It has been a pleasure for me to interview these amazing artists and poets. Every Saturday we have been able to say “Here Come the Poets.” And they have arrived with all their individual voices and splendor.
By Kathabela Wilson
In order of appearance, here are the first group of 18 artists/poets of 2015.
The creative process is as a door to inner knowledge. A door to where memories are found and transform to reality. The conscious artist creates from the heart and through the imagination recognizes the doors opening to true wisdom…Full interview.
For me, poetry is like breathing…The soil of my childhood was exceptionally rich. Like the Pannonian Sea in the early history, enriched by the presence of the river Danube, from the Black Forest in Germany and passing through eight different countries including Yugoslavia with its areas of Voyvodina and Serbia…Full interview.
I had always loved libraries…I could never just walk in. I had to take my time, ease in since this holy place filled with great minds and ideas that seemed to be calling to me filled me with both such exhilaration and confusion…I think most of my life, I may have been a bit too responsible…Full interview.
I wrote an entire series of seismic poems…poems about earthquakes, tsunami, volcanoes, etc., all of which were really about relationships…I still am interested in the forces of the earth and they crop up in my poetry…Full interview.
I have poems from elementary school, art from high school, stories from college and all three from my entire adult life…I see the poet as the soothsayer of the modern world–the artist who speaks the truth without reservation or fear of being correct…Full interview.
I have always felt like something of an outlier, one of those on the fringes of the bell curve. I suspect that the poet must be in that position relative to the rest of the human race. Perhaps those of us in fringes are necessary for the whole curve to function…I would love to see long poetic works revived as a form of storytelling…Full interview.
I was raised in Art, I sniffed it, tasted it, fondled it my entire life...I’ve had a long inclination to write, printing out my stories, inspired by the family background, for family members-memoirs and fiction. I switched from “writing” to writing poetry as I found I could use words and descriptions in short meaningful phrases….Full interview.
My work and my art make sense together though I and others often questioned it…There is rapid expansion of human consciousness to the edge of the universe and possible multiverses beyond, from the local to the global village. At the same time, everyone on this planet is a poet at any age inputting to the great cloud babble…Full interview.
Most of my poems have a sense of place, Brooklyn, New York, Amherst Massachusetts, Seattle, Los Angeles, and… various Moon Bases, Mars bases, and interstellar destinations in my fiction…Some of my most inspired moments have been in Asian Gardens, especially our local Storrier Stearns Japanese Garden. There time extends and deepens…Full interview.
I believe that I am part of everything and it is part of me — a leaf, flowers, sky, ocean. I grew up in the natural world, and it continues to follow me today…I am surrounded by the “green” of nature. It springs, over and over again, as new beginnings in my poems, my paintings and the fused glass jewelry I create…Full interview.
Writing is still a private thing, like a secret internal dialog, it helps me to work out things which I may not have grasped at the moment. It’s a struggle, an emotional dialog, a game of scrabble…Full interview.
One of the tools that my father (unknowingly?) gave for my career as a writer was his example as an active observer, his passion to “decode” (or at least trying to decode) the universe. When I look at myself here, writing in this urban environment, suddenly the image of my father looking, listening in the middle of the fields becomes vivid, and for moment…Full interview.
I lost my home and all of my fabrics in the “Old Fire” in San Bernardino in 2003…After the fire…I found the bottom of a raku pot (made from fire originally) …a porcelain doll that was my husband’s mother’s, and a ring from my grandmother. I liked that I found something intact from both sides of the family…Someday I’ll make a mosaic of the fragments…Full interview.
I found the perfect match for my natural gifts in Brush Painting. I relaxed into just painting. Painting anything, no concept needed, no angst…just paint…I introduced my work as a Brush Painting artist…Someone said that my work was “like a ray of sunshine”. That did it, I knew that like it or not, this was my calling and my purpose and I never looked back…Full interview.
I question life a lot in my writing. Why do human beings get a thrill out of hurting others? Why do we choose painful paths like moth to flame. I like my funny poems the most…I believe singing is medicine for the soul. Even if you don’t like your singing voice you should still sing along with songs that you love. Don’t worry about how you sound….Full interview.
I started writing poems in high school, mostly influenced by Kahlil Gibran. These were mostly meant to impress my girlfriends…All the metaphors on my pallet found nuances in word that completed sentences left abandoned in my paintings. I am no longer certain if my poems spring from my paintings or if my paintings are inspired by the poetry…Full interview.
Tanka helped to lift the seal from the mountaintop of my life! I could express my emotions in tanka, and I made so many wonderful friends worldwide…I perform in Japanese and English, even write some of my tanka directly in English. I hope I can continue performing tanka even someday when I can’t walk… like planting sunflower seeds…Full interview.
…the poems were cathartic. They helped me keep in tune with myself. When I was working in a small office I realized that…all I really needed was a scrap of paper and a pencil, so I wrote poems several times a day between counting cash and keeping books….Full interview.
More next week…
Happy New Year,
From Kathabela
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