Through poetry, Living Methods writers created “porous” maps of the Kinney Center as a physical and textual site: not just a place-to-write, but a place formed and reformed by writing. Each writer documented their ongoing relationship with a location of their choosing on the Center’s grounds, a place they felt drawn to investigate through poetry.
Barbara Johnson
Viewing a Renaissance Landscape from the Porch Looking North
Look down at the paper.
Let the pen follow and record your eye’s journey.
First notice the green plastic chair to your right.
It is in conversation with the small rock perched in the sun on the shelf to your left.
That little patch of quartzite on the rock’s face
captures the sunlight and propels your sight out to a framed mountain view.
Take hold of the black railing as you
descend the wooden steps to cross over the grey slate patio and step onto the grassy knoll.
As you go further through cool woods, the tall deep green shade trees frame the warm sunny yellow green meadow stretched before the cool blue mountains.
With the spectrum of a Renaissance palette, the illusion of space is created through aerial perspective. As your sight travels into the distance you first notice the sensation of any red in colors dropping away,
then the yellows,
and, at last, you find the same tall deep green trees you stand under must be rendered tiny and blue as they appear while covering those far away mountains.
If the contour of the mountain’s shape is just right it will direct your attention up to the small bright white clouds passing over the mountains
and to the next band of larger white clouds as they return over our heads
only to drop us
into the tall deep green trees and onto the cool grassy knoll under our feet.
Remember to grab the cool black handrail
as you ascend the wooden steps
back into the conversation
between a green chair and small sunlit rock asking
where have you been?
Statement
The dialogue between the old texts- like Shakespeare's Sonnets, the Theory of the Earth, The Propagation of Fruit Trees- with contemporary texts inspired me. Such as Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, and Lisa Samuels reflecting on Hejinian: “We relinquish ourselves to the representative government of language, and language does not disappoint us: it shapes our world and gives it back to us.” And Hejinian: “We never wanted more than something beginning worth continuing which remained unended.”
Reading the old forms of language as composed in poetic /scientific forms contrasted with contemporary poetry was so revealing. To observe the breaking away from past formulas to create a new stream of conscious writing, to now see / read poems as objects of art, crafted into organic shapes- or presented as landscapes, releases the living language from previous confinements. Shedding a skin like a growing snake.
Just as a painting represents the body, the representation of words can do the same thing. To create the poem as an object - a visual construction with the page not just on it. Weaving words and open spaces to keep us porous and alive and growing- not confined. This reminds me of the physicality of the old texts- the type imprinted into the hand made paper becomes a tactile sculpture of words. I now think of a book as a body too. The words on pages are like fossil footprints of the thought language of those who wrote before us, and made from the same elemental substances of ink and paper.
I cannot name a definite influence at this time- it is a whole shift in consciousness for me.
I love many, CAConrad and Alice Notley stand out. I will experiment with that form making. Hejinian is might be the closest to an influence I might choose, relatable in it being like jazz prose poetry, weaving colloquial sayings like “pretty is as pretty does” with descriptions of the weather one day or fragments from childhood memory. Though her work originates from the west coast, (rural California is very different from the major cities there) it speaks to me of my childhood in the midwest.