Maxine krasnow on sun 5 mar 06
AZ
The Poetry Message Bowl Project
Local poets and poetry lovers are invited to inscribe their poems or favorite poems on bowls which Muse potters will supply, every Saturday in March from Noon to 2.
Muse artists will be on hand to give poets technical guidance.
Saturday, April 1st we will kick off poetry month in Tucson, at Muse Pottery, 127 West Fifth Street & Tenth Avenue. From 3 to 5 pm, there will be a poetry writing workshop. At 5:30 Maurice Grossman, former head of Ceramics at the U of A will read his latest poems about pottery. At 6:00 each participant will read their poem and set their finished bowls in the exhibit, which then will be photographedby Charles Alexander of Chax Press. Then each participant will get to choose a bowl to take home. This ritual takes its inspiration from Iranian message bowls and community building. After the reading, there will be time to discuss the event and refreshments.
Muse Pottery 127 W. 5th Street & 10th Avenue 792 6263 musepottery@yahoo.com
Statement of Intention by Richard Brodesky
The Poetry Message Bowl Project
The Poetry Message Bowl Project is the synthesis of text and ceramics drawing its inspiration from ancient Iranian message bowls, a liturgical source, and a new way of viewing text.
Ancient Iranians inscribed words on pottery bowls which they buried with their dead. Archaeologists tell us that these bowls carried prayers, good wishes for the deceased as well as poems and even memories.
In the church where I spent many years of my life, the high point of the calendar was a ceremony called Flower Communion which took place on Easter Sunday. This ceremony was devised by a minister in Czechoslovakia after World War II. It was the result of his quest to find a ritual that would build community after the devastation where neighbors had seen the worst and the best of human behavior.
The ceremony begins as one enters the church and places a flower in a vase on the communion table. An offering might be anything from a wildflower, to a beautiful garden specimen, to an arrangement, or even a vase full of flowers purchased at a florist. Together, the blooms appear absolutely beautiful! Then as the entire congregation would sing Samuel Longfellow’s nineteenth-century hymn "The Life that Makest All Things New," each worshipper would return to the communion table taking one of the flowers.
Each flower, like each person, was beautiful but even more beautiful was the ensemble representing the congregation, the community, the human family. Taking another's flower entailed contemplation on our mysterious and unseen connections with everyone else.
The Poetry Message Bowls represent our fullness as individuals, our aspirations, our hearts, ears, eyes, minds, sense of humor, and who knows what else. They will join together with others' into a beautiful if diverse offering and finally, each participant will take another poem-filled bowl ratifying the connections between the individual and the larger whole.
In regard to text, we will relate to poetry the way we listen to music in the post-Beatles age. Instead of saying we only listen to classical music or rock or country or jazz, we now move from genre to genre without any hesitation. Likewise we will move from text to text, sensibility to sensibility, offering to offering without judgments or boundaries. And in the largest sense, we will be exploring and renewing the consciousness that lies within and between all people.
It might be helpful to contemplate the bowl.
As potters we understand that the bowl both receives and offers. As such it combines feminine and masculine. We often make the distinction between a winter bowl which is close and inward in order to retain heat and the summer bowl which is open and more generous.
Similarly, the bowl combines the feminine and masculine in its fabrication. The clay becomes centered, as does the potter, and then receives the action of the fingers and the hands. The eternal spiral path becomes a plane which is opened to depth and space. Then the potter and the clay build a cylinder, which becomes a flower-pot shape, and then a bowl. We use the four elements: earth, water, air, and fire to bring the bowl to life. So, in a very real sense the bowl is like the mystic; it is the edge between the outer and the inner infinities.
To execute these tasks on the potter's wheel, an artist becomes centered like the clay. The artist also knows that the clay has and responds to consciousness itself and that the art comes from an energy moving through the joined potter and clay. In making vessels we stress our wellbeing and the health of our thoughts. After all, only the highest and the best should be crystallized into a vessel another human being might use.
The Muse Pottery at 127 W. Fifth St., Tucson, AZ 85705, will provide a variety of bowls. People interested in the Project will come by the Pottery to decorate and inscribe their chosen bowl with their poem. Decoration will be simple, and here are some possibilities:
1. We will paint the bowls with colored clay solutions called "slip" and then scratch the poems into the surface.
2. We will use acrylic paint and transparent enamel to seal the poem (such bowls are not useful for food).
3. We will use typeface, lent generously by Chax Press, to impress our poems into the bowls.
4. We will use solutions of colored metallic oxides and brushwork to paint our poems onto the bowls.
5. We will incise the bowls.
6. We will use any and all surfaces of the bowls (sides, inside, outside, rim, bottom).
7. We will feel free to combine these suggestions and any others offered by the Muse Potters.
Muse Potters will be available to help participants transfer their poems to the bowls. We will be available at The Muse Pottery (792 – 6263) on Saturday, March 4, 11, 18, and 25 from 12 – 2 P. M The earlier the better!
The reading, installation, and re-distribution of the Poetry Message Bowls will take place at 6 P. M., Saturday, April 1, 2006, at The Muse Pottery.
Above all, our work will be joyful and represent a contribution to the human family.
To participate, please contact either Richard Brodesky at rmbrodesky@msn.com or The Muse Pottery at 792 – 6263.
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Brings words and photos together (easily) with
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