A couple of weeks ago I had the fun experience of reading a few of my poems in a studio. My friends Hilda (fellow poet) and Wayne (the director, cameraman, et al) invited me to give it a go. They’ve been filming poets around Los Angeles for the last year and have a website where they post them. They credit me with being the catalyst for the venture. At a feature reading of our Night Birds poetry group at Coffee Cartel a while back I asked Wayne to take some pictures with my digital camera and it planted the seed in him to get a video camera and the whole thing blossomed from there. 

Michael, another of the Night Bird poets (this is what the six of us who workshop with Sarah Maclay call ourselves), volunteered his loft/studio space at The Brewery in east L.A. and filled in as the "sound man" on the taping. It took a couple of hours and the whole thing was really fun and interesting: getting the lights, the background, timing, camera angle, sound, all just right. So far there are three studio tapings: Michael’s, mine and a poet named Annette Sugden (not a Night Bird). You can take a look at them (and more) at Poetry.LA. Just click on the picture and it will take you to YouTube.

Of course, looking at the video, I can see where I could have done so many things better: smiling more, for one, and doing more voice modulation in tone and energy. Oh, well, it’s a learning experience and it could definitely have been worse. I took a couple of pictures of us at Michael’s after the shoot. We were breaking everything down and getting ready to go before I remembered, so the pics are staged after the fact.

Hilda, Wayne & me 

Pretending to be filmed–but it looks good! 

Michael outside of his loft at The Brewery. 

A couple of days ago my husband and I took a trip up to the Getty Museum. It was a blustery, rather chilly day, for L.A. but there were still pretty sizable crowds lining up to get on the tram that climbs to the top of the hill, where the many buildings of the museum reside. We arrived around 12:15 and had a reservation at the very popular restaurant there for a post-Christmas lunch at 1:30, so we didn’t have time to see too much. Our first stop was at the permanent collection of the European masters with always my favorites of the late 19th century paintings of Monet, Van Gogh, Pizarro, Degas, Renoir, Cezanne and others. There is always a crowd in this particular room of the exhibition, but it was manageable and we made our way around the room, stopping in front of our favorites to linger and drink them in. My husband favors Claude Monet’s, Wheatstacks, Snow Effect Morning and I am entranced by the watercolor of Paul Cezanne, Still Life with Blue Pot.

It reminded me that I had written a short essay about the still life watercolors of Cezanne and in particular, Still Life with Blue Pot when I was in my third semester of school at Vermont College. It was my art study semester and I fell in love over and over again with the paintings of the impressionists and expressionists of the late 19th century and early 20th century. To me this art is the most alive, most present and most emotionally compelling of anything I’ve seen. Following a few photos from our day at the Getty is a reprint of my mini-essay and a poem, of course.

Still Life with Blue Pot by Paul Cezanne is deeply explored in this oversized book written in conjunction with an exhibit at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Cezanne in the Studio: Still Life in Watercolors. There are numerous partial and full-page photos of Cezanne’s paintings, with particular attention given to details of the painting Still Life with Blue Pot. These close-up photos of the painting are particularly entrancing as they reveal the movement of the brushstroke on the canvas, the layering of the colors of the paint and the penciled lines of the original drawing.

The French poet Charles Baudelaire is quoted as saying that “the modern artist acts as a kaleidoscope; color is relational and plural in its effects, while working on the eye and imagination of the viewer like a prism or faceted jewel.” This is the experience of peering deeply into these Cezanne’s watercolors. They are beautiful to behold as a completed composition or a simple study, as in Decanter and Bowl on page 80, which is charming in its depiction of these two simple objects, yet one can also feel the energy of a man and a woman; partners who are not only utilitarian, but have a wistful and demurely sensual aspect to them. Cezanne accomplishes this effect with his ability to create a carefully crafted still life scene that, at the same time, appears unassuming and spiritually beguiling.

Cezanne sought to “realize his sensations” and was not given to follow any particular school of painting, rather chose to incorporate them in relationship to his own artistic sensibility. He follows no set procedure to constructing his art and often blurs the “distinction between sketch and finished picture, and even privileging the former over the latter.” This shows up in the enlarged details of Still Life with Blue Pot where graphite lines are seen swirling amidst the brilliant colors and white expanses, adding a wonderful sense of imagining the hand of the artist on the canvas, not in perfect determination, but wandering, playing, letting the hand go where it will.

There is something about the irregularity of these watercolors, how they pool, drip, are not controllable within any boundaries, that is so liberating to observe. The way the colors run together and the objects themselves have murky boundaries, often flowing over into one another. It speaks of life and how individuals slip into and out of our lives, daubing their particular hue onto our psyche. Cezanne had the ability, through his mastery of color and brushstroke and his intention to “realize his sensations,” to depict a simple grouping of fruit and pottery that transcended the commonplace, transforming them into a glorious and ephemeral experience for the viewer.

Cezanne in the Studio: Still Life in Watercolors
Carol Armstrong
Getty Publications
 

Van Gogh’s Bed

is orange,
like Cinderella’s coach, like
the sun when he looked it
straight in the eye.

is narrow, he sleeps alone, tossing
between two pillows, while it carried him
bumpily to the ball.
is clumsy,
but friendly. A peasant
built the frame; and old wife beat
the mattress till it rose like meringue.

is empty,
morning light pours in
like wine, melody, fragrance,
the memory of happiness.

Jane Flanders (1985)
from Ekphrastic Poetry website
 

It’s been a busy poetry week, not to mention the revving up for the holidays (which I don’t participate in at full bore). I’ve been to two readings and met with three different workshop groups. I had on my schedule to go to another reading this afternoon, but decided to stay home instead. Starting in October it was my intention to branch out more into the poetry community here in L.A. until I’m off and traveling later in the spring. I’ve made it a point to attend and participate in more workshops, readings and events in the local Southern California area–to get a taste of who’s doing what. I also wanted to do more open mic readings, to get myself out there. What I’m understanding more and more is that although I often enjoy these outings and find them useful in my own process, not to mention supporting fellow-poets, they can be a drain on my creative energy. It’s not just the physical aspect of driving the L.A. streets and freeways to get to these things and staying up a little later than would be my preference. It’s more about realizing that there is only so much of other people’s poetry and opinions my psyche can handle, quite a bit of which I don’t find useful and often times find detrimental in enhancing my own creative process. Suffice it to say, I’ll be cutting back on some of these excursions and pinpointing those activities that really do have the maximum amount of juice for the effort—small get togethers with writers I know and trust to be honest and supportive and quality readings where the poet uplifts and inspires with their work and with their humanity. (Such as the reading last Monday by Robert Hass.)

I’ve also been thinking a lot about what it means to be a “poet.” What I’ve come up with is that I’m not interested in being any one thing and truthfully, what I’ve observed in our cultural is that there is way too much baggage that comes along with any particular label and I don’t want the parts that never will apply to me and the parts I don’t want to ever apply. I know that sounds rather vague, but the distinction really is between being tagged as falling into a general category or being me, Hari Bhajan, with all the subsets underneath: Woman, Mother, Daughter, Wife, Friend, Sikh, Life Coach, Business Administrator, Writer of Poems, Workshop Facilitator, etc. You get the idea. It’s way less pressure not to feel squeezed into a mold that will never quite fit and actually be a distraction from the truth of the whole, of who I am.

Oh, by the way, a regular reader mentioned the other day that she hadn’t seen any of my poems in the e-letter or on the blog in quiet awhile. The reason is that I’ve been submitting many of my poems to journals for publication these last few months and generally they do not accept any work that has been previously published, even if it’s on your own website. The good news is (well, it’s good news for me, anyway) several of my poems will be appearing in issues of journals around the country very soon. I’ll keep you updated on which ones with links to their sites. The latest two are at Poetic Diversity, an online journal that published a poem in their August issue and Lilliput Review, which is a small journal devoted to small poems. In their most recent issue, #159, they published the poem Spirito, which I wrote for my father on his 85th birthday, just a few months before he passed away.

Here’s a little Christmas fun for you…our next door neighbor, Billy, and his family built a gingerbread house to enter into a contest to benefit a charity. It had to be constructed of all edible materials. My husband helped them load it into their SUV to take to the hotel where they were all being displayed. I haven’t heard how it fared in the contest. I don’t think Billy much cared. He was just having a good time putting it together. It’s really quite amazing!!