I chose the title of this two-part blog post to pay homage to one of my all-time favorite poems, "Why I Am Not a Painter," by Frank O'Hara, in which he describes creating a series of poems he called Oranges during the same weeks his friend Mike Goldberg worked on a painting called Sardines. I love O'Hara's humor, his humility, his keen observation of himself and everything around him.

In 1983 I was working as a graphic artist at the University of Connecticut, where I designed publicity and educational materials for an exhibition entitled Art with the Touch of  Poet at the William Benton Museum of Art on campus.

When I wrote Part 1 of this blog entry about my friend Susan Christian selling her painting after my words had caught someone's eye, I thought about co-creation, about serendipity. 

I emailed Susan to tell her my Frank O'Hara story and share his poem.

She emailed back a simple reply: "I knew Mike Goldberg."

Susan Christian with some of her work
Photo by Joanne Lee




Stay tuned for part 2 
of this blog post, 
coming soon!

I'm a member of a feedback group that includes both writers and visual artists. We don't critique; instead we respond with our experiences of each other's work. This feedback method is not only great fun, it also provides useful and refreshing insights about what a given piece of writing or art expresses to each of us. During one session we were viewing paintings by Susan Christian at her downtown Olympia studio; each of us drew and/or wrote a little blurb and pinned it to the wall next to the related painting. One of Susan's pieces was a long canvas painted deep purple with a vibrant core of red in the center. I wrote my response and pinned it to the wall. Some weeks later Susan removed the paintings, intending to hang new work. But she hadn't yet removed all of the blurbs, when a woman visited the studio and happened to read the little piece I'd written. She immediately asked Susan, "Where is this painting? I want to buy it." And she did!!

What I had written became this poem:

On Seeing Susan’s Painting 
in Memory of Her Uterus
 
I want to glimpse this kind of red
in everything, a core that births
blood, that sobs pulsing, burning

cries. The throb & heat of days 
contracted, expanded, so I’ll 
always know in thick, violet night 

that when I wake I will wake. 
A center so vibrant I hold it 
like a kiss, lingering & juicy— 

the blossom of flesh meeting 
flesh, opening like lips, like mouth, 
to taste the tongue of living.

 

It started last Thanksgiving when I began an art quilt requiring skills beyond mine. The square I'd cut for the background had been sitting on the table for days, eyeing me warily, while I stalked the perfect image in my mind as if I were a predator after its prey. Finally there was nothing else to do but pick up a pair of scissors. I didn't think about it, just let my hands do their bravest work, and I watched as the picture I'd imagined began to appear. Since that November afternoon I've done many things I didn't know how to do: prepared a manuscript for publication, collaborated with designer Debi Bodett to create this website and marketing materials for my book, leapt into social media, learned a million things about the publishing industry, rebirthed my life in ways I couldn't have seen nine months ago. Oh, and that quilt is nearly finished.   

In front of my house stands a great cedar. We've lived together for nearly twenty-five years. Most mornings we converse in a silent kind of speech. My hands against its trunk, I read its slow, deep pulse. And its shaggy bark feels the spread of my fingers, the breadth of my palms, the warmth of my skin. Face to face, we come to know each other. We talk about things for which there are no words, only the touch of hand and bark, the beat of blood and sap, the lifting of fronds and hair in wind.