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The Perks of Being an Artist

Tag Archives: poetry

so many kinds of yes

11 Wednesday Apr 2018

Posted by emilypageart in culture, gratitude, health, kindness, mental health, tattooing, Uncategorized, writing

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

coping with depression, depression, ee cummings, ee cummings tattoo, poetry, reminder of the good in life, so many kinds of yes, stanza, sweet spring, tattoo, tattooing

I have a rule for myself: if I get an idea for a tattoo I want, I have to wait a year before I can get it. If I still want it a year later, then it’s not likely that I’ll regret the tattoo later in life. Well, it’s been more than a year since I got the idea for this tattoo, and 6 years since my last tattoo, so I decided it was time. Plus, I’ve never been tattooed by my tattoo mentor Julio, and I own a freakin’ tattoo shop. Julio had a little free time today, so I chained him to his tattoo chair and put him to work, even though today is his birthday (everyone say “Happy Birthday, Julio!!!!”).

My dad kept a magazine picture, of a little girl from a third world country carrying a jug of water on her head, in his music room to remind him that it could always be worse and that he really had it very good. It was one of the ways he dealt with his own depression. It helped him keep his life in perspective. To me, the picture just depressed me more, because not only did her situation not actually make my brain any more functional, but it frustrated me both that the world would allow her to have to live like that and that I couldn’t do anything about it. Reminding myself that I have an easy life just made me angrier that I still wasn’t able to be happy.

So instead, I’m choosing to just keep reminding myself to look for the good that’s all around me. Thank you Mr. Rogers. I have a stanza from an ee cummings poem printed out and taped onto the lightswitch in my art studio so that I see it coming and going. It’s a reminder that spring is always present in a million little ways if I just look hard enough. The color is there. The poem is called Sweet Spring, and the stanza I keep up is

(such a sky and such a sun

i never knew and neither did you

and everybody never breathed

quite so many kinds of yes)

I’m not spending much time in the art studio these days, because I’m busy learning a new way to make a living as an artist and spending all my time at the tattoo studio. I’m working to shape my life into what I want it to be and grabbing every opportunity that comes my way. I’m making all that color mine. When I can. And when I can’t, maybe my tattoo will remind me that there are just

so many kinds of yes.jpg

 

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Let Us Sing Our Throats Dry

18 Friday Nov 2016

Posted by emilypageart in culture, kindness, singing, Uncategorized

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Tags

poetry, pride, singing, song, standing up for love

This was written by my high school AP English teacher, Paul Erb. Yes, we are now friends on Facebook, even though he terrified me back then. Every once in a while, he posts something he’s written, and while I usually like what he’s posted, this one really spoke to me. So I’m sharing it now with you:

Cafe

I.
Try singing now.

In Casablanca and in Cabaret,
The people stand and say
In song
What they’ve been feeling all along.

Ugly or strong

I read this week about a dictionary
That hanged its accolade, choking praise,
Upon the word “post-truth.”

If that’s the key of our times,
then play The Marseillaise!
The future belongs to me.
Half a melody will call me up,
Or maybe I won’t wait. I’ll enlist,
Ragged private of a tenor,
Shouldering my part, pianissimo, rallentando,
Boosting my buzz with overtones
More true than truthy.

II.
Once, you stood alone
Just sixteen measures in,
After a cafe reception, in the noon sun near Hoxton Hall,
And explicitly didn’t say you were in the closet
Sad, holding the music, not ready yet to sing.

I let the rest sing then
But will sing with you now that you may be at risk again.

I welcome the voice
That will stand up now
And sing its throat dry.

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Delphi

30 Friday Sep 2016

Posted by emilypageart in art, death, gratitude, kindness, MOndays with Muddy, Uncategorized

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ampitheatre, Beatrice Allen Page, Greek theatre, Karen Silvestri, photography, poem, poetry

After a long, trying, kinda sad day (would have been my parents’ anniversary), another artist on Fine Art America paid me a real compliment. I went to check out her work and came across a photo she had taken of an abandoned ampitheatre. Immediately, this reminded me of one of my favorite poems written by my grandmother, Beatrice Allen Page. I know it’s not Mondays with Muddy, and it’s a good possibility that I’ve posted it before, but I’m going to share it now anyway because it’s my blog and I win. When you’re done reading the poem, be sure to check out the photo I linked to above and “like” her image to boost its visibility on Fine Art America:

DELPHI

Emptiness broods on the ampitheatre.

Time has gnawed at the stone tiers.

Weeds and moss grow in the chinks.

Furtive salamanders scribble

cryptograms in ancient dust.

Throngs no longer gather here

to have their heartstrings played upon

by Attic tragedies.

 

Yet a sombre chorus of women

circles mutely in time’s shadow,

their invisible hands linked in common woe.

The scuffle of their worn sandals

makes a sound like autumn wind

sighing through age-old memory.

Masks conceal their faces.

 

Grief is more durable than stone.

Long before the theatre was built,

the moving choir had begun in hollows of cypress-dotted hills,

on wind-swept plains, inside walls

and towns. And still goes on

down through the ages, throughout the earth

an ever-widening circle of women

mourning the death of the warriors:

fathers…brothers…husbands…sons.

And children not yet born.

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A Poem on a Sunday

28 Sunday Aug 2016

Posted by emilypageart in culture, humor, Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

bourbon, poem, poetry

I wrote you a poem:

 

Hey diddle diddle.

Bring me some bourbon.

 

You’re welcome.

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Mondays With Muddy

28 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by emilypageart in MOndays with Muddy, Uncategorized, writing

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16th century poetry, Beatrice Allen Page, Beatrice Page, God, journal, journaling, Landscape with Figures, poetry, unpublished manuscript

This is the latest installment from Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape With Figures:

“We had another night so utterly still it seemed to me if I tuned my hearing a hair’s breadth higher, I could not only hear the secret, delicate burrowing of a mole among the roots of the trees but the infinitesimal sound of growing made by the roots themselves. Which is, of course, absured.

Nevertheless, I lay in the dark, quiet as the night itself, listening, listening – for what I wasn’t sure. It was not fear that kept me awake this time; it was something more elusive.

Then as I lay there in the silent dark there floated into my mind that anonymous little 16th century poem, one of the most poignant, passionate poems in all English literature:

O westron wind, when wilt thou blow

That the small rain down can rain?

Christ, that my love were in my arm

And I in my bed again!

I’ve never been able to make up my mind whether it was written by a man or a woman. It is a cry that might have been wrenched from the throat of Abelard or torn from the anguished heart of Heloise. In fact, I used to let myself imagine the poem was originally written by one of them in Latin and was somehow found and translated into English centuries later.

I hadn’t thought of the poem for a long time and when the words went through my mind, a wave of sadness swept over me and a moment later I realized I was no longer listening for something beyond audible sound but longing for something beyond defining. I could not have said whether it was for a person, a place, or an experience I’d once had and lost forever or one I might have had but failed to find. It was rather like an unassuageable home-sickness for a country I’d never seen, which is a contradiction, of course.

Was it basically, I wondered, sexual desire manifesting itself directly? It seemed to me that if ‘my love were in my arms,’ the longing might have been eased temporarily, but I had the feeling something deeper or other, was involved – something possible like what the psalmist felt when his soul was ‘thirsting’ for God.

Is there in the core of every human being this longing, this essential loneliness, for something we cannot or will not or dare not specify, which is why we so often avoid silence and prefer noise to drown out our thoughts?

I hope the wind blows tonight so I can sleep.”

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Rhyming Couplets

14 Wednesday Oct 2015

Posted by emilypageart in humor, music

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Tags

asparagus pee, asparagus pee song, iambic pentameter, poetry, Pop-Tart, Pop-Tart fart, rap, rhyming couplets, Wiz Khalifa

So this conversation just happened:

I’m reading happily, S is surfing the inter-webs.

S: What’s a rhyming couplet?

Me: Two lines in a poem that rhyme. So instead of ABAB, it’s AA.

S: What?

Me: Hold on, lemme grab Shakespeare’s sonnets and I can show you. See how every other line rhymes with every other line, but at the end the last two lines rhyme with each other? That’s a rhyming couplet at the end.

S: So like, if I said, “I fart/ because I ate a Pop-Tart,” that’d be a rhyming couplet?

Me: No, I think the two lines have to have the same meter. So it’d have to be something more like, “my butt did fart/ from a Pop-Tart.”

S: Got it.

Me: Out of curiosity, what are you reading that made you ask?

S: I’m reading about this rapper Wiz Khalifa.

Me: Wait, there’s a rapper whose first name is Wiz? Oh my god. You mean that’s taken now? Because if I were a rapper that would totally be the best name for me. I mean, I have to pee all the time. Not just some of the time. All. Of. The. Time. From now on you should just call me Wiz-diddy. And people pay money to hear his music? I bet he doesn’t even sing the asparagus pee song. I’m not sure he’s earned the right to use the name Wiz. I need to write a rap about asparagus pee using, apparently, rhyming couplets.

S: <silence>

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Mondays With Muddy

27 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by emilypageart in MOndays with Muddy

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Beatrice Allen Page, poetry, writing

As promised, here is your weekly Mondays With Muddy post. It’s the last week of National Poetry Month, after which I’ll return to the manuscript from which I’ve been posting. But this week, I give you Beatrice Allen Page’s poem, “Dilemma.”

Dilemma

Whether to walk along the beach

with eyes focused on the sand

where the outgoing tide

leaves odds and ends behind,

looking for a rare shell,

a bit of sea-polished glass,

gnarl of driftwood for the fireside,

or possibly – just possibly – to find

a white stone,

clean, cool, smooth as stark bone,

on which is written one’s secret name…

Or whether to fling the gaze far out and up

like a kite, letting it fly free

beyond self, beyond earth,

toward infinity…

Always the decision to make

between the near and the far:

to look for the treasure within reach

or strain one’s eyes toward an invisible star.

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Mondays With Muddy

20 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by emilypageart in MOndays with Muddy

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Tags

Beatrice Allen Page, casualties, Greek theatre, grief, poem, poetry, war

It’s still National Poetry Month, so I’m sticking with poems by my grandmother and will return to “Landscape With Figures” in May. Today, I give you one of my favorite poems. I love the line “Grief is more durable than stone.” I think that line influenced falling in love with the book, “Fugitive Pieces,” by Anne Michaels.  If you haven’t read it, you need to. The first half is exquisite and when I read it, my grandmother’s line reverberates in my head in waves.

So here is Beatrice Allen Page’s “DELPHI.”

Emptiness broods on the amphitheatre.

Time has gnawed at the stone tiers.

Weeds and moss grow in the chinks.

Furtive salamanders scribble

cryptograms in ancient dust.

Throngs no longer gather here

to have their heartstrings played upon

by Attic tragedies.

Yet, a somber chorus of women

circles mutely in time’s shadow,

their invisible hands linked in common woe.

The scuffle of their worn sandals

makes a sound like autumn wind

sighing through the age-old memory.

Masks conceal their faces.

Grief is more durable than stone.

Long before the theatre was built,

the moving choir had begun

in hollows of cypress-dotted hills,

on wind-swept plains, inside walls

and towns. And still goes on

down through the ages, throughout the earth

an ever-widening circle of women

mourning the death of warriors:

fathers…brothers…husbands…sons.

And children not yet born.

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A Tuna Haiku

17 Friday Apr 2015

Posted by emilypageart in humor

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

haiku, poetry, Satchmo, tuna

In honor of it still being National Poetry Month, I have written a little haiku (the “little” there was redundant, wasn’t it? Oh hell, I’m leaving it in anyway), just for you, dear internet:

As I enjoy my

tuna sandwich, Satch glares at

me accusingly.

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Mondays With Muddy

13 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by emilypageart in MOndays with Muddy

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Tags

Beatrice Allen Page, poetry, writing

Again, in keeping with it being National Poetry Month, I’m taking a break from my grandmother’s Landscape with Figures manuscript to post some of her poetry. Today, I give you Divided Viewpoint by Beatrice Allen Page:

Divided Viewpoint

Beating my way along the windy beach

I watched a small bird on stilts

who kept up a teetering pace

in and out of the sea’s last reach

where the shore line tilts

and the waves burst to filigree

and dissolve in lace.

With an eye on each side of its face,

what did the bird see?

With the right eye the waves giving chase

to its skittering retreat;

on the other side, me?

How then could it know in its race

against time and tide, where to jab

its bill in the sand for something to eat?

Or did it, like most of us, blindly replace

vision with chance, hopefully making a stab

at fulfilling its hungers by luck – or by grace?

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