As usual, serendipity played a starring role here.  The back story: You may have noticed an uptick in poetry praise and consumption of late, given that April is National Poetry Month. For the more hard core, however, April is National Poetry Writing Month (fondly known as NaPoWriMo).  Those who choose to join in on the NaPoWriMo fun take on writing a poem a day for the entire month. 

I myself have not participated in NaPoWriMo, but I was among the enthusiastic bystanders cheering on some prolific poet friends who suited up for the marathon and delighted the rest of us with one fine poem after the next all month long.  Among them was Jim Howard, a friend I met back when we both worked in the Collaboratory writing studio at Hallmark.  (Jim is a multi-talented guy with screenplays and all sorts of creative notches in his belt, not to mention a cool blog called Spulge Nine.) 

But I digress. 

Jim’s first poem out of the NaPoWriMo chute was a surreal, swoopy piece called “Eccentric Heaven.” As soon as I read it, I knew I wanted to share it with my Zesty Artista  readers and friends, who are nothing if not appreciative of oddball impulses and idiosyncratic imaginations. My impulse to play with it myself came soon thereafter.  Here it is:  

ECCENTRIC HEAVEN 

Zappa said to Lennon,
“We got the noses, boy.
You wear four sets of glasses
And I smell like Illinois.” 

Lennon said to Trotsky,
“You fooled me way back when.
But Frida and Diego say
You’re not who you were then.” 

Trotsky said to Brodkey,
“All our souls are runaways.”
And Brodkey said to no one,
“I will miss me all my days.” 

And they gathered in the twilight
As the strangest voices called
Like livestock playing violins
Across a sky Chagalled 

And Dali’d, Dubuffeted,
Caravaggioed with crimson,
While fugues spun forward, Bachward,
Then Beethovened into hymns, and 

A spectral figure (whispers went,
“Nijinsky!” and “GodDAMN!”)
Leapt years of space and landed
In the lap of Martha Graham, 

While Kubrick in Wright-angled rooms
Met Monk, and Monk, Thoreau—
And Dickinson—who couldn’t stop—
And Yeats, Li Po, and Poe— 

And gathering meant scattering,
And heaven meant a home
For every oddball impulse,
Any stray, queer chromosome, 

All geekdom in its hermitage,
Each wild and wayward goof…
Death almost imitating life
And art, life’s living proof. 

–Jim Howard  

  

 As I went hunting for images in both my collection and on the internet, this photograph of Frida Kahlo holding a figurine was the immediate frontrunner as my central image.   Then I remembered a famous photograph of Martha Graham that seemed  right for perching on the palm of Frida’s outstretched hand. 

I needed a Caravaggio angel in the worst way for Frida’s shoulder, and this fellow fit the bill: 

Amor Victorious by Caravaggio

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I then went after images of some of the individuals mentioned in Jim’s poem, favoring those pictures that had some inherent oddball quality beyond the artists themselves.  Thus these three made the cut:

Salvador Dali

Frank Zappa

John Lennon

 

Thanks to Jim’s effervescent imagination, the trio decided on their own—without any intervention from me, I swear—to create a strange totem-pole like homage to eccentric genius:

 

Other things happened too, the most notable being that Emily Dickinson’s head wound up on an Henri Matisse cutout body. 

“But wait!” comes the refrain from alert readers.  “Matisse isn’t in the poem!” 

Well, my friends, that’s where we play the poetic license card.  All is fair in love, war and poem-inspired art. So if you feel like switching out Chagall for Matisse, well, that’s your prerogative. 

Here’s to wild and wayward souls everywhere—especially the unrecognized ones—and the delightful sparks that fly when we open ourselves up to the creations of others.   

Live lusciously, fellow oddballs. 

I suddenly feel the need to explain myself to the horrified bibliophiles out there.  Let me just say that I long ago got over my guilt about cutting up certain old books.  My justification, should you be interested, is that I work with these chosen victims the way sausage makers work with a pig – they use everything but the squeal.  But let’s get that unpleasant image out of our minds and get back to my story.

Actually, it was one Margaret Deland’s story, a 1906 novel she called “The Awakening of Helen Richie” and saw fit to populate with more tormented characters than I’ve ever found between two covers.  Along with Margaret’s fine prose I chose to use pieces of a charming old autograph book from my collection as well a picture from a 1950s  magazine of a suitably smarmy young man.

While I’ve harvested bits of dialogue and narrative far more dramatic and florid than this particular one, Margaret’s depiction of this poor sap (with his high hopes but low probability of ever scoring) spoke to me of every unbearable, glacial evening anyone’s ever spent in the presence of the relentlessly boring.

I am not alone in this, of course.  One need only look as far as Joseph Cornell, genius collage and assemblage artist of the early 20^th century and Patron Saint of All Artists Who Love Working Inside Boxes.  I have now managed to see dozens of his pieces in person, one time risking severe disapproval from a boss when I fled a meeting in New York to make it across town to the final hours of a special showing of Cornell boxes in a miniscule jewel of a gallery.  Makes me breathless just thinking about it – both the wild cab ride and the stress of finding the address, and then the thrill of walking into a dimly lit warren of intimate spaces where so many of my hero’s boxes were lovingly displayed.

I’ve read much about Cornell, and the rather “small” seeming life he led.  He didn’t travel, he didn’t get out much, he didn’t have any big love affairs.  Instead, he gathered objects and images that intrigued him, and he worked in his cramped, crowded room and created things of luminous, lasting beauty.  He made boxes, and he made magic with them.

Perhaps there is something about having limits that allows us to think bigger.

And so we did.

You know how your memories of a place can color your experience of it?  My memories were borrowed, but worked in the same way.  I was full of other people’s moony love affairs with the city, what with those books about life on the Left Bank, all the movies, the Edith Piaf songs.  I even wrote “Non, je ne regrette rien” on the cover of one of my high school text books, such a ready-for-zee-luscious-life little lass was I.

Suffice it to say that you tend to find what you’re looking for, and I found a city brimming with mystery, passion, beauty, and lots and lots of buttery sauces.  I had a good time.

This Zesty Shrine features a coquettish dancer lifting her full, layered skirts in a saucy salute.  And oh, those pink shoes, where did she find them?  Mostly, though, I covet her chartreuse, emerald and flamingo pink head dress.  I have embellished “Flirty Skirty” with found pink coral, sequins, a tiny rosebud, a flourish of unknown origins, and a remnant of vintage silk that I like to imagine was ripped from the hem of a show girl’s dress to make it just a smidge shorter.

I see the smooth black rocks arranged around a candle and recall several wonderful, romantic days and nights in Mexico.  Every time I look at the striped glass pitcher that lives on top of my kitchen cabinet, I am reminded of my grandmother, Hilda, and my great grandmother who used it before her.  The metal dog with the chipped paint displayed on a shelf was my father’s when he was a boy and makes me feel closer to him just seeing it.  Some things carry the aura of memory with them, and others – pictures and fabrics and books – were chosen by me because I love the colors, or the feel of them between my fingers, or the ideas they contain are ideas I want to try on, or they simply make me happy.

The small shrine pictured here is simply called “Home.”  I immediately responded to the picture of a white house bathed in the warm light of a sunset, and chose to include with it a piece of old velvet – in that mossy green I love so much – and some pieces of old rattan chair back, which speak to me of humble histories and the familiar, comforting feeling of home.

First, a brief art history lesson:  Memory jugs, or memory jars, or memory vessels, if you want to sound fancy, have been around a long, long time.  Basically they involve embellishing a bottle, jug or crock with an accumulation of smallish items – buttons, medals, pieces of broken china, game pieces, doll parts, you name it – that have associations or evoke some memory of a person or event.  Some historians say they have their origins in Southern Black communities, while others claim that no, it was really the Victorians with their sentimentality-on-steroids that we have to thank for this phenomenon.

But let’s let those two camps argue amongst themselves and get on with making something fun.  I urge you to get yourself down to the nearest big-box craft store and find yourself a jug that you can cover with the flotsam and jetsam of your own life.  (That’s what I did.  The jar I used looks old, but it’s that faux-old that can be had for under ten bucks, if you hit a sale.)  Get some grout, too.

That jug you buy is, of course, simply your blank canvas. By the time you’re done attaching all your own sentimental stuff, and then grouting it, there won’t be much of the original container visible.  (By the way, prepare yourself for the grouting part, it takes way longer than you’d think to work around all those oddly shaped and angled objects.)  When you’re done, however, you have a remarkable piece that you wouldn’t part with for a million bucks, because that’s your life on that thing, and it’s beautiful.  And only you need to know the stories behind it all.

The Mexican tin nicho obviously needed to be equally glamorous, and what better way to accomplish that then with some shells gathered by yours truly on a pristine, isolated beach in Mexico? I also thought the dangly, beaded number topping it all off was perfect.  (Is it just me, or does that look for all the world like a teeny pastie?)>

As for the name of this piece, it’s inspired by our heroine’s pose – one hand gracefully raised to her ear, the other outstretched behind her.  As in, “Hark! What is that? Why, I do believe I hear Destiny calling my name….”

I made this triptych in honor of –  and for – my mother, whose sense of adventure and optimistic, anything-is-possible outlook on life has been a powerful influence on me and many other people whose lives she’s touched.

I shamelessly incorporated some look-on-the-bright-side clichés, a la the ship coming in, the bowl of cherries, and the just-arrived piece of mail that could contain anything.  That adorable little girl in the pigtails – that’s my mom.  And then there’s the image I was thrilled to find of a young woman standing at the side of a highway, suitcase at the ready, waiting for…who knows?  But you know something’s going to happen, she’s clearly on her way somewhere, and the air practically crackles with both anticipation and certitude.  Meandering across the top of the piece is a phrase my brothers and I have heard my mother say any time it would seem the deck was stacked against us:  “You just never know.”