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Posts Tagged ‘Poem’

Archaeology: The Silence of the World

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on May 2, 2026| 4 Comments »

Archaeology: The Silence of the World— Coming to Principle Gallery

I can imagine the silence when the world
will have stilled itself—no more poems tossed
off the tongue, no more screams
of raven lugging entrails of porcupine,
no more tales of the Navajo, or Louisiana black man,
or old-time Vermonter,
no more breathing in the ear of last lover…

The Silence of the World, Galway Kinnell

These are the opening lines from the first poem I encountered from Galway Kinnell, who I briefly wrote about t a few days ago. That idea of the world being without the hive activity of humans, forever cast in silence, stuck in my mind. It was just kind of hovering there for several weeks but came back to the surface in the past week as I worked on the new painting shown above.

It’s from my ongoing Archaeology series which first came about in 2008, after I returned to an exercise from a 5th grade art class when I was feeling deeply blocked creatively. I have only painted a handful of these Archaeology pieces in recent years, despite the fact that I do enjoy the process of painting them and that they have always been well received, both here and abroad.

Why that is, I don’t know. I suppose it’s as simple as the heart and spirit having to be in just the right place. Recently, I found that working on this piece and another in the same series have forced me to focus on the small moves that create the artifact fields in both. I needed to bring my mind back into the work and this really seemed to serve that purpose.

As I was working on this particular painting, that Kinnell poem–and its title specifically– began to haunt my thoughts. While many of the Archaeology paintings deal with the world beyond the time of man and how our existence will be reduced to buried artifacts, this piece brought other thoughts and questions to mind.

The primary question was: When humans are no more, does that mean that heaven no longer exists? Are heaven and hell attached to humans and will therefore cease to exist when the last human returns to dust?

I wasn’t bothered by either a yes or no answer to these questions. It will be what it will be without my opinion, fears, or hopes. Just wondering.

Yes or no, it will be a quieter world, filled with more silences. And that pleases me somehow. Humans seem to have a need to fill every empty space with sound and noise. And I think– without any evidence, of course– that this somehow throws the world out of equilibrium. That it seeks more silence.

And that is what I see in this painting. I chose to fill the artifact field mainly with chairs that represent the passing of man. For some unknown reason, I resisted making them Red Chairs. The upper part is painted in shades of blue that have a unifying silence in them. No noise from the contrast of colors or lightness.

Just a placid blueness.

And the tree in the foreground might be expressing in its twists the slightest delight in finally regaining the silence the world desired.

It’s a piece that fills me with a variety of feelings. I am saddened to see in it the end of our time and all that the human mind has produced that is good. Music, art, poetry, literature, and so on. But the idea of a reign of real silence along with the world returning to a greater equilibrium somehow satisfies me.

Don’t ask me why.

It’s given me a lot to both focus on and think about in here the studio. And I am grateful for that.

We all need things that make us think about things other than the things we think about. If you followed that, you’ve got a quicker mind than me.

Of course, I borrowed the title for this painting, Archaeology: The Silence of the World, from Kinnell’s poem which I have included below in its entirety.  I am also including a wonderful piece of music from composer Samuel Barber, his Adagio for Strings. This is performed here by the Berliner Philharmoniker conducted by Simon Rattle. The composition is built around beautiful silences that I feel reflect well on the painting.

Lovely music for a quiet Saturday morning, even if those damn humans are still out there making noise.

I can imagine the silence when the world
will have stilled itself—no more poems tossed
off the tongue, no more screams
of raven lugging entrails of porcupine,
no more tales of the Navajo, or Louisiana black man,
or old-time Vermonter,
no more breathing in the ear of last lover,
no more angelic beings left to be kissed
into the claustrophobia of flesh,
no more temples giving light
from open doors into bitter winter nights, no more
curious weasel who leaves
her black ring frozen in the air,
no more tooth that gnaws through gum and bones into
the cathedral of the mouth.
No more splat when singer spits
mouthwash into the washbasin after the concert,
no more “Quit yer bawlin!”
from punk principal to slob schoolboy
when sore mother hauls
small boy into classroom by sore ear.
No more young woman in large hat in profile
in afternoon light saying, “So what, darling?
I don’t hate you. I love you. So what?”
No more flutesman trudging through snow
on 125th Street on the last Sunday morning of his jeopardy.
No more husband saying, “Snack bar’s the other way.”
No more wife replying, “You aren’t going to eat again, are you?”
No more husband replying, “I don’t want to eat,
I was just telling you where the snack bar is.”
No more wife replying, “For Chrissake! I know where it is.”
No more caesura or else everything one endless caesura,
no more feminine rhyme such as “lattice” and “thereat is,”
no more parallelismus membrorum panting in one ear,
no more Neruda’s slowly deepening voice saying,
“Federico, te acuerdas, debajo de la tierra . . .”
From across the valley the thud of an axe
arrives later than its strike
and the call of goodbye slowly separates itself
little by little from the vocal chords of everything.

– The Silence of the World, Galway Kinnell, The New Yorker, May 13, 2013

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Uncle Walt

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on April 16, 2026| 4 Comments »

Eye to Eye

I resist anything better than my own diversity,
And breathe the air and leave plenty after me,
And am not stuck up, and am in my place.

The moth and the fisheggs are in their place,
The suns I see and the suns I cannot see are in their place,
The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.

These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me,
If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing,
If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing,
If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.

This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,
This the common air that bathes the globe.

–Walt Whitman, Song of Myself (1855)

I was reading Mary Oliver‘s book of essays, Upstream, and her essay on Walt Whitman really resonated with me. As a young woman, Whitman became a close friend, the caring uncle, and the brother she had never had. He is Uncle Walt to me, a wizened and understanding being who accepts you as you are because he knows that what is in you is in him as well.

Her essay, in which she cites the short section above from his Song of Myself as a guiding light for her own relationship with nature and the world:

The moth and the fisheggs are in their place,
The suns I see and the suns I cannot see are in their place,
The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.

Her writing made me pull out my old beat-up copy of Whitman’s work. I needed a fix from Uncle Walt and went to the section from which this passage came just to put it into better context for myself. Glad I did.

Shown above, it says so much about how he saw himself and the world. He proudly claimed his diversity of self, that messy mass of contradictions that is within us all. He also saw clearly that he was in place in the role that he had to play in the grand opera that is life, just as the moths and fisheggs and the sun high up in the sky were. I especially liked that he made mention of the suns he cannot see, given my propensity for sometimes showing multiple suns or moons in my skies.

To Uncle Walt, the natural world, which included him and you and me, was, and still is, just as it should be.

He then goes on to point out that his thoughts are nothing new, that they are simply echoes of thoughts that have come down through time. It is our purpose to ask questions and attempt to find answers of some sort, though our efforts will be forever futile.

Our attempts at solving the riddle that is life often create even more complex riddles.

That, too, is just as it should be. As he writes, This the common air that bathes the globe.

This short section from his grand poem says so much about how I have come to see the world, as well.  I imagine much of that comes from having an uncle like Walt. Or a brother or friend or simply an old man with a white beard who says a few words in passing.

Just as it should be.

Here’s a song that I thought I had recently shared here only to find that it has been 16 years. I guess for some of us that is recent. The song is another from Mermaid Avenue, an album featuring unrecorded songs written by Woody Guthrie set to music and performed by Billy Bragg and Wilco. This is Walt Whitman’s Niece.

I think I might have seen her at one of the family reunions.

Or not.

Who knows? It is, after all, a riddle, right?

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Words in the Mourning Time, Redux

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on July 21, 2025| 3 Comments »

Gordon Parks- Father /Daughter, St. Louis, 1950

The post below is from a couple of years ago and has been by far my most viewed post in recent days.  In light of the poorly veiled political and cowardly cancellation of Stephen Cobert’s Late Night show, I thought it might well be worth revisiting. I have added another chapter from the Robert Hayden poem on which the post is based.

One of my favorite parts of writing this blog is the stream of consciousness part of it where I encounter something new. That part where I begin to research and one thing leads to another and another, wild tangent  to wild tangent. The result is that I end up learning of someone of whom I was previously unaware or some new concept or fact.

It often starts innocently. For example, this morning I stumbled across a short video from last night’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert where the singer Dua Lipa turned the tables and asked Colbert about whether his comedy and his faith ever intersected. His answer was thoughtful and complete. I urge you to watch the clip at the bottom.

But in it, he invoked lines from the late poet Robert Hayden , from his 1970 book of poetry titled Words in the Mourning Time, that were very powerful and to the moment:

We must not be frightened nor cajoled
into accepting evil as deliverance from evil.
We must go on struggling to be human,
though monsters of abstraction
police and threaten us.

Words powerful enough that I immediately began looking up Hayden. I was a little embarrassed and ashamed that I didn’t know the name. His credits and the poems that I read were staggeringly impressive.

Hayden was an African-American born in Detroit in 1913 and died in 1980. He was the first African-American to hold the post Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, which is now known as Poet Laureate.

Inspired by the poetry of W.H. Auden  and Stephen Vincent Benet, Hayden’s work often outlined the experience of the African-American throughout our history. But even so, Hayden rejected the idea of being called a black poet, referring to simply be recognized as a poet. This small distinction put him somewhat out of favor during the 1960’s with the black community though in essence his desire to be recognized without reference to his race represented one of the desired goals of the civil rights movement.

In fact, the whole of the verse from which Colbert quoted made just that point:

We must not be frightened nor cajoled
into accepting evil as deliverance from evil.
We must go on struggling to be human,
though monsters of abstraction
police and threaten us.

Reclaim now, now renew the vision of
a human world where godliness
is possible and man
is neither gook nigger honkey wop nor kike

but man

permitted to be man.

Words in the Mourning Time is a longer poem comprised of ten separate chapters that explores and mourns the world in the time period in the era of the Malcolm X/ RFK/MLK assassinations, and the horrors of the Viet Nam War. It speaks equally to the time in which we now find ourselves in 2025. Below is another chapter from the poem, voice in the wilderness, that really struck a chord with me:

I am including a couple of his other poems below. One is Those Winter Sundays which movingly speaks of the simple duties of love carried out by parents that are often overlooked by their children. Powerful. The other is Frederick Douglass.

As I read this poem, I wondered as I have many time before how nobody had yet made a big biographical film about the life of Douglass, who I consider one of the most fascinating, impressive, and influential characters in our history. This led me to looking this up and it turns out that the production company formed by Barack and Michelle Obama have one currently in production based on the Pulitzer Prize winning biography, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, from historian David Blight. Hope it brings his power and eloquence to the attention of a wider swath of Americans.

Glad I watched the video below and found out more about Robert Hayden. I feel a bit more complete now. And that’s always a good thing.

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Frederick Douglass

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

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Delusion and Truth

Posted in Philosophy, Poetry, Recent Paintings, tagged , , , on August 7, 2020| 3 Comments »

“The Timeout” At West End Gallery

************************

Why do you so earnestly seek
the truth in distant places?
Look for delusion and truth in the
bottom of your own heart.

― Ryōkan Taigu (1758-1831)

***********************

Do the deluded know the truth of who and what they are?

Or has their delusion replaced the truth at the bottom of their heart?

Can truth and delusion coexist within the heart of a person?

Or is truth a form of delusion in itself?

I think if we could figure this out, a lot of the problems of the world might fade away. Well, at least, not not seem quite so dire.

But that’s just the deluded opinion of one person…

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Hat

Posted in Current Events, Favorite Things, Opinion, Poetry, tagged , , , , on December 6, 2019| 1 Comment »

I was going to write something about gullibility this morning and while I was searching for something to kick off the post, a quote or an image, I came across this little bit of mirth from the late Shel Silverstein. It pretty much summed up everything you need to know about our willingness to often accept things that make no sense or are demonstrably false.

Of course, none of us will admit to wearing the plunger. We convince ourselves it’s a damn fine hat because Teddy or someone else, maybe someone named Donnie, says it is just that. If he says it looks good then it must, because he always tells us just what we want to hear and believe. We’re too smart and wary to fall for something other than the truth.

But in fact, we are actually like the character in All the King’s Men that Robert Penn Warren described: “I suppose that Willie had his natural quota of ordinary suspicion and caginess, but those things tend to evaporate when what people tell you is what you want to hear.”

And when someone is telling you that the toilet plunger on your head looks great, you really want to believe him. Because otherwise you’re just an idiot with a damn toilet plunger stuck on your head.

You know, whenever I see one of those godawful red hats on someone from now on, all I am going to see is that person with a toilet plunger on their head.

There’s a brain somewhere inside that bony box sitting between your shoulders, people. Take off the plunger and use it.

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Listen to the Mustn’ts

Posted in Favorite Things, Poetry, tagged , on February 15, 2017| 2 Comments »

shel-silverstein-listen-to-the-mustntsBusy day. But there’s always time for a little Shel Silverstein.

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Into the Common Ground

Posted in Opinion, Recent Paintings, tagged , , , , , , , on September 30, 2014| 1 Comment »

Into the Common Ground/ GC MyersCommon Ground

Blood tells the story of your life
in heartbeats as you live it;
bones speak in the language
of death, and flesh thins
with age when up
through your pores rises
the stuff of your origin.

These days,
when I look in the mirror I see
my grandmother’s stern lips
speaking in parentheses at the corners
of my mouth of pain and deprivation
I have never known. I recognize
my father’s brows arching in disdain
over the objects of my vanity, my mother’s
nervous hands smoothing lines
just appearing on my skin,
like arrows pointing downward
to our common ground.

–Judith Ortiz Cofer

*********************

The painting above, a 36″ by 36″ canvas, is titled Into the Common Ground.  It is part of my exhibit of the same name that will open in early December at the Kada Gallery in Erie, PA.  I think the poem above from author Judith Ortiz Cofer fits very well with the theme of this show which is about recognizing the common bonds that are between us.

It seems that our world has become more and more fractured, the distance between people growing greater even as the world itself seems to be shrinking in so many ways.  We actively seek to find difference, something that distinguishes us from others.  And while I am an advocate of the individual and individualism, it should not come at the expense of losing the ability to identify the commonality that exists in all of us.  For to look in that mirror, as Cofer does in her poem, and not see the traces of your family and the influences of others written on your face is to lose empathy.

When empathy leaves, we fail to see the sufferings of others as our own, fail to imagine that such things could ever occur to ourselves.  The pain of others becomes dull and distant, unfelt to us as selfishness and greed pushes our empathy aside.  To lose empathy is to choose to live in a savage and ugly world.

And that is not the world that I see in this painting.

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