SPECIAL FEATURE
Sparks: A Conversation in Poems and Paintings
by Peggy Shumaker and Kes Woodward
PEGGY SHUMAKER
Peggy Shumaker was the Rasmuson Foundation Distinguished Artist for 2014. She served as Alaska State Writer Laureate from 2010–2012. She is the author of seven books of poetry and a lyrical memoir, and was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Professor Emerita at University of Alaska Fairbanks, she teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA at Pacific Lutheran University. She is an contributing editor. (www.peggyshumaker.com)
KES WOODWARD
Kes Woodward received the first Alaska Governor’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts in 2004, and he was named Alaska’s Rasmuson Foundation Distinguished Artist in 2012. His artwork is represented in all of Alaska’s major public art collections and in museum, corporate, and private collections on both coasts of the United States. He retired from teaching at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2000 as Professor of Art Emeritus, in order to work in his studio full time. (www.keslerwoodward.com)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Grateful acknowledgement is made to Christine Barber, Curator of the Alaska Humanities Forum, for the exhibition “Sparks: A Conversation” that opened on September 11, 2015 at the Alaska Humanities Forum, Anchorage Alaska; and to Therese Bakker for recording this conversation on October 25, 2015 in Fairbanks, Alaska. (The unedited audio version is posted on the Alaska Quarterly Review website.) Finally, the authors express their gratitude to their spouses, Dorli McWayne and Joe Usibelli.
Paintings are are available for viewing in the print version only.
INTRODUCTION
This collaboration began when two friends decided to share an artistic conversation. Kes Woodward asked Peggy Shumaker to write a poem, and he created a painting in response to it. Peggy wrote in response, Kes painted in response, again and again. As each piece added its vividness to the conversation, both writer and artist found they were responding not just to the last piece, but to the entire body of work. The work has taken many unpredictable and startling turns, adding to the intensity of this third art – an art that’s not language alone, not purely painting, but the bonding of the two.
This is their fourth collaboration. The most significant one was the book Blaze (2005), which featured thirty years of Kes’ paintings of birches and the boreal forest, and thirty years of Peggy’s poems. A major excerpt of Blaze initially appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review (Vol. 22. No. 1 & 2). Most of the poems and paintings were juxtaposed to create conversations with one another.
Kes and Peggy’s other collaborations included a broadside for the Alaska State Council on the Arts, for a statewide conference in 2008. It featured Kes’ painting Bright Tracks and “Long Before We Got Here, Long After We’re Gone,” a poem that Peggy wrote in response. Similarly, they collaborated on a poster for the 2013 Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival.
THE CONVERSATION
KES WOODWARD: We decided at the very beginning that this would be a true conversation. I suggested that she write a poem and I make a painting in response to it, and she make a poem in response to that painting, and I make another painting in response to that one, and we’d just see where it went. What we showed at the Alaska Humanities Forum in September, 2015 was the result of that almost year-long conversation between a poet and a painter.
PEGGY SHUMAKER: Early on we both decided independently and then together that anything that came up was fair game and we would include it. Kes said that usually when he does a show there is some continuity in terms of either material or size or subject matter. But this time he chose many different media, many different sizes, and many different subjects. The poems came in different forms and with a wide range of concerns. Each artwork focused our attention in distinct ways, and we let everything in, just as you might in a conversation with a friend.
KES WOODWARD: That was one of the most exciting things about it. Probably the most exciting thing was that we didn’t know, going into it, where it would lead, and we certainly could never have predicted what we would come up with when we began.
PEGGY SHUMAKER: It was absolutely thrilling to see it all in one place, because at the show at the Alaska Humanities Forum, that was the first time anybody had seen all the poems and paintings together.
KES WOODWARD: Including us (laughing).
PEGGY SHUMAKER; Yeah (laughing). So that was pretty wonderful.
KES WOODWARD: So . . . we started with one of Peggy’s poems.
PEGGY SHUMAKER: Yes. This poem came from a memory of a dance performance by a woman named Maureen Fleming. One of her specialties is moving exquisitely slowly.
THREE BLUES
– after Maureen Fleming
We once watched a woman
naked with grace fall
down a flight
of stairs so steep no
Dall’s sheep could
balance there,
set of stairs built precisely
for falling. The woman
had trained body
and soul to fall
exquisitely
slowly
sculpting
light
each movement melting
into the next
so that time
held its breath.
The eye could not trust
what it couldn’t see
gestures so quiet
they register only after
we notice their passing.
Her falling took infinity
along for the ride, her spine
knobby testament
to all we must imagine,
dancing shape of galaxies
sending tendrils of stardust
to breathe in dark matter
where we live incompletely
aware one moment.
Paints wet on the palette,
brush tip blending
three blues with a touch
of black, slow swirl graceful
and sure, painting past knowing,
painting into all we cannot touch.
KES WOODWARD: For this poem and all the others, I received the poem from Peggy, and I read it, and I took a deep breath, and I went on working on whatever I was working on. I posted it on the wall in my studio, and every day when I came into the studio, I would read the poem. Then I would try to put it out of my mind and work on whatever I was going to work on and wait for a response to come. And sure enough and very, very rapidly in this case, I knew in general terms how I wanted to respond to it.
What I came up with was a painting called Three Blues from one of the last lines in the poem. That’s the most obvious way that it relates to the poem – the three blues blended with the brush tip with a touch of black is very much a part of the image that you see. But the poem itself seemed to be mostly about precipitousness, steepness, the possibility of falling. And the most precipitous place I’ve ever been, the steepest place I’ve ever been, and the most dramatic place I’ve ever been is a place called the Sheldon Hut, which is atop a 200‑foot rock outcropping in the middle of Ruth Glacier, six miles as the crow flies from the summit of Denali. Dorli and I spent five nights there three years ago in May and were just bowled over by the place. That image came immediately to mind after reading Peggy’s poem. And so I focused on that quality of steepness, on the blending of the blues, on the blacks, but not illustrating. None of the images that I made for the show are illustrations of Peggy’s poems and none of Peggy’s poems are illustrations of my paintings. They are simply responses to them that in my case, at least, came unbidden in response to my reaction to the poems, given the time for them to sink into my consciousness and elicit some kind of response.
Three Blues: Mt. Dickey from the Sheldon Hut (oil on paper 28 x 40)
PEGGY SHUMAKER: And once I looked at Kes’ painting (by the way, at this stage we were in different cities and so I didn’t see his work in person, I saw it as an image on the computer screen), I found it extremely dramatic. It’s filled with severe opportunities to fall. It’s filled with geologic outcroppings. It’s filled with a sense of something much larger than ourselves. And so for the next piece, I wrote a little poem and then another little poem and another little poem and the piece just kept building in the way, I guess, that some mountains build. Not all, but some. My sense of what we can’t quite grasp is very large in this poem.
Sometimes people in my life appear in the poems. In this one, several people make cameo appearances: Sherry Simpson, my beloved Joe, Judith Kitchen and Stan Rubin, and Eva Saulitis. The poem is called “Geology of Wonder.”
GEOLOGY OF WONDER
1.
Shaped by forces way underneath,
shaped gradually by grinding,
shaped over eons by rivers of ice,
shaped by wind, by rain, by eruption, by season
after season of snow, some melting, some packing down
evidence of how this mountain came to be
what it is this instant, how
this mountain changes each breath
2.
A young writer once asked
a roomful of writers to list
our fears. To start us,
she jotted on the board
bears
blindness
widowhood
Until that moment I had not
let myself know
that I too carry inside a little nugget
of pre-emptive mourning
for our hardy and loving bond, for the days
of our marriage forged late in life
a marriage that cannot last
because we cannot last
3.
Over years of working for each breath,
Judith made files,
files to help Stan
find his way
once she wasn’t there
to holler and guide him.
One file lists women
he should and should not
date. With reasons,
juicy
and funny.
I can just see her
amusing herself
amassing this catalog
of poignance,
antidote
to the loneliness
of dying.
4.
When the horizon holds on
to the sun, when light
lingers and dim shapes
gather in every ravine
alpenglow eases
first out of snow banks
then out of cloudscapes
then out of our eyes
into stars closer now because
we have stepped out from under
whatever we call shelter
to be with the sky.
5.
Aware that death
draws very close, dear Eva
lives parallel lives.
One involves next –
next whale season, next
harvest of honey and kale,
next visit with grandson Findlay,
next birthday.
One involves last,
as desires sharpen
then fall away.
Last hike up Grace Ridge,
last trip to Latvia, last
manuscript complete.
Each word
next to last
she writes.
6.
Radical, our innocence,
as in rooted,
as all that matters
pushes up from that root
toward light, as each moment
spreads wide to gather moisture,
as our wonder tunnels deeper,
riddles rich earth.
7.
We must stand far off
or go up in a plane
to see much of this mountain.
When we’re on it,
our focus shifts
to scree underfoot,
to a shady cornice
overhanging our steps,
to a patch of lichen
breaking
down
stone.
The view
vast
beyond us.
KES WOODWARD: So that poem, longer than the rest in this conversation, elicited not one but two paintings – one larger one I called Horizon Holds On and a smaller one called Vespertine. Both of them come from essentially the same place. They’re very similar images, from the neighborhood where Dorli and I live. We walk our dog along a ridge that overlooks the city. In the far distance, you can see on a good day not only the alpenglow and the mountains of the Alaska Range and the Tanana Valley basin, but Denali off in the distance on the horizon, just over the top of Chena Ridge.
Horizon Holds On: Denali from Taiga (acrylic on canvas 30 x 40)
Vespertine (acrylic on canvas 20 x 16)
KES WOODWARD: One of the things that neither of us anticipated, I think, was how much of this conversation would be influenced by the fact that we’re growing older and we’re feeling our age. We have friends who are undergoing great trials. We have friends like Eva, who is nearing the end of a long trial. And we have become very, very aware of the temporariness of life . . . the tentativeness of life and the impossibility of holding on. In February in Fairbanks the tentativeness of the light, the way the sun comes up just barely east of due south, crawls above the horizon almost on it, and then drops out of sight, became a really strong metaphor for me of that sort of tenuousness of life and the way the light tries to hold on to the horizon, and so this painting, both these paintings, came very much out of a response to that growing theme that was emerging in the conversation as a whole and the references in this specific poem.
PEGGY SHUMAKER: I was thinking, too, as I looked at these paintings, both of them, how in this atmosphere of tenuousness it becomes vitally important for us to make human connections. Questions of distance and perspective, and how distance alters perspective, stretched out before me. I have a nephew who at the age of 17 met his father for the first time. And I was thinking about how dramatic that distance has been for them and then what it meant for them actually to be in the same room and to be able to touch one another. This one’s called “Sun at the Horizon.”
SUN AT THE HORIZON
– For Malik and Dorrell
His whole life, the boy suffered
having no dad. His sister had one
in the house for a while
but he hit. Never
his, never real, never dad.
In the story his mom tells
he was conceived
far north in the month
light returns, sifted
by branches of black
spruce and birches
long since bare.
Far, the mountain
so high it changes weather.
Far, the distance –
who he is, who
he might be. When he stands
taller than his mother,
slim and strong as a fresh
trunk of birch,
he flies east to meet
the man he has imagined,
the man defined by absence,
the man who was half his making,
the man he hated when he needed
him most, the man he has wanted
more than anyone to love,
the man who holds what he needs
to know, the man whose silence
echoes his silence.
When the plane touches down
his stomach lurches. He walks
the unfamiliar path
to baggage claim. Through
the milling crowd, one man –
around him, his father’s arms –
light after long darkness
returning to the world
all the branches the dark time
has hidden, iced rivers braided,
the legacy of sky opening, the self
a shape – shifting cloud, backlit.
KES WOODWARD: So what was wonderful about getting to see all these paintings and poems together for the first time was being able to look back and forth and see the way that poem makes references to the image before it, and then to think about what I was thinking about as I made the painting in response to it. And in many ways, it’s all there. It’s all there in both of them. That poem is very much about individuals and relationships among people and relationships in families.
Birches, in my work, have always stood in for people, in their individuality and their uprightness, their strength and their fragileness, and their vulnerability. Things that happen to them in their lives show as scars in their bark, the same as scars on our skin. And groups of birches have often in my work been in my mind family portraits. Larger ones, smaller ones, younger ones, older ones. Images of relationship and individuals and aging. And so naturally enough, I turned in response to that poem to a multiple image of birch trunks and branches, and to the numerous references to branches. There’s a reference to a branch, to an arm being put around. There are young people, and there are older people, and there are relationships among them. And there is a bareness to the branches that is referenced a number of times in the poem. That is very much the case with most of the birches that I paint, and particularly in the birches that I chose for this painting. But there is also in the poem this sense of reawakening hope as this contact is made. I was making this painting in the spring, when the leaf buds on the trees were just warming and swelling and just about to burst, and so I was eager to include those leaf buds in the painting, just about to swell and burst into life in response to the gathering of this family.
Birches Bare (acrylic on canvas 48 x 60)
PEGGY SHUMAKER: It was absolutely marvelous that I got to go to Kes’ studio and see this painting. I also got to see the paintings that came before, and I think that enlarged the conversation for me in a great many ways. Kes’ paintings, when you see them on a computer screen, are gorgeous, but you’re seeing one portion, one facet of the painting, but when you see them in person, when you get up close, there’s a more textured experience. When you stand six feet away, it’s a different experience. And when you stand across the room the paintings resolve into images in ways that they don’t when you’re right up next to them and they are more abstract. I got to see lots of lines and shapes that looked like maps in this painting when I was up close.
The poem also involved a concert by a flute choir. Dorli, Kes’ wife, has for over 35 years led a flute choir. This year, for one of the pieces, she taught her flutists to aim air through their flutes so that it makes a really haunting and powerful vibration but no tone. It’s not a note. It’s just quickened air gliding through the tubes. It’s incredibly beautiful. So that’s in here as well.
And then I found out one other thing. When I was looking at the surfaces of old paintings, thinking about them, I realized there has to be a word for what happens when the paint can’t hold together anymore. And there is! That juicy word made it into the poem. So, anyway, Kes probably knew that all along (laughing).
GREEN UP
Iris shoots shin tall
pierced ground
a week ago.
All the buds holding tight,
birch, chokecherry, alder
have broken,
green filling in
all the blanks on the map.
Spring’s privacy
shields songbirds
trilling for territory,
jazzing for mates.
Scrolls of bark reveal the
cartographer’s art –
how the city of each tree
sprawls, layered,
intricate apartments
occupied by pollen
drifting on breath,
burgeoning air of a flute choir
angled so the tremble
translates tension
traveling
lung to hollow
to the open ear
of the world, the curve
of the alto doubling
the thrill,
air channeled to art,
no tone no note
restraint just burst.
Two steps back
birch branches blacken.
Two steps forward
birch branches
crackle, the dark palette
of a beloved addict
about to be released,
unsure, consumed
with all the shades
of what’s next, knowing only
how this season
sends tiny fissures
across every
surface, the craquelure
of self.
Spring leads us on,
lets us divine
elaborate patterns
of cracks
we call ourselves,
all the broken
places that make us
us.
KES WOODWARD: At this point in this developing conversation, things started to get weirder and eerier in a wonderful way. My paintings began to respond to the poems in ways that I didn’t anticipate, and even more than usual, my paintings felt out of my control. This painting is one of the most striking examples of that that I can remember in my work. It’s called Spring Leads Us On, and it’s not at all the painting that I set out to make. I started to make a painting about green‑up, because that’s the poem that preceded it. And it was very much a poem about burgeoning life and spring and greening up, and I thought, “Great! So I’m going to look up. I’m going to look up into the trees and I’m going to celebrate the leaves coming out on the trees and focus on the underside of the canopy.” And I started working on the painting and it got away from me. Instead of being spring, it turned into summer, and then before I knew it, it turned into fall. And as I kept on, every day I would come back into the studio and as I was working on the painting, I would read the poem again. But I kept thinking, you know, what’s happening here? Why is this painting not about green‑up? Why is this painting not about spring? Why is it turning into fall? It wasn’t until I was nearly done with the painting, and it was very much a fall painting, that I realized that it was spring leading us on. I thought about how when it’s spring, you think the summer’s going to last forever. And when you’re young, you think life is going to last forever.
At the time I was working on this painting, my son’s partner turned thirty, and my son was just about to turn thirty a couple of months later. I talked to Becca, his partner, and I said, “You know, I remember turning thirty. I remember being in my office at the university and my good friend Glen Simpson, who is exactly ten years older than I am, was turning forty just a couple of days later, and I was talking about turning thirty. And that was only yesterday. I swear it was only yesterday.” And I told her that (laughing). I’m not sure she wanted to hear that as she turned thirty (laughing), that in a day she’d be my age, but it suddenly occurred – so I went back and I read the poem and I saw that line, “Spring leads us on,” and I thought, “You know, that’s exactly what this is about. This is about how you don’t realize as life goes along that it goes by so quickly. And you look back to when you were young and it was just yesterday.”
Spring Leads Us On (oil on canvas 16 x 20)
PEGGY SHUMAKER: And as Kes mentioned, both of us are of a certain age. My beloved is in his late 70s and I am, myself, in my 60s. And I thought that I would be writing a poem – in fact I started drafts of poems – that dealt with particular loved ones who are not around anymore. Not breathing. And then I thought, no, this needs to be a poem of wider human experience, a poem of public engagement. So maybe this one shouldn’t be linked to any one individual, even though I had several cherished loved ones in my mind and heart. And I was thinking as I was writing of a Mayan belief that the dead, the living, and those yet to live travel along the roots, trunk and branches of one enormous tree. I leapt from that image into new possibilities. I began to think about how love continues even when a person’s life does not.
LISTENING AMONG BIRCHES
Those of us still rooted to this earth
lie back on the sponge of other lives,
look up through thirteen layers of breath.
Below, roots echo
branching canopies,
deepen and widen
toward moisture not
light. Under us, nine
worlds. At least.
Those who’ve gone before
travel along trees,
all trees, not
just the giant
the Mayans imagined,
not just the ancient
redwood or kauri
or oak. These birches
hold the laughter
we can’t quite call back,
the glance
that touched us
more intimately than skin.
Inside us conversations
continue, layer
upon layer, off-kilter
but not really one-sided, absent
love so fully present.
So much left
unsaid, undone.
Each weight specific.
One love, particular.
Listening alive
beyond mere death.
Springfall: Listening (acrylic on canvas 36 x 48)
KES WOODWARD: So in Springfall: Listening, this aspen leaf lies back and looks up into the branches, just the way Peggy talks about in the poem. And it lies on the sponge of other lives. It lies on the detritus of the forest. A lot of what was happening in this conversation was our thinking about losses and potential future losses of loved ones. At this point it was still early summer, and this was an aspen leaf that was still green and had fallen before its time. Rain had fallen on it, and raindrops were beaded up on the surface of the leaf. Dorli and I run on paths out our back door and through the boreal forest for six miles on trails every other day, all year round. And I had seen this leaf, or one very much like it, on the path with little beaded-up droplets of rain just a few days before and had thought about how I might want to make a painting of it in some way. And this poem came along and there was a kind of shock of recognition when I read it. It seemed so much of what that was about. It was about someone fallen, something fallen before its time. It was about something falling in the spring and that concatenation of seasons.
The problem with paintings is that they take a long time to do. I was working on paintings all along, and I would do a painting and I would spend weeks, sometimes six weeks, working on a painting, and then I’d be very pleased to send it off, send an image of it to Peggy, wherever she was, and then two days later a poem would come back (laughing), and I would think, “Oh, no, this is too fast! I’m not ready.” But then sure enough, you know, I would be off, veering in another direction in response to it.
When I do these paintings, I lay in the image very loosely and then I go back in and I sort of excavate the detail out of them. I go back in with a tiny brush and I bring structure and organization. Particularly in something like Springfall: Listening, an image that’s so intricate. Dorli saw this one when it had just been started, and it was all very diffuse and she said, “Oh, my gosh. You’ve really sentenced yourself to a long excavation here.” And sure enough, I was running out of time, and so I pulled a lot of long days and nights working on this fairly large, three foot by four foot painting of this leaf in order to get it done. I wanted to get it back to Peggy, so we could get one or two more paintings done for the show.
PEGGY SHUMAKER: And modestly, Kes is not mentioning that he also had a show at Well Street Art Company that involved many of these paintings and others. I went and sat in front of this painting in July for several hours and just drank it in. Kes said at the opening people kept coming up to him saying, “It must have been so difficult to paint those raindrops.” And you’ll hear his response in the poem. The poem was also particularly moving to me because the painting appeared at just about the anniversary of the deaths of Kes’s wife Missy and Dorli’s husband Barry McWayne. And so that sorrow is intertwined in this poem even though they are not mentioned by name. They are certainly present.
LETTER TO ONE WHO’S GONE BEFORE
Spring span of aspen
fallen too soon,
twig-jam floating
on rusty blue duff.
One leaf on the path
and you’re with me.
Knocking down smoke,
pelting drops
calm wildfires
to smolder.
Drizzle’s delicious
grace lets us breathe.
From the serrated
edge to narrow roads
all through me, you live
in each cell. Inhale
the intricate civilization
alive in the fragrance of sage.
Nothing is harder to paint
than anything else,
the artist says. Just look.
Paint what you see.
What you cannot see
will surface just fine.
Each raindrop bending
the world in its own
curve. And when we step close,
through each raindrop
our lives shapeshift,
the lives we live
flawed and tender, the lives
we dream minus the suffering,
the life where this aching
absence has walked a few steps
down the path.
You are with me.
KES WOODWARD: So as Peggy said, this was right around the time of the fifth anniversary of my dear, beloved wife Missy’s sudden death, in the 40th year of our marriage, and that was very much on my mind. The loss of my friend Barry, Dorli’s husband, ten days later was very much on my mind. The fragility of life was an emerging theme in all of this conversation. What I focused on as I began this painting one day was the notion of a path – that you go down the path and you don’t know where the path is going to lead, and all you can do is go down the path. So I decided I would do a painting of the path through the boreal forest, and I would try to lighten things up a little bit (laughing) because I was having dark thoughts and we were talking about fragile and dark things and so I thought, well, I’m going to look up, or I’m going to look down the path towards the future. And try to make a hopeful image of a path. And so I began with these birch trees on either side and the path in between them.
I had just laid in the very beginnings of the painting when Peggy called one day in tears and said that she had just been diagnosed with cancer. I just couldn’t believe it. I washed out my brushes, and in a total sense of not knowing anything to do, just drove, racing, across town, and I gave her and Joe big hugs. I was overwhelmed by the sense of helplessness that not only were we remembering losses and not only were we worrying about those that we might lose, but we had darkness staring us right in the face.
I went back home, and I went back to work on this painting, and this dark black spruce tree grew up in the path. It had been a summer painting. It turned into a winter painting. And the spruce tree just kind of appeared. I mean, I didn’t consciously think I’m going to make a spruce tree in the path. The spruce tree just grew up out of its own volition. Outside my own volition in the path that I was putting in this painting, there it was.
I looked up, trying to lift my gaze upward, trying to get beyond that tree. But I couldn’t see beyond it. It was so big, it was taking up the path. And it was, you know, again, without consciously setting out to do it at all, it was the absolute embodiment of everything I was feeling at the time. And so, this painting resulted. It’s called Darkness in the Path.
Darkness in the Path (acrylic on canvas 36 x 24)
PEGGY SHUMAKER: And when Kes saw one of my poems, I don’t remember which one, Kes. I think it was when you saw “Listening Among Birches,” you emailed me and said, “Wow, wow, wow! Oh, wow! I know exactly what I’m going to do.” And that is really uncharacteristic of you.
KES WOODWARD: Right.
PEGGY SHUMAKER: And it’s uncharacteristic of me when I start a poem to know exactly where it’s headed. So when I was looking at this painting and being distraught and bewildered and overwhelmed, I didn’t know what was going to happen. I just had this great surge of writing and I completely took advantage of our conversation and sent Kes a flurry of poems. That wasn’t the deal, but he received them graciously and considered them and did his best. This huge surge came from extremity, but I didn’t know where it was going to go. I was living so much in the unknown.
SUCCESSION
– after diagnosis
Where once there were birches, a path.
Where we wanted a path, this spruce.
The spruce is not ashamed
of its smell, not sorry
for its shape.
This spruce holds on,
a poor self-pruner,
keeping dead branches for decades.
My friend who nearly died this
week holds that health involves
illness and aging.
True health lets us see
who we are. Not busy,
not going doing making.
Just being. If we’re lucky
loved and loving.
Zen aroma of rain
washing birch and spruce.
Spiral of needles
dark blue dusted white.
Breathe.
No matter what grows in us.
Breathe.
How else can we live?
picea mariana black spruce
PEGGY SHUMAKER: It was peculiar to me when I looked up the Latin name of black spruce that it involves mariana, which is . . .
KES WOODWARD: Mariana was Missy’s real name (laughing).
PEGGY SHUMAKER: So that was chilling. When I got my diagnosis, they told me I have a rare form of cancer called mucinous colloid carcinoma. That involves a shell of mucus around the cancer cells. So of course I thought of scuba diving and parrotfish. A logical leap (laughing).
SIDEWAYS WALKING
Scientists don’t know why exactly
parrotfish at night secrete
a lovely mucous bubble
and rest within it,
secure from bloodsuckers.
Nor do mere mortals know
why some cells hold on past their time, refusing
so much to die that they
put the whole being in danger.
Disease named for claws
sideways walking, my cells take their time
getting weird, spin their cocoons
and kick back. O shape shifting
breast. I breathe my finite air, hover fascinated
deep in surging salt.
– day before surgery (mucinous colloid carcinoma)
PEGGY SHUMAKER: That was the day before surgery . . .
Okay. I don’t know how memories come back to us and I don’t know why they come back to us. This next moment happened many decades ago. An event occurred many decades ago, and then here it showed up and it was extremely vivid. And so it became this next poem.
Kes and I had been talking about how there are certain things that you can do in the much beloved company of others and certain things that you do alone. That’s part of this, too.
KISS
One evening I kissed
outside a bookstore
a gentle man
I did not know
kissed this man
twisted in a car
parked I did not
love him, kissed
long and deep
a man I did not love
with everything I had
because I missed
a man I once loved
because I missed
the man I would
one day love so hard
my longing
spread across the sky
backlit red
wide and deep.
My own loneliness
I kissed.
I kissed my mother’s
loneliness, my father’s,
the loneliness
of all our ancestors,
the loneliness of moss,
of cacti, the spiky loneliness
of lizards, of rattlers,
the loneliness
of birch bark, of black
spruce, the solitary
sweeper teetering
over the eddy,
the swirling
loneliness of green
aurora, the loneliness
of starshine on new snow,
the loneliness
dark gray leaning to black
of stormclouds full
of lightning
that loneliness
I kissed.
KES WOODWARD: So by this time it was fall. It was early fall. Every fall, I think how extraordinary it is that the leaves become most beautiful just as they die. Just before they turn brown and crumble and die altogether is when they take on the brilliant color, and they become more beautiful than ever. And so this year, particularly, as Dorli and I walked in the woods, I noticed that the fireweed leaves were particularly brilliant red. I had been gathering them on our walks and on our runs and bringing them back to my studio and pressing them to hold onto, thinking I might do some kind of painting with fireweed leaves. And then I read these three poems. There was Peggy’s struggle with her own cancer going on, there was our dear friend Eva Saulitis moving closer and closer to the end of her path. And there were all those other things that had boiled up in our recollections and in our fears and in our memories in the course of this year-long conversation. And so I decided I would make a painting of these leaves, kind of falling through the air, and I called it Firefall (for Eva).
I thought a lot about how I wanted these leaves to be. Taking the title “Kiss” from the poem, I thought, “Well, maybe they should be touching. Maybe they should be kissing one another.” But the poem is not really just about kissing, it’s also about loneliness and about being alone and how no matter how many friends you have and no matter how close they are to you and how much they are there for you, there are paths that you end up having to go alone. Death is one of those. And so I thought, “No, I’m going to pack these leaves in as closely as possible, but I’m not going to let them touch each other. I’m going to acknowledge that as they move toward their end, they go alone. And the kiss, if anything, will be the kiss of frost . . . the kiss of frost that’s brought the color to their lives even as their lives are nearing their end.” And so I just kept painting fireweed leaves, and painting fireweed leaves, and packing them in as closely as I could, trying to celebrate the individuality of each leaf and the beauty of each leaf and the beauty not just of the redness but the torn-ness, of the blackened-ness and the tattered-ness of them that is as much a part of their beauty, it seemed to me, as the brilliance of the color.
And finally I reached a point where I thought, “You know, I could squeeze in another leaf or two but it would look awkward.” I liked that there was more space in some places than others, and it seemed like the right number of leaves, and so I counted them to see how many leaves I had. It took me about four tries to count them because I kept getting lost, but when I finally counted them I was a little creeped-out to realize that there were sixty-four leaves, which is exactly how old I am (laughing). And I didn’t think of that as premonitory but I kind of liked that, that maybe this celebration of the beauty of life as you get older, and the beauty of getting older, was so personal, and that it dealt with so many of the things that Peggy had brought up in her images. The full title of this painting is Firefall (for Eva). For some time now, Eva has been recognizing and writing about the fact that she knows that the end is near. That was very much on my mind, and very much on Peggy’s mind. She was in contact with Eva, and I would see Eva at advisory meetings for the Bunnell Street Gallery in Homer, so this is really a painting for Eva, celebrating her beauty at the very end of her life and hoping we can be anywhere near as beautiful as we make that lonely journey ourselves.
Firefall (For Eva) (acrylic on canvas 36 x 36)
PEGGY SHUMAKER: The grace and the exuberance in this painting are very evocative of Eva.
Many of the paintings in this conversation, Kes, are recognizable as your work, but they are distinct as well. They are not the ones that most people would look at and say, “Oh, that’s got to be a Kes Woodward.”
They are a little different. Same thing with these poems. They’re surely mine and they certainly come from my artistic sensibility. But this conversation took me in directions that I would never have predicted, and that allowed me to be open to things that usually I don’t go toward or explore so much.
KES WOODWARD: It definitely did that for both of us. This conversation took both of us places that we hadn’t really intended to go, and maybe wouldn’t have felt comfortable going if we hadn’t been swept up in the midst of it. I had very much the same sense of unpredictability with your poems.
I was talking to our friend Frank Soos about working with Peggy on this project and I was saying, “You know, I know Peggy’s poems so well and these are definitely Peggy’s poems but they are very different in character. And my paintings, I think, are very different in character. They really are taking twists and turns that we never could have anticipated, and that’s the great thing about a collaboration of this sort.” This has been just an extraordinary one in that respect.
LILT, PATTER, BOUND
Besides the cancer, I am in good health.
– Eva Saulitis
You’re listening with great care
to your heart, your musician’s heart
that needs you to listen,
heart that insists
on being heard
over the rumbles of that splendid
upstart, your magpie brain, always turning over
something most of us overlook,
finding some pure thing
worthy of wonder.
Out in the Sound, watching
for whales, taking in
salt aromas rocking
your laughter cleanses
your tears cleanse.
You bring home
the Sound in each breath.
If there are miracles, you
are one.
You who with your own hands
helped scoop out last cups of soil
so the handmade-paper box
holding last bits of your mother
might nest gently in earth,
mother who struggled mightily
in her beauty, mother who taught you
to speak her language, but
who could not teach you
to trust a man, mother whose
heartbeat was your first music,
whose voice was your life-long
music, mother whose life was your
song.
Strings of prayer flags fly now
for her, for you.
Candles lit
in her honor. In yours.
Distant notes of an oboe
just beyond our hearing
beckon. We lean toward
sounds we can’t take in,
not yet, feel our mouths
opening around ritual
languages no one
can teach us.
Listen. Let us accept
our heart’s lilt, heart’s patter,
heart’s bounding.
Deep breath and a slow letting go,
the aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah that takes with it
what you don’t need to carry.
Whatever we’re sure of
disappears. Whatever we doubt
disappears.
We walk
into the forest
humming,
our shadows mixing
with shadows
of everyone we love,
those already mica and root,
those still making songs
from salt air among birch.
KES WOODWARD: That poem is such a wonderful summary of so many of the threads of this conversation. I love that poem, and I love the way it draws so many of those threads together. We can weave them into a kind of a Veronica’s Veil, a kind of cloth.
As I have worked in my studio since the end of this, people keep asking us, you know, is this the end? It’s not the end of our collaboration – we’ve collaborated before and we’ll collaborate again. I don’t doubt that in the least. But I think projects have a beginning and an end. This one had a beginning, and I liked that the exhibit gave it a shape and that we had a certain amount of space to work with, and a certain amount of time to work. Then it took on a shape of its own.
I miss having those poems to post on my wall to write in response to. I’m going to my studio, as I do every day, and I’m working and I’m painting, but I miss the conversation that we shared all during the course of the year.
PEGGY SHUMAKER: Me, too. I miss our conversation a lot.