Selling Art: Why I Am a Poet (part 1)

Susan Christian with some of her work
Photo by Joanne Lee




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

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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.