “no longer” themselves. She might have stopped there with her textured “painting” of light and shadow interplay, but Oliver turns again, illuminating our own day with this finish:

This is a poem about loving

                       this world and everything in it:

                        the self, the perpetual muscle,

                        the passage in and out, the bristling

                                    swing of the sea.

And in her words, she has captured the mysterious nature of light. Like all ephemera, it is meant to be savored in the moment and loved for its palpable presence in our days. Light clarifies everything we gaze upon, coloring it, shaping the substance of our time indoors and out. And Oliver urges us to also love our “self, the perpetual muscle,” as we hopefully make our own days something lit and meaningful (though, at other times, something shadowed) as we navigate the “bristling/swing of the sea.”  We are out in it now, past wading, deep and shimmering, and trying our hardest to be the light we see.

Backyard Stoop, Garden, 2012

                                                                                                July 9, 2012

The Accessible Poem: Hot, Ready and Edible at a Diner Near You

First Installment: Accessible Poem                                                                                        
Accessible:  adj. 1.) That which can be easily approached, entered, reached or used: an accessible road; accessible ruins. 3. obtainable; attainable

The diner of accessibilty has shiny chrome seats with padded red cushions that swivel when you sit on them. Coffee comes in white mugs, hot and topped off every fifteen minutes. A bold-faced black clock on the wall places you squarely in time. Menus in this Red Hawk Diner are also accessible: Readable font. Everything clearly spelled out: Breakfast Special: 2 eggs, your choice of side (bacon, ham or sausage patties), hash browns, toast, $4.99.  Clear and to the point. Skim through and you've got it.  Make your order, eat and out. Life as a direct equation. No fuss, no muss. And handed to you on a clean, white plate. The whole scene is comforting, expected, easily read. 

         Accessible here means the familiar, the known. Mystery kept to an unnoticeable level. Of course, people can be unpredictable, so they may surprise you, even in the Red Hawk Diner, but for the most part, it is the experience you want exactly as you imagined. You chew and swallow. Spread strawberry jam on your toast from one of those tiny plastic tubs. Life as it should be.

   I enjoy the accessible dining experience. But when I read and write poetry, I do not seek out to read nor long to write the “accessible poem.” But, many readers and writers of poetry only want that experience. Give me the poem I can understand at one reading/hearing. Don’t make me work or think too deeply to understand this piece of writing. The most common responses from my college poetry students (after reading an assigned book of poems) or that I overhear from all kinds of people after poetry readings are: “Such and such poem was the best because it was accessible.” Or its converse: “That poet/poetry book/poem wasn’t very good because he/she/it wasn’t accessible.”

            I’ve been wondering for a long time now: Why is “accessibility” (as in quick and easy access) so prized by many readers of poetry? How does this impact the poets who are writing now? What does it mean to be a reader who "requires" all poetry to be accessible, ignoring "other" poems that might require extra thought and multiple readings to yield their riches? And finally, what DO people mean by an “accessible poem,” anyway? I’m going to address the final question first: What do people mean by an “accessible poem” anyway?

            Frankly, sometimes valuing the “accessible” poem simply means that the student or reader does not have a developed vocabulary. I recently had a group of Introduction to Poetry Writing students, who were placed in groups to discuss imagery found in poems by Carl Sandburg, Walt Whitman, Robert Bly, Louise Gluck and Mark Doty. Each of the groups was assigned one of the poems to look at how the imagery was working in the poem and share their findings with the class. Minutes after someone read the assigned poem to their group, hands shot up from all over the classroom: "What does 'haunches' mean? asked the group looking at Carl Sandburg's famous "Fog" poem. "What does "billow" mean, asked another group? A third needed the definition of "shimmering," from Mark Doty’s poem. And the final group asked about the word “sinewy” from Walt Whitman’s poem "The Runner," which granted, of the three words, was probably a more challenging vocabulary word.                            

            This was very revealing to me. I realized that many who value the “accessible” poem are asking that their poems have a simple vocabulary.  Newspapers, with the exception of the New York Times and possibly The Washington Post, long ago acquiesced to this demand from their readers and required their reporters to write on a 3^rd through 7^th grade reading level (I think USA Today is shooting for 1^st grade level! ) As a poet, who wants to create with a wide array of words much as a painter expresses herself with a vivid array of colors, I’m very resistant to this idea that a poem must limit its word choice/palette to ensure that “everyone” will be able to instantly “get” it.  What a sad state of poetry we’d be in if a poet such as Gerard Manley Hopkins with his sensuous, sensory-rich score of words had chosen  to scale his celebratory songs back in order to be easily plumbed. Here, for instance, is the first stanza of his poem “Pied Beauty”:

                        Pied Beauty ~Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things--

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

       For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough

      And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

            This is one of my favorite poems. When I first came upon it in early high school, I had no idea what “couple-colour” or “brinded” meant. (I knew what “dappled” and “stipple” meant from the reading I had done in my childhood.) But, I caught the spirit of the poem as my teacher read it out loud; I was uplifted by its celebration of the unlimited variations and beauty in the natural world. And I loved the music of the words, the playful alliterative sounds— “Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls, finches’wings”—pouring down this short two-stanza poem. Words as vivid waterfall!  And written at a time when a poet was allowed to actually capture joy and sentiment and celebration in a poem (unlike in our modern, jaded age.)  His vocabulary is challenging by the mere combination of words.  But it is well-worth the re-readings, the looking up the definitions—the meaning gaining clarity with effort—and well worth the effort.

            Why not revel in the wild beauty of our extensive language?  Words have a texture, a life, an interesting history of their own. And the English language has a tremendous range of words with which we might use to express ourselves!  An old friend of mine, Regina, who came here from Aachen, Germany and lived in the US for 8 years, once told me she could no longer write her children’s stories in her native German.  “The English language has so many more choices to describe emotions!” she exclaimed. Poetry would become a gray garden if poems were only written with a 7^th grade vocabulary.  Some might call this elitist—but I feel that it’s actually uplifting to invite another human being to broaden their language and thus, broaden their own range of ideas. Language belongs to everyone freely; it is most democratic.  I am free to read more, to look up words in a dictionary or online (how simple nowadays to find a definition of anything!), to broaden my own palette of words.

            My students tell me they don't like to read books anymore. They like magazines and newspapers, internet gossip and facebook status updates, tweets and emails--most written on a 3rd grade - 7th grade level. Some tweets and emails are only written out as acronyms, not even words at all. If that's what you read on a regular basis, how will you gain new worlds? And if you never stretch your vocabulary beyond the basic 7th grade level, how could a large history of poems be accessible to you? William Butler Yeats would be inaccessible, as would Mark Doty with his luscious landscape of words, as would Coleridge, Roethke, Eliot, McHugh, Robert Hass, Louise Gluck, Anne Carson, Dylan Thomas or Gerard Manley Hopkins and on and on. This is not to say everyone should "like and appreciate" my favorite writers, but that there is more to the world of poetry than William Carlos Williams (whom I also love and admire his aesthetic—hoping to write a poetry that embraced America’s democratic ideas. It was once said that Williams hoped that if any one of his poems were placed in a roadside restroom and found by any person, no matter their age, sex, class or level of education, that that person would be able to be read and understand his poem.) We have many wonderful narrative poets based in Pittsburgh who write straightforward stories in verse, with little to no complicated vocabulary in them. Mary Oliver and Billy Collins, both of whom I admire greatly for different reasons—keep their language easily open to the public--though Oliver, at least, it could be argued, might be "inaccessible" on another level.

            Any adult I know with a wide vocabulary gained that vocabulary from years of reading books. When I was a fourth-grade girl reading The Secret Garden, Little Women, Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights among other books, I don't remember running to my parents every other word and asking them to define something for me. Mostly because I was caught up in the world of the book and didn't want to break that spell. I would eventually understand a difficult word’s meaning by the context it was written in. Reading a long novel, I could gradually deduce the word’s meaning from how it was used over and over again. I wasn't thinking about definitions of words. I was enthralled by and immersed in the spirited sister, Jo,or the storm on the great heaths, or the locked snagged garden full of old rose bushes. I gained a wider world because I acquired new WORDS!


If, for instance, my chosen word is “sussurations”(a word that the poet Robert Hass favors and I love for its soothing, hushed line of “s” sounds throughout), I don’t want to dismiss using it for the sake of gaining more readership. I do not find myself worrying about whether or not a reader understands a particular word in my poem. 

Rosie contemplates the mystery of it all.

As an artist, a poet, I am free to find the precise, exact word I need to create a mood, a song, a tone, a story, no matter how few or many syllables the word contains.  As in the visual arts, there are minimalist painters who choose to limit their palettes to black, gray, white, red, and there are also the Joan Mitchells (an abstract expressionist from the 50's/60's) whose enormous canvases fairly explode in color (check out her beauty, "Wet Orange" at our Carnegie Museum of Art!) 

Don't get me wrong: I love the idea that somebody, somewhere might even read my poems once in a while! But, my job is to the art, to the poetry--and I want to honor that voice inside that, for  who I am and what my aesthetic is, values lush song and sound and substance over more directly stated stories. There is room in the poetry world for all aesthetics. I just worry when the ever-dwindling readership and audience so loudly wants only accessible poems.  

Next Installment:  The InAccessible Poem: Too Hot to Handle or Why Are You Making Me Think So Hard?  

Bitter Acoustic Has Arrived!

Oh my friends! I am so happy to announce that my collection of poetry, Bitter Acoustic, has just been published by Jacar Press, (North Carolina.)  Because I am terribly sleepy as I write this, I will keep this blog entry brief. I am thrilled about the publication of this book! Bill DeBernardi, a dear friend and gifted painter from Pittsburgh, provided the beautiful artwork for the cover, a still life of a cello's headstock entitled "Nocture." I am so grateful to my publisher, Richard Krawiec, to the talented designer, Daniel Krawiec and to the wonderful poet Betty Adcock, who chose Bitter Acoustic as the contest winner. Adcock's notes about my book touched me and honored me deeply, especially her remark "McDermott remembers the old magic: poetry as memorable language" and her gracious and humbling final sentence: "Bitter Acoustic is a making so genuine, so original, so true, it takes my breath away." I can't ask for more than that.

Yesterday, at the invitation of my friend Ellen Smith (a marvelous poet and teacher of poetry!) I had the honor of delivering my first reading and discussion of the book for a group of poets called the MadWomen at Carlow University in Pittsburgh. What a wonderful group of women; I had such a good time reading for them and answering questions. And I brought up the issue of a poem's accessibility to the group, telling them that there was a period of time in graduate school where I truly tried to write the more stereotypically "accessible" poem--narratives of my childhood, for instance, of taking a helicopter ride with my Grandfather above the Statue of Liberty--and that I simply was not good at this kind of writing. I told them that ultimately, you have to stay true to the writer you are meant to be. In my case, that meant I valued musicality, vocabulary, and creating moods or atmospheres in a poem above simply recounting a memory or story.  This is a topic (does a poem HAVE to be accessible to be enjoyed or liked in today's world?) that I've given a lot of thought to, and I will blog more about this soon. Right now, I just need to get a good night's sleep.  Thanks for listening...  And if you're interested in buying a copy of Bitter Acoustic, simply email Jacar Press at jacarpress@gmail.com, supply the publisher's with your name, full address and how many copies you'd like, and they will be mailed to you with an invoice to purchase the book.  Happy weekend everyone!