This was written and performed at the {9} Gallery for the Caffeine Corridor poetry event last night, May 10, 2013. Judy Green-Davis gave me the word Coronation and I wrote it about six poets before my Open Mic performance of it. (This is the capsule version; a previous post of mine seems to be lost to the ethersphere.)
This little piggie is glazed with Coleman Red-Orange.
This little piggie stays home: I’m not going to display it for sale at the Village Gallery, where my stuff hangs out. It’s got Cobalt Turquoise and White Liner going for it, and I can’t wait to put some Cottonwood flowers in it after Denise and I move there.
This little piggie went wrong, or not: Coleman Red-Orange again, and Cobalt Turquoise, but the Red-Orange morphed to a sort of red iron oxide just below the rim. But the ribbing was consequently better defined with that thinness. Still, I wish I’d kept the vessel inverted/immersed longer in the glaze.
This little piggie DID go to market; after being rejected by the Yavapai College Juried Art Show, I gave it shelf space at the Village Gallery, and a $35.00 price tag. Within 24 hours it was purchased by the spouse of one of my fellow artists–and there was a thank-you note in the cash envelope! Moral: Rejection need not be Forever.
And this little piggie is going Wee Wee Wee all the way to the Valley of the Sun. It was commissioned by, and made especially for, stellar Valley poet Bill Campana. I’ve upended it to reveal the signature/date format I use. Feb 6 on top, 2013 on bottom, and my signature in the middle, with the O of Bowers coinciding with the center. Atypically, since this is a commissioned work, I’ve added “Made exclusively” (below Feb 6) and “for bill campana” (above 2013. Bill texts almost entirely in lowercase, including his name) to the foot inscription. (The bottom of a functional ceramic vessel is called the Foot. Other body parts, like Lip and Belly, come into play as well when a vessel is described.)
It has been too long since my “One with Clay” featured clay. Feels good!
Friday afternoon Denise and I drove to Phoenix in the most horrendous varietal winter weather I’ve ever encountered. Thank Goodness Denise, who is a superb driver AND grew up in northern Arizona, was driving. We went there to attend the Caffeine Corridor poetry event, and the only real time-chunk I had to do my daily journal page was at the event itself.
Here are the words:
My, mic time’s a bootstrap upon which to strop
Itinerant MINSTRELS will posture & cough
Compelling distracting one mundane one boffo
Roughedg’d as a sledge or as slight as chiffon
O open thy honeycomb’d throat–then begone
Though it sounds as though Mr. Snidely Dismissive might have penned the words, the real viewpoint character is the one who’s about to perform–and is worried about the audience reaction to HIS performance, and is consoling himself with the range of talent that has so far graced the stage.
The triple acrostic refers to the fact that at this poetry event there is no microphone, yet the first segment of the event is still called “Open Mic.”
Two recent journal pages of mine refer to the two unpleasant subjects Rage and Spit. When I woke up this morning, “Shave and a Haircut/Two Bits” was looped in my head, I think to clue me in that I ought to base today’s blog post on the two pages.
RAGE is known to all except (perhaps) the freakishly evolved. I wonder if the Dalai Lama has ever experienced rage. Rage usually makes us do regrettable things. This to me is exemplified not only by mass shootings but by the Lynch Mob. About forty years ago I read The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilberg Clark, and the author managed to imagine the dynamics of a Lynch Mob utterly convincingly. I commend this fine book to your attention.
Is Rage ever a good thing? Does it ever drive positive behavior? Ought we to genetically engineer Rage out of our genome, if we could? I wish we knew.
The Spit-Take is an unignorable part of American physical comedy. Actor A is drinking something; Actor B says something unexpected and/or outrageous; Actor A diffuses the contents of Actor A’s mouth into the local atmosphere. In cinema, the Spit-Take has been around since 1906. That’s more than a hundred and six years ago! In television, the Spit-Take has been around for at least fifty years, having been popularized by Danny Thomas of “Make Room for Daddy” fame. On YouTube, there is a video by my friends, Phoenix-area poets Kevin Patterson and Bill Campana, containing no fewer than half a dozen Spit-Takes of what purports to be Champagne. The interested reader may use the phrase “Bill Campana 1957” to find the video (I could provide a link, but you have to REALLY WANT to see it, so I’m not making it easy). If you drink coffee while watching the video, point your mouth away from your computer screen, for you may well end up doing a Spit-Take yourself.
Cheers!
One with Clay, Image and Text 