Mapping the Artist – Three Poets’ Adventures

(Photo – Sharon Howley).

Three wonderful poet explorers speak, each in their own way, about their recent adventures.

By Kathabela Wilson

Each poet has “One More Thing” to say. Toti O’Brien gives us a flash-autobiography of important aesthetic moments in her life! Sharon Hawley recounts her recent bicycle adventure in North Carolina’s Outer Banks, and points to an upcoming adventure. Elva Lauter’s beautiful book “Being She” has been published and she gives us a few insights into what she has done, and a glimpse into the mysteries of her “tactile night”.

Toti O’Brien

In the rainy afternoon I paint two washerwomen – I feel as happy as the rainbow. I make a bear of dirt mixed with water, I stick it onto a stone wall (again my heart bursts with joy).
Grandma asks me to draw a dress I would like to wear: then we go buy the fabric and we make it… just as I have imagined it!
Our Christmas Tree is only a dry branch grandpa rescued in the street. We have no ornaments or tinsel: we make origami flowers. The result is a giant ikebana: breathtaking.
Grandpa’s stamps collections – a treasure chest of miniatures: I sink in and get lost. Partisans songs listened like whispers in the night: headphones do not exist. My first balalaika.
Picasso’s last 200 paintings at the Pope’s Palace in Avignon: I hold a peacock feather I just found in the garden – while I walk around mesmerized. Paul Klee retrospective in Florence:I am moonstruck.
Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude: this book can’t possibly end – not while I am still alive.
Naif painters of the world first (and only) biennial: I know what I want to live for.
One line (one) by Jean Sebastian Bach published on the daily paper this morning.
For three instruments: I play it with my brothers. I am totally sure what I want to live for.

More: Homesick – The Staircase – Gypsy

Sharon Hawley

Since that interview, I have lived on the bicycle part of the time as a secondary way of life.
In April, it was the Outer Banks islands of North Carolina that lured me, stopped me, and provided a Good Samaritan opportunity to a local sheriff who rescued me.
In October, just two months from now, The bicycle will be just a small part of a hiking venture into the backcountry of Grand Teton National Park, daring winter not to come too early.

See more on Sharon’s blog.

Elva Lauter

Finishing Line Press has published Elva’s beautiful new book called “Being She”.

Elva Lauter’s vision is an inner world she makes manifest in her lyrical, powerful verse. With each poem I feel I have known the “she” of whom she speaks. Is she my sister, muse, friend, other self that I have known all along, who now tells the story? I feel it is mine, it is every-woman’s, and only hers, at the same time. She sings the depths of the natural feminine that is all of us. Yet it is her authentic, intimate story — her secrets, revealed one by one over a lifetime of world travel and inner adventure.

— Kathabela Wilson (a blurb included in “Being She”).

After several years of reading her work aloud at our Caltech Poets meetings, Elva finished selecting her poems for this beautiful book.
Elva says “My poems are often about women, their feelings and experiences. I sometimes represent myself as part of the landscape since I am aligned with nature. Many of my poems express this through aspects of water, sun, birds, and other natural phenomena “.

Night flows in.
Her breath goes up
mixed with tree shadows,
the glitter of stars.
Her feet crackle on leaves
hushed in grass
this tactile evening.
Afraid of her
the future unrolls,
a white road
under the moon.

— From “Being She”.