Last month, I spent the first Friday night in Tulsa’s downtown Brady district, on an art crawl, that involved art galleries, pubs, shops, studios, and much much fun. I’m going for round two, and maybe I will see you down there this time. It is a great time in a wonderful area of the city. I parked near the Cain’s Ballroom and headed south down Main Street, then east and made a big circle, ending up at the SoundPony and then back to my car at the end of the evening. Continue reading
Tag Archives: art
Art Crawl: Take Your Head Off
From Brady Street looking south
Art is inspiring, like any creative outlet, and I have an extremely wide view of what creative outlets are: the main thing is that they need to make you feel like Emily Dickinson described when reading poetry: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Continue reading
The Artist’s Work
The mural is not your best work.
The intricate delicacy of the lilacs
That ate your lunch, as you said,
Smell like the perfumed wind
Of my grandmother’s house early spring. Continue reading
Today’s Blue Plate Poetry Special
Today’s Blue Plate Poetry Special!
Ingredients: Comment under this post with a phrase you want in a poem, and I will write the poem for you and post it in your comment.
Price: Absolutely free of charge
Nutritional Value: Nil
Emotional/Intellectual Value: Priceless
Get your order in before we run out!
In Indian Territory
You show me the basket your mother made,
The light color of the cane entwined with the dyed scarlet,
All so evenly spaced, and the handle a perfect arch. Continue reading
The Thing About Chairs
I love simple wooden chairs. I love how they look against a wood floor. On a porch. Stacked up against a wall. Hanging on a wall (I have an old dark-stained one that I use as a towel rack on the bathroom wall.) I think the artwork at the Oklahoma memorial to the bombing victims, those rows of chairs, is sublime. I wrote a manuscript once about a girl preoccupied with painting landscapes that always had a chair in them. Continue reading
Out of Darkness
–after Ann McCoy’s Pyramid for Martin Hurson
Owl with wings spread
Enveloping the night as only
A nocturnal creature can
Slipping into the passage
She creates out of darkness
The moon not a place
Of silver but airy blight, Continue reading
Art
Could I have gone on forever in the
shadows with you, in the mosaic of
night broken with our desires, jagged
with blind care and the work of twin dreamers? Continue reading
Merlin’s Last Art
The heart becomes the master after all
–Even with my first and last art
of fire—blazing or smoldering,
identity is not known.
Heart smothers the flame.
Water banishes it.
And the smoke rising
in the air and the weightless
ash that drifts into the trees
are someone else’s gifts.
I have slept through
the exchange.
–Shaun Perkins
