Archana Horsting, On the Fringe of the Field

Published as “Six Creative! Human! Dynamic! Solutions!” in Knox Book Beat, The Berkeley Times, 21 September, 2023.

The catalog to the magnificent art show, Archana Horsting, On the Fringe of the Field, A Survey of Works 1972 – 2022, produced by Berkeley’s Kala Art Institute, was another striking gift. As Kala co-founder with Yuzo Nakano, leading and contributing with classes, fellowship and residency programs as well as her own art; Horsting has been as monumental and dynamic in the East Bay art scene as her labyrinths, etchings, drawings and linear and smudged “oil stick on paper” “which feels to me like the soil or the earth itself.”  

The three articles, a fine interview and her Artist’s Statement all expand the history, origins, breadth, ”beauty and mystery” “pointing toward meaning” of her already “bold” “personal visual vocabulary.” “Problems of metaphor, symbolism and artistic communication” was the theme of her undergraduate program at Santa Cruz, and Berin Golonu notes how “her choice of title (Padovan Arches) after the work’s creation speaks to the way in which our minds are wired to make associations when our minds are confronted with the strange or unrecognizable.” 

Thus, I understood, as well as could admire, abstraction, as never before. “Associations are drawn from the scope of our life experiences.” Again – childlike or childhood trust and release to sensation and emotion create and/or echo the heretofore undiscovered, hidden or ancestrally, biologically innate “meaning.”

Marvelous! 

See also https://www.kala.org/gallery/exhibitions/
 

In the Cities of Sleep: Elizabeth C. Herron

In the Cities of Sleep by Elizabeth Herron
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
 

Art House Gallery on Shattuck Avenue near Ashby hosted another Poetry Flash reading where Elizabeth C. Herron read from In the Cities of Sleep, a moving interplay between her individual perception and love of beings, nature and the world in light of the crushing disparities of climate change, political and social injustice, the humbling infinitude of Creation/ the Cosmos.

I wrote the words “private,” “insignificant” and “infinitely beautiful” in my notebook, not knowing whether they were from one of her poems, my impression of her, or something she said.

The Sonoma County Poet Laureate, she juxtaposed Greta Thunberg’s quote about our “house on fire” in the epigraph with the nursery rhyme “Ladybug, Ladybug, fly away home.” 

The silhouette of a leafless tree before a terrifying orange-red blur on the cover takes on new meaning.

In “Ghost Dance” there are similar paradoxes of

Quiet spaces in the mind
wide as the Great Plains…
In Nebraska and Kansas,
the harvester pitches over acres
pocked for thousands of years
by burrows and warrens that caught the rain
for the Ogallala aquifer…
grinding over the quiet spaces in the mind
of the First Nations…
How will we live
without the quiet
spaces in the mind?

In “Nesting,” reproductive avian behavior balances precariously with
“The mother in her kitchen
unable to avert” the arc of a stray bullet from
“her eleven-year-old daughter;”

with “The mallards… wander
within the slain grass, dazed
by the absence of their nest, the disappearance
of their eggs.”

In her Art House Gallery reading of “Ceremony” I noted: “A threat to all species… a long period of denial…” and “the shift from known identity to no identity to” a place where “new emerge.”

Again, the “Liminal State” where great genius, great wounds and complete transformational leaps are possible. Don’t miss her long poems, and the lovely lines like

“Across the small chaos
of our bed, the cat stretches
one paw toward you, closes his eyes,
and sleeps.”

(Published in “Six Creative! Human! Dynamic! Solutions!” in Knox Book Beat, The Berkeley Times, 21 September, 2023.)
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Beverly Burch: The Latter Days of Eve at Gallery 2727

Latter Days of Eve: Poems by Beverly Burch
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Published 25 May 2023 as “Poetic Expressions” in The Berkeley Times, “Knox Book Beat.”

The 2727 Gallery “Multi-Use Event and Program Space, Residential/Studio Space” at 27th and California was a lovely place for Poetry Flash to host a poetry reading for Robert Thomas’ 2023 Sonnets with Two Torches and One Cliff and Beverly Burch’s 2022 Leave Me A Little Want in the early, chilly days of spring.

Both books proved a marvelous delight, but Ms. Burch’s addition of Latter Days of Eve, one of those “left behind” releases of 2019, became a wonderful boon. Taking Back Old: Poetry Celebrating Old Women, 2022, came in the mail and rounded out some of the “almost lost” years of pandemic publishing with Berkeley’s hidden flowerings and roots.

A lot of F2F events in Berkeley “got cancelled” for two years, but that didn’t mean we all stopped writing or wanting to share. So it was fine to munch, raise a glass, schmooze and hear fine, magical words and heartening thoughts and feelings among aficionados of small press poetry and the spoken word.

Beverly Burch’s A Little Want was mostly very good, but her Latter Days of Eve was definitely excellent, and won awards like the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry to prove it.

I have been wondering a lot about women and men, boys and girls; about love, desire, power and control. (like for 55 years or more?) She is a Berkeley psychotherapist (you have my sympathy), and I felt she unsheathed my tough, coarse, protective, snakelike skin as I read her wonderful poems. (“Difficult” mothers and religious upbringings are hard “crosses to bear.”)

So right, so RIGHT! Brava!

Latter Days of Eve, Beverly Burch, 2022 , BkMk Press, University of Missouri-Kansas City.
 

Wonderful Wordsmiths: Thomas, Burch and Welch

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Wanderland Writers in Japan!

Wandering in Japan: The Spirit of Tokyo, Kyoto and Beyond by Wanderland Writers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Editors (and writers) Linda Watanabe McFerrin and Laurie McAndish King have really hit their stride in their Wandering in Japan: The Spirit of Tokyo, Kyoto and Beyond. 

A nice big volume of travel essays, stories and poems with super photos, prints and painting reproductions, elegant bullet points, helpful glossary and writer biographies.

They “threw out the rules” and included several of their own best pieces among those sometimes covering the exact same locations through the eyes of different writers like veteran travel writers Joanna Biggar, Anne Sigmon and Tania Romanov as well as “visitors” Rob “Tor” Torkildson, Lowry McFerrin and others, with a foreword by Don George.

The variety of tones and viewpoints, often deeply introspective as well as sense-descriptive and detailed, is well-modulated to give a broad view of a culture so unlike America the respect it deserves. We are more influenced by Japan and Asia, especially on the West Coast, than we think.

Highly recommended to both armchair and actual travelers; and an open door to inner and outer evolutions and cultural changes, too.

(Published as “Six Creative! Human! Dynamic! Solutions!” in Knox Book Beat, The Berkeley Times, 21 September, 2023.)
 

It has been an immense comfort and pleasure to read six books filled with original, inspiring, clever and profound observations, images and ruminations on creativity, the arts, humans, world cultures and travel. 

Mary Mackey, Phyllis Grilikhes, Archana Horsting, Elizabeth C. Herron, Linda Watanabe McFerrin, Laurie McAndish King, Alan Bern, Joanna Biggar, Anne Sigmon, Tania Romanov Rob “Tor” Torkildson, Lowry McFerrin and Don George. 

#bookpassage #anthropology #arts #art #dance #rhythm #movement #poetry #writers #creativity #social #humanrelations #peace #travel #japan #kyoto #tokyo

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Creative! Human! Dynamic!

Creativity: Where Poems Begin by Mary Mackey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Mary Mackey read pieces of Creativity: Where Poems Begin at 2727 Gallery for Poetry Flash. She clearly describes that pre-literate, not-very verbal state of pure being, emotion, reminiscence and physical sensation poetry buds from with miraculous accuracy. I’ve been writing poems for 60 years now, graduated from a MFA program etc. etc., but never heard the practice explained with such elegant simplicity.

When she begins her novel, Immersion, which she realizes much later “is also a 126-page poem,” she says, contemplating an ashtray in the library at her elbow (many years ago, 1969, University of Chicago) : 

“I will search out, find, and resurrect the way I saw the world as a very young child – a world in which categories did not yet exist, in which there was no context, no expectation, no reason not to look at the unimportant details of things as well as the important ones…”

The story of her life leading up to and after discovering that process is unique and fascinating, but can be summed up as the Cosmic Truth she gleaned from it: “So out of great pain came a great gift.”

Follow her path to and from that, with a number of her fine poems along the way. GOOD!

(Published as “Six Creative! Human! Dynamic! Solutions!” in Knox Book Beat, The Berkeley Times, 21 September, 2023.)

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Grilikhes’ The Presence of Rhythm

The Presence of Rhythm in the Flow of Time by Phyllis Grilikhes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Phyllis Grilikhes’ The Presence of Rhythm in the Flow of Time from Regent Press is an eclectic resource of illustrations, photographs, mini-biographies and references by a dancer, pianist, tapestry maker, teacher and psychologist.

She chooses examples of people and movements influencing Western and American culture, basing them/us in the rhythms of our bodies, child development, family patterns, psychological and cultural theories; winding up with “Culture and Rhythm,” “Creating One’s Own Rhythm,” “Synesthesia” and “Improvisation.” Gathering in Oliver Sacks, Edna St. Vincent Millais, Louis Armstrong, Bob Dylan, The Beats, Karen Horney, Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and much more.

Poetry, Music, Women’s Voices, Bonding and Storytelling all get their chapters and reflections; but when she gets to “Dance – Rhythm in Movement,” she displays her true forte.

Once I let go to her modest expertise and slim synopses in the other arts and artists as a “wide-screen” production, I saw Presence as a really fascinating, erudite and personal review of human creative experimentation and select genius over the past century and a half. 

Subject listed under “Cultural Anthropology,” (not the Arts) it does not profess to be encyclopedic in any sense, frankly exploring her own penchants for “Possible Pathways” “Vibrant Styles and Non-Conformity” that open out to the world.

Beautiful.

(Published as “Six Creative! Human! Dynamic! Solutions!” in Knox Book Beat, The Berkeley Times, 21 September, 2023.)


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Oakland History Center Librarian: Dorothy Lazard

What You Don’t Know Will Make a Whole New World: A Memoir by Dorothy Lazard
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

from “Healing Self, Others, the World,” Knox Book Beat, The Berkeley Times, 24 August, 2023

Dorothy Lazard’s What You Don’t Know Will Make a Whole New World: A Memoir, from Heyday Press, Berkeley, tells a “Negro” St. Louis girl’s journey to life in San Francisco and Oakland during the 1960s and 70s where she astutely puzzled her way through many aspects of the laundry list of cultural woes

(racism, childhood and adult trauma, sexism, gender bias, climate disaster, police militarism, domestic abuse, physical and mental illness, poverty, immigrant and native genocides, legal and political corruption)

afflicting humans then and now. She survived.

These challenges in her family and world, however, come to us through the eyes and heart of a defiantly authentic, sharply intelligent and sensitively perceptive little girl becoming a young woman, and her family who did their best to make her “stay out of grown folks’ business.”
But she was CURIOUS, SMART and BRAVE.

She had a stint in an all-white Catholic Orphanage, reuniting with her extended family, discovering the Public Library, the power of the written word and fueling her persistent curiosity as she traversed different Black/white strict/loose neighborhoods and school systems that taught her far more than the Three Rs.  

Maybe Resilience, Racial/familial Realities and Resourcing Refuges from loneliness, poverty, violence and prejudice. And Risking the courage and self-esteem to keep on seeking them.

Uncle Shirley, MaDear, Mr. Bear, Aunt Ri, Sarah, Mam’Ella are all there in full, human complexity. A theater of mixed curious, inspiring, loyal, earthy as well as sometimes absent, negligent, creepy and awful caregivers; “the wrong crowd,” teachers, friends and mentors open up in love, joy, pain and all-too-human frailties. She describes them all with clear-eyed honesty and wise consideration of the flaws, world and society she and they were born into and lived in together.

We live through the assassinations of President Kennedy and Dr. King, the Vietnam War as well as “Soul Train” and Billy Dee Williams on TV with “a girl like me, who wanted nothing more than fresh air and freedom.”

Among the “many layers of peace…hippies…church folk…antiwar protestors…Violence seemed to creep into all corners of life during my fifth-grade year…” “student protests, race riots…Paris…Prague…Olympic victory stands.” 

“It seemed everybody was warring for control of somebody or something – a country’s resources, a government, a classroom, or a curfew… tangible things like land, and intangible things like honor and decency.” 

Lazard “tells it like it is,” and tells it like it was.

Well done, well done! She survived. And made HER OWN world, too.

https://www.heydaybooks.com/authors/d...
 

Heyday site – “A librarian for forty years, she joined the staff of the Oakland Public Library in 2000. From 2009 until her retirement in 2021, she was the head librarian of OPL’s Oakland History Center, where she encouraged people of all ages and backgrounds to explore local history.”


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