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PEACEMAKING<br />
AN AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN EXCHANGE OF ART AND WRITINGS<br />
GALERIE KERSTAN<br />
BREITSCHEIDSTRASSE 48 | 70176 STUTTGART<br />
22. JUNI – 21. JULI 2018 | JUNE 22 - JULY 21, 2018
© Copyright: 2018 Andreas Kerstan<br />
Umschlaggestaltung, Illustration: Andreas Kerstan<br />
Lektorat, Korrektorat: Andreas Kerstan<br />
Verlag: Kunst Stuttgart International e.V. | Schmalzstraße 4 | 71229 Leonberg<br />
Druck: Wir machen Druck, Backnang<br />
ISBN: 978-3-947408-09-2<br />
© Copyright Fotos: liegen beim jeweiligen Künstler des abgebildeten Werkes<br />
Das Werk, einschließlich seiner Teile, ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung ist ohne Zustimmung<br />
des Verlages und des Autors unzulässig. Dies gilt insbesondere für die elektronische oder sonstige Vervielfältigung,<br />
Übersetzung, Verbreitung und öffentliche Zugänglichmachung.
<strong>Peacemaking</strong> – An American and European Exchange of Art and Writings<br />
We are grateful to Gallery Kerstan for hosting this exhibition of art and writings from the USA, a<br />
two-year venture that is now coming to full fruition. We present 29 American perspectives on Peace<br />
and <strong>Peacemaking</strong>, thirteen professional artists, thirteen professional writers and three student<br />
artists. Each artist and writer offers their unique perspective on the subject, a passion for each.<br />
Our primary US sponsor, Elizabethtown College was founded by the Church of the Brethren, "one of<br />
the three historic peace churches in the USA." The college houses the Young Center, a leading<br />
research center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies. The following was compiled and written by<br />
Project Peace participant, Julia Spicher Kasdorf.<br />
This exchange of art and writings between American and German people recalls our particular<br />
histories. Stuttgart became home to American military personnel after World War II, but our<br />
memory reaches to an earlier time. In the seventeenth century, pacifist Täufer (Anabaptist /<br />
Mennonite) fled Swiss persecution and migrated to the Rhineland Palatinate and worked hard to<br />
restore the land destroyed by war. William Penn, familiar with Mennonites after traveling through<br />
the Palatinate in 1677, specifically invited them to join his “Holy Experiment” in America. In<br />
1683, they began to settle in Germantown, north of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania. The Neue Täufer<br />
(Church of the Brethren) began in 1708 in Schwarzenau, North-Rhine-Westphalia, and reorganized<br />
on Christmas Day, 1723, in Germantown. Elizabethtown College was founded by the Church of the<br />
Brethren, one of three historic peace churches in the United States, along with the Mennonites and<br />
Quakers.<br />
A special thanks to all the contributing artists and writers in this project. The artists and writers<br />
give insight into their personal struggle for inner peace, compassion, and a passion for World Peace.<br />
Each expression is filled with the past, the present and a hope for the future. We ask difficult<br />
questions, and perhaps the answers are challenging. We are grateful and thank our sponsors for<br />
Project Peace: Kunst Stuttgart International; the Joseph Robert Foundation; a CISP Grant, Elizabethtown<br />
College; the Center for Global Understanding and <strong>Peacemaking</strong>, Elizabethtown College;<br />
the Bowers Writers House, Elizabethtown College; the English and Fine and Performing Arts<br />
Departments, Elizabethtown College. Thank you Andreas Kerstan and the City of Stuttgart for<br />
hosting our project. We hope that this gesture on our part, will make a lasting impression on your<br />
city and all who see and read our work. We are grateful for this opportunity.<br />
Elizabethtown | USA | June 2018<br />
Milt Friedly, David Kenley and Jesse Waters<br />
Directors – Project Peace USA | Elizabethtown College
<strong>Peacemaking</strong> – An American and European Exchange of Art and Writings<br />
Direktoren<br />
Co-Direktoren<br />
Kuratoren<br />
Sponsoren<br />
Milt Friedly<br />
Andreas Kerstan<br />
David Kenley<br />
Jesse Waters<br />
Milt Friedly<br />
Andreas Kerstan<br />
Samantha Redles<br />
Jesse Waters<br />
Kunst Stuttgart International e.V., Leonberg, Germany<br />
Elizabethtown College, Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, USA<br />
Joseph Robert Foundation, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Projekt Frieden | <strong>Peacemaking</strong><br />
Kunst Stuttgart International e.V., kurz [KUN:ST] International, ist ein gemeinnütziger, internationaler<br />
Kunstverein mit Sitz in Leonberg, der am 21. Dezember 2015 gegründet wurde. Per 1.<br />
April 2018 zählt der Verein genau 280 Mitglieder aus 14 Ländern, u.a. aus Australien, Dänemark,<br />
Deutschland, Finnland, Frankreich, Italien, Indien, Luxemburg, Niederlande, Österreich, Polen,<br />
Russland, Schweiz und den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika.<br />
Eines der wichtigen Ziele des Vereins ist es, seinen Mitgliedern auf nationaler und internationaler<br />
Ebene Ausstellungs- und Präsentationsmöglichkeiten zu verschaffen. Zur Unterstützung dieses Ziels<br />
veranstaltet [KUN:ST] International seit 2017 jährlich einen Kunstwettbewerb. In 2017 ergab sich<br />
das Wettbewerbsthema Projekt Frieden aus dem Kontext einer Austauschausstellung unter dem<br />
gleichnamigen Titel mit dem Elizabethtown College, in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania.<br />
Im Mai und Juni 2017 wurden in der Galerie Kerstan, Stuttgart, 50 ausgewählte Werke dieses<br />
Wettbewerbs in der Kunstpreisausstellung Projekt Frieden gezeigt und Preisträger in vier Kategorien<br />
gekürt. 37 dieser Werke wurden im Anschluss vom 21. September bis 21. November 2017 auf dem<br />
Elizabethtown College Campus in Elizabethtown, USA, präsentiert.<br />
Dieser Ausstellungszyklus wird nun mit zwei Ausstellungen in der Galerie Kerstan, Stuttgart,<br />
abgeschlossen: mit der Ausstellung der Projekt Frieden Kunstpreisträger aus 2017 und der direkt<br />
danach folgenden Ausstellung <strong>Peacemaking</strong> – An American and European Exchange of Art and<br />
Writings.<br />
Wir freuen uns außerordentlich, dass wir zum Abschluss dieses großen kulturellen Austauschprojektes<br />
29 Künstlerinnen und Künstler aus den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika in der Galerie Kerstan,<br />
Stuttgart, willkommen heißen dürfen und wünschen den Künstlern und Besuchern viel Freude mit<br />
dieser Ausstellung. Wir bedanken uns bei den an dem Projekt beteiligten Künstlerinnen und Künstler<br />
für ihre Teilnahme und den Unterstützern dieses Projektes für ihren unermüdlichen Einsatz, ohne<br />
den dieses Projekt nicht möglich gewesen wäre.<br />
Leonberg | im Juni 2018<br />
Andreas Kerstan<br />
Direktor / Kurator – Projekt Frieden<br />
1. Vorsitzender Kunst Stuttgart International e.V.
Projekt Frieden<br />
Teilnehmende Künstler in alphabetischer<br />
Reihenfolge<br />
<strong>Peacemaking</strong> – An American and European<br />
Exchange of Art and Writings<br />
Participating artists in alphabetical order<br />
Teil 1 | Bildende Künstler<br />
Chapter 1 | Contributing Visual Artists<br />
Anne Phong<br />
Chris Raschka<br />
Claire Giblin<br />
Helen Beekman<br />
Helen Berggruen<br />
Herb Weaver<br />
Leslie Kaufman<br />
Lucio Pozzi<br />
Michael Arrigo<br />
Milt Friedly<br />
Nina Buxenbaum<br />
Sandy Brunvand<br />
Steven Rubin<br />
Teil 2 | Autoren<br />
Chapter 2 | Contributing Writers<br />
Carolyn Forché<br />
Daina Savage<br />
David Kenley<br />
Deanna Nikaido<br />
E. Ethelbert Miller<br />
Jesse Waters<br />
Julia Spicher Kasdorf<br />
Lawrence Ferlinghetti<br />
Leslie McGrath<br />
Michael White<br />
Romie Lie<br />
Scott Cairns<br />
Taslima Nasreen<br />
Teil 3 | Teilnehmende Studenten<br />
Chapter 3 | Contributing Students<br />
Adam Way<br />
Cooper Siegel<br />
Georgia Grimm
TEIL 1<br />
BILDENDE KUNST<br />
CHAPTER 1<br />
VISUAL ART
Ann currently teaches art at California State<br />
University Pomona. She also serves as the<br />
board president of VAALA (Vietnamese<br />
American Arts and Letters Association), a nonprofit<br />
organization to promote Vietnamese<br />
American artists who live outside Vietnam. Ann<br />
has been invited to speak at many high<br />
schools, colleges, universities, galleries and<br />
museums on the subject of her own work and<br />
the work of other Vietnamese American artists.<br />
Ann Phong<br />
Ann Phong was born in Saigon, escaped from<br />
the communist Vietnam and now Ann has<br />
settled in Los Angeles, California.<br />
Ann Phong received her MFA in painting from<br />
California State University, Fullerton in 1995,<br />
and has actively participated in more than 150<br />
solo and group shows in galleries and<br />
museums. Her work has been exhibited in Los<br />
Angeles, to Houston, Vancouver, Bangkok,<br />
Karbi, Seoul, Chengdu, Taichung and Tokyo.<br />
Ann's artwork is collected and displayed in<br />
many public areas such as the UC Riverside<br />
Sweeney Museum, the Queen's Gallery in<br />
Bangkok, Cal Poly Pomona University Student<br />
Center, Cal State University Fullerton Student<br />
Center, and also in many private collections.<br />
“I have lived in many different countries in my<br />
life, from Asia to America. Each nation has<br />
given me unique memories about its culture<br />
and living environment. I like to wander, to<br />
listen to the voices of people, to blend into<br />
the crowd and to watch, as people juggle<br />
their everyday lives. In each one of my art<br />
pieces, I let my feelings flow from my past to<br />
the present, and seek to record most<br />
memorable scenes.<br />
Having seen cities embrace and protect<br />
nature, it is painful to witness some other<br />
places that have such destruction due to<br />
human greed. It seems like the more<br />
convenient we make our lives, the more<br />
pollution we create and the more carelessly<br />
we deplete the earth’s resources. Mother<br />
nature has given a home and we should be<br />
treating it as such. To obtain a peaceful life,<br />
one first needs to make peace with mother<br />
earth.”<br />
Ann Phong | April 2018<br />
Angel<br />
Mixed media<br />
61 x 22 cm | 2018<br />
www.annphongart.com
eceived two Caldecott Medals and one Honor<br />
forThe Hello, Goodbye Window, by Norton<br />
Juster; and for his own A Ball for Daisy; and his<br />
Yo! Yes? Five of his titles have been named<br />
New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s<br />
Books, including Mysterious Thelonious and A<br />
Poke in the I.<br />
Chris Raschka<br />
Chris Raschka never meant to be an illustrator.<br />
Certainly he had no thought of becoming a<br />
picture book artist. Though in his school days<br />
he always drew and painted, he studied<br />
science and was ready to enter a career in<br />
medicine. But on the eve of that next step, he<br />
understood that taking it would finally mean<br />
the end of his painting life, which was after all<br />
what he wanted most. So he just didn’t go.<br />
Instead he opened the newspaper to find a<br />
part-time job, one which happened to find him<br />
his first steady employment as an illustrator:<br />
illustrating all of the articles each month in a<br />
law journal (his job had been factotum to a<br />
private attorney). For the next three years he<br />
created illustrations for magazines and<br />
newspapers in Ann Arbor and Detroit, Michigan,<br />
before moving to New York City.<br />
This city would be the place he required to<br />
complete his education. Chris Raschka has<br />
created over sixty books for children. He has<br />
He was the US nominee for the Hans Christian<br />
Andersen Award in 2012 and 2016. Chris<br />
Raschka was born in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania,<br />
in the USA, in 1959. He studied biology, music,<br />
and art, in Minnesota, and since 1989, has<br />
lived with his family in New York City.<br />
Chris Raschka’s illustrations have been exhibited<br />
throughout the United States, including a<br />
solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago<br />
in 2007 through 2008. In Europe his work has<br />
appeared at Bad Berleburg, Germany, and in<br />
Italy at Bologna, Padua, and Rome.<br />
"We are as close as sienna is to umber and<br />
umber is to ochre, which is to say, very close<br />
indeed. We are made with the same strokes,<br />
of the same materials. Peace is not that<br />
hard.”<br />
Chris Raschka | April 2018<br />
It’s Not That Hard<br />
Watercolor on colored paper<br />
48 x 48 cm | 2017<br />
www.nccil.org/artists/chris-raschka
government funded exhibitions, solo shows,<br />
joint, invitational, national and international<br />
juried exhibits, museum and gallery exhibitions<br />
in the US, Spain, Italy, Japan, New Zealand,<br />
Turkey and Korea, and has served as juror and<br />
panelist for art organizations and the<br />
Pennsylvania Council of the Arts.<br />
Claire Giblin<br />
Claire Giblin was born and educated in New<br />
York City. She majored in fine art in high<br />
school, earning honors in NY State Regents and<br />
Board examinations. Giblin learned studio<br />
techniques under the tutelage of artist and<br />
historian, Vincent Mercaldo, later briefly<br />
attending F.I.T. (life drawing and Fashion<br />
Illustration).<br />
In Pennsylvania, Giblin studied studio art,<br />
Chinese brush painting - calligraphy and<br />
mountain painting - at Franklin & Marshall<br />
College; Lebanon Valley College (Art History,<br />
Philosophy of Religion, Anthropology); Millersville<br />
University (Art History, Photography).<br />
Giblin is the recipient of national and regional<br />
awards in art, and is listed in Who’s Who in the<br />
Arts, Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who of<br />
American Women. Giblin was honored as 2003<br />
“Woman of the Year” by the Women’s Center<br />
at Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, PA.<br />
She has curated exhibitions, participated in<br />
Her work is in national and international corporate,<br />
museum and private collections. She has<br />
taught in her studio, at workshops, and at<br />
Franklin & Marshall College (adjunct) in<br />
curriculum. Claire is former co-owner and<br />
Director of Pfenninger Gallery in Lancaster<br />
City. She is former Curator of Exhibitions at the<br />
Phillips Museum of Art on the campus of<br />
Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster,<br />
Pennsylvania where she has taught introductory<br />
painting and workshops in professional<br />
practices, and facilitated a weekly life-drawing<br />
studio. Giblin earned a Certificate in Fine Art<br />
Appraisal at NYU. She is an Associate of<br />
Appraisers Association of America and co<br />
founder of Atlantic Appraisal Services LLC.<br />
“I choose to point to a place where the eye is<br />
able to rest and the mind is able to consider<br />
the power in choosing a course of peace and<br />
non-violence.”<br />
Claire Giblin | April 2018<br />
Wounded Dove<br />
Digital Print on Rag Paper<br />
Print No. 1<br />
28 x 36 cm | framed | 2017<br />
www.giblinart.com
Literally, they can be touched and a<br />
subliminal understanding within my mind and<br />
heart is transformed into reality. Connecting<br />
these dots is like tracing constellations with a<br />
paintbrush. Look up into the darkness of the<br />
night sky and be awed by the unknown. In the<br />
vastness of the universe, humankind is a speck<br />
in that celestial sky. Our wars and worries,<br />
joys and dreams are inconsequential in the<br />
scope of outer space. Seeking peace amidst<br />
the troubles of the world seems like a mirage.<br />
Helen Beekman<br />
Helen Beekman, sculptor and painter, works<br />
and lives in New York City. She grew up in<br />
Menlo Park and Inverness, California and in<br />
1971 received a B.A. in Fine Art (focusing on<br />
sculpture) from Mills College in Oakland,<br />
California. Helen Beekman was a visiting artist<br />
at The American Academy in Rome. Her work is<br />
in private, corporate and museum collections.<br />
“Peace is as mercurial as the night sky. Trying<br />
to capture peace or holding stars in your hand<br />
is a daydream. I want you to look deeply into<br />
my hay sculptures. The painted hay is<br />
manipulated on neutral surfaces where my<br />
wordless thoughts and visions only imagined<br />
become three dimensional palettes. Stars fall<br />
into the hay like fireflies landing on grass.<br />
Still, I am a believer in peace. I am uplifted<br />
knowing that while our home rock floats in<br />
the infinite darkness of nothingness, twinkling<br />
lights brighten churning chaos. We are made<br />
of stardust, the identical atomic elements<br />
(oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen) of<br />
the Milky Way. This is humbling but the very<br />
nature of humans has something intangible,<br />
optimism.<br />
I peer into the night sky and hear John<br />
Lennon’s song Imagine. I feel a sense of<br />
possibility and peace. We humans are<br />
stubborn, arrogant yet we try to be good<br />
citizens on earth. We will fight for our blue<br />
planet and peace. We are stardust with a<br />
shared responsibility.”<br />
Helen Beekman | April 2018<br />
Shooting Stars<br />
Hay, acrylic on Masonite<br />
104 x 102 cm | 2017<br />
www.helenbeekmanart.com
I reaffirm a belief that art has the power to<br />
be a transformative force for good.<br />
The animating sources for Peace Accord: the<br />
Triumph of Music are two-fold. The first is a<br />
visionary series of concerts, “In War & Peace”,<br />
launched two years ago by the American<br />
mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato.<br />
Helen Berggruen<br />
“I was born in San Francisco in 1945. My artistic<br />
life began, not as a painter, but as an<br />
actress. From the age of twelve, I was<br />
determined to be on stage. In the early 80’s I<br />
stepped away from theater life and started<br />
painting. The canvases would be “peopled”<br />
not with figures, but with objects, trees,<br />
houses. Early on I was highly influenced by Van<br />
Gogh and by the early 20th Century European<br />
painters, especially the French Fauves and<br />
German Expressionists. Their emphasis on the<br />
“liberation of color” became guiding<br />
principles. My work has been exhibited in San<br />
Francisco, New York, London and Berlin and is<br />
in the collections of the Springfield Art<br />
Museuam, Missouri, and the Cedar Rapids<br />
Museum of Art, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.”<br />
“As artists, as members of society, we find<br />
ourselves faced with the challenge: how to<br />
resist being dragged down into the negative,<br />
fearful despair that surrounds us. In response,<br />
Through the sublime music of Handel, Purcell,<br />
and other Baroque masters, the concerts<br />
explore the darkest conditions of the human<br />
soul, as well as the most exalted. We hear<br />
searing melodies set to words crying out for<br />
revenge, but also, melodies conveying a sense<br />
of hope. The scourge of war is interwoven<br />
with a craving for peace. The second source is<br />
the painting St.Cecilia and the Angel, by the<br />
Seventeenth Century Italian artist Saraceni. In<br />
my narrative composition, St. Cecilia and her<br />
lute have been replaced by a determined<br />
young singer. The angel beckons to the singer;<br />
she has already embarked on a fierce mission.<br />
In one hand she holds a sheet of music; in the<br />
other, she carries a blazing torch. The winged<br />
angel joins the singer, offering to accompany<br />
her on his bass viol. Together their song<br />
vanquishes dark forces. Hostilities cease.<br />
Swords lie broken at their feet.”<br />
Helen Berggruen | March 2018<br />
Peace Accord: The Triumph of Music<br />
Oil on linen<br />
71 x 56 cm | 2018<br />
www.helenberggruen.com
MFA from James Madison University. For nearly<br />
two decades Herb lived and taught at Bethany<br />
College in West Virginia where he and his wife,<br />
Anita, raised three daughters. While in West<br />
Virginia, Herb’s artwork evolved into<br />
statements about life circumstances, both<br />
whimsical and political. His work has been<br />
exhibited in 200 shows throughout the United<br />
States and abroad. Herb retired from teaching<br />
in 2015 to build a house in Virginia and make<br />
art full time.<br />
Herb Weaver<br />
An art educator for over three decades ranging<br />
from middle school to the college level, Herb<br />
Weaver strives to take art off the pedestal and<br />
into the daily lives of the viewer. Initially<br />
trained more as an “art generalist” in a liberal<br />
arts setting, Weaver later focused on the<br />
medium of ceramic sculpture and earned an<br />
“The “arrows through the heart” are actually<br />
rods extracted from a library cabinet’s card<br />
catalog, intended to accentuate Trump’s 4th<br />
grade reading level. The chains hanging down<br />
from the neck-area are symbolic of “chain<br />
migration” to remind us that the current First<br />
Lady is a recipient of this policy. And the<br />
plastic “umbrella” of “Make America Great<br />
Again” that covers the head represents the<br />
shield of ignorance under which he and his<br />
base mask their true values. On the base are a<br />
series of ten quotes extracted from the<br />
internet. The black text are Trump’s words<br />
that are compared to biblical passages in red<br />
text. This oxymoronic juxtaposition of<br />
thoughts are intended to signify the hypocrisy<br />
of the “Christian Right” who blindly deny the<br />
actual teachings of their “Prince of Peace.”<br />
Herb Weaver | April 2018<br />
A Great, Great Peace Extinguisher<br />
Ceramic and mixed media<br />
117 x 41 x 41 cm | 2015<br />
weaverworks.yolasite.com
She is a founder of Philadelphia Sculptors, the<br />
Philadelphia - based organization of professional<br />
sculptors, and has served as its president<br />
since its inception in 1996. She founded the<br />
Burlington County College Sculpture Garden in<br />
Pemberton, NJ, and directed it for 20 years.<br />
“Ongoing traumas and tragedies are taking<br />
place throughout the world, causing people to<br />
be uprooted, marginalized, expelled, starved<br />
and otherwise treated in the most inhumane<br />
ways.<br />
Leslie Kaufman<br />
Leslie Kaufman lives in Philadelphia and has<br />
been active in the arts for over 40 years. She<br />
has exhibited her sculpture in numerous local,<br />
regional, and international shows including a<br />
one-person show at Shippensburg University<br />
(Shippensburg, PA) and a two-person show at<br />
Highwire Gallery (Philadelphia). Other venues<br />
where she has exhibited her work include<br />
Budapest Gallery (Budapest, Hungary) and<br />
Washington Square (Washington, DC), among<br />
others.<br />
Her work has ranged from carved stone and<br />
wood to ceramic sculpture to mixed-media<br />
constructions. She has participated in numerous<br />
collaborative, alternative, and public art<br />
projects, including the “Artfronts Partnership,”<br />
the Main Line Art Center’s “Kites: Art Takes<br />
Flight” and Philadelphia Sculptors’ “Cart Art,”<br />
“Chairs in the Air,” and “A Case for Art.”<br />
I created the Safe Haven series as a response<br />
to this upheaval. I am interested in the<br />
possibilities for escape and new life, even as I<br />
acknowledge the complexities of transitioning<br />
from one place to another. In this series of<br />
sculptures, I chose to repurpose some objects<br />
so that their new identities reflect the<br />
process of bringing to light something that<br />
wasn’t visible before.<br />
Understanding those who are different from<br />
us involves changing our focus from what is<br />
different to what is similar. If we are allowed<br />
the freedom to develop our lives in an<br />
environment not bombarded by hostilities,<br />
life and creativity can return to replace<br />
emptiness and despair.”<br />
Leslie Kaufman | April 2018<br />
Safe Haven: Root<br />
Wood, cardboard, plaster, fabric, mixed<br />
33 x 48 x 33 cm | 2018<br />
lesliekaufman.artspan.com
Sculpture Program, Princeton University,<br />
Maryland Institute of Art, School of Visual Arts.<br />
He currently is an occasional instructor at art<br />
schools in the US and Europe. His work has<br />
been presented at Documenta 6 (1977) and at<br />
the Venice Biennale (American Pavilion) in<br />
1980. His art is represented in many private<br />
and public collections.<br />
Lucio Pozzi<br />
Lucio Pozzi was born in 1935 in Milan, Italy.<br />
After living a few years in Rome, where he<br />
studied architecture, he came to the United<br />
States in 1962, as a guest of the Harvard<br />
International Summer Seminar. He then settled<br />
in New York and took the US citizenship. He<br />
now shares his time between his Hudson (NY)<br />
and Valeggio s/M (VR) studios.<br />
In 1978 the Museum of Modern Art, New York,<br />
exhibited his early videotapes in one of the<br />
first single-artist exhibitions of the Projects:<br />
Video series. He occasionally writes and has<br />
taught at the Cooper Union, Yale Graduate<br />
“The Next 475 Years Of My Art And Life” is<br />
both a lecture and a work of art. I have<br />
delivered it for about thirty years always with<br />
the same title. Even though it contains a fixed<br />
nucleus of images, it changes over the years<br />
according to circumstances. In this event I<br />
move constantly and hop from one idea to the<br />
next not so much to explain but rather to<br />
trace the evolution of a way of thinking about<br />
art. I describe how I have turned upside down<br />
the canons of my generation’s Conceptual and<br />
Analytic art so as to make of them a point of<br />
departure instead of a point of arrival. Since<br />
then I live my art at the widest range, in all<br />
its possibilities. I have chosen to seek the<br />
intensity of inspiration by structuring a<br />
practice of continuous shifts from one mode<br />
of art making to the next. I believe that<br />
coherence of style and meaning does not<br />
depend on formula but surfaces uncalculated<br />
in the practice of the artist.”<br />
Lucio Pozzi | April 2018<br />
Diaspora<br />
Acrylic on plywood<br />
Size variable - a proxy artwork | 2018<br />
luciopozzi.com
He currently is Professor of Art at Bowling<br />
Green State University, and serves as a<br />
National AP Studio Art Reviewer. Arrigo has<br />
taught painting at Studio Arts Center<br />
International in Florence, Italy and served for<br />
two years as the director of Young Artists at<br />
Work, a nationally recognized arts outreach<br />
program for young adults.<br />
Michael Arrigo<br />
Michael Arrigo is a multi-disciplinary artist<br />
based in Toledo, Ohio. He received his M.F.A.<br />
in Painting and Drawing from the Ohio State<br />
University and has been included in many<br />
national juried and invitational exhibitions.<br />
He has received a G.C.A.C. Individual Artists<br />
Fellowship, and awards from The Columbus<br />
Museum of Art, The Maser Museum of Art and<br />
The Toledo Museum of Art.<br />
Recent solo exhibitions include Crumbs Gather<br />
in the Folds at the Mariani Gallery in Greeley<br />
CO; Packing Up at Cascade Gallery in Portland,<br />
OR; and Interface with Jake Rowland at the<br />
Rosemary Duffy Larson Gallery in Miami FL.<br />
“People die, often at the hands of other<br />
people. Death, however, cannot die. This is<br />
perhaps one of the things that make it<br />
troubling and powerful. Death cannot do what<br />
it is and therefor it persists in being.<br />
Similarly, words cannot speak. They cannot<br />
bring themselves into being. Euphemisms are<br />
the words that we humans breathe into<br />
existence because we dare not speak the<br />
words that cannot speak themselves- words<br />
that might actually materialize the world as it<br />
is. Euphemisms are the words we speak to<br />
bring a less troubling more convenient world<br />
into existence, a parallel world of alternative<br />
facts (thank you Kellyanne Conway). Spade, A<br />
Spade is an attempt to lay some of the<br />
euphemisms of drone warfare to rest.”<br />
Michael Arrigo | April 2018<br />
Spade, A Spade<br />
Digital imaging on canvas | 183 x 245 cm<br />
2017<br />
www.michaelarrigo.com
Printmaking) and the University of Wyoming<br />
(MFA Sculpture and Printmaking). He is<br />
Professor of Art at Elizabethtown College and<br />
directs the Susquehanna Center for the<br />
Creative Arts.<br />
Milt Friedly<br />
Born: 1958, Powell, WY<br />
Resides: Elizabethtown, PA<br />
Milt Friedly has received recognition locally,<br />
regionally, nationally and internationally for his<br />
work in ceramics, printmaking and sculpture.<br />
His work has been included in exhibitions at<br />
the Urban Center for Contemporary Art; the<br />
Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition; the<br />
Yellowstone Art Museum; the Nicolayson Art<br />
Museum; the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts;<br />
Museum; the Gallery of American Craft; the<br />
Susquehanna Art Museum; the Lancaster<br />
Museum of Art; Lynden Gallery; Denise Bibro<br />
Fine Art; the Demuth Museum; the George<br />
Krevsky Gallery; and the University of the Arts,<br />
Philadelphia and many other art centers and<br />
galleries. His work is included in a number of<br />
public collections and many private<br />
collections. He received Fine Arts Degrees from<br />
Arizona State University (BFA Ceramics and<br />
“The 'free world' vs Kim Jong-un, tensions<br />
rising, an American President compelled to<br />
flex his muscle and mouth, raising the boiling<br />
temperature for what could be a nuclear fallout.<br />
Ballistic - 38th Parallel, a recent work,<br />
defines a dynamic for world peace. Donald<br />
Trump pointing a finger, Kim Jong-un spying on<br />
his own people across the 38th parallel,<br />
spewing hate and distrust; missiles dividing<br />
the two powers - a missile raising Kim's hair.<br />
Mount Rushmore and a Lotus flower look on,<br />
wondering, what have we become?<br />
Gun Control, an American problem, the World<br />
looks on in disbelief - shootings in our schools<br />
and public places. Are we out of control,<br />
teaching our children violence is the answer?<br />
Are video games and television numbing the<br />
minds of our youth and to the point that they<br />
cannot discern make believe from reality?<br />
What are the consequences, no regard for the<br />
sanctity of human life? Broken homes, broken<br />
children who look on and see hypocrisy - what<br />
is life? Our children and citizens become<br />
terrorist, for what cause?”<br />
Milt Friedly | April 2018<br />
miltfriedly.com
Gun Control | Defunct gun, rebar, pulley, hook, chain, spring and motorcycle foot peg | app. 315 x 61 x 25 cm | 2016
Nina Buxenbaum grew up in the Crown Heights<br />
area of Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA<br />
degree in Painting from the Maryland Institute<br />
College of Art and her BFA from Washington<br />
University in St. Louis in Drawing and Printmaking.<br />
Her work has been included in several<br />
exhibitions including the Studio Museum of<br />
Harlem (NYC, NY), The Slater Museum (Norwich,<br />
CT), The Painting Center (NYC, NY), the<br />
Ingalls Gallery (Miami, FL), Rush Arts (NYC,<br />
NY), including a solo show at The Stella Jones<br />
Gallery (New Orleans, LA). She is currently<br />
represented by Galerie Myrtis (Baltimore, MD).<br />
Her work has been reviewed in the International<br />
Review of African American Art. She is<br />
a member of the Silvermine Guild of Artists in<br />
New Canaan, CT. She is an Associate Professor<br />
at York College, CUNY, in Jamaica, NY, and<br />
Coordinator of the Fine Arts Discipline in the<br />
Department of Performing and Fine Arts. She<br />
maintains and active studio practice in<br />
Brooklyn, NY and Bethel, CT.<br />
“I began my work as an exploration of images<br />
of African American women in our society. We<br />
judge a culture and a civilization by the<br />
images and art objects that they create. I<br />
have always focused on creating honest and<br />
personal depictions of women, particularly<br />
women of color, as a means to provide an<br />
alternative to the stereotypes prevalent in<br />
our culture.<br />
Nina Buxenbaum<br />
I use the “Topsy-Turvy doll” as a metaphor of<br />
black women and the way we learn to define<br />
ourselves. The doll, whose name is derived<br />
from the character of Topsy in the Harriet<br />
Beecher Stowe novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is<br />
designed to look like a southern belle on one<br />
side, but her dress conceals a black girl<br />
underneath. These dueling images deal with<br />
some of the complexities of identity that go<br />
beyond race.”<br />
Cousins: Buxenbaum/Engst<br />
Oil on linen | 122 x 91 cm | 2017<br />
Nina I. Buxenbaum | April 2018<br />
www.ninabuxenbaum.com
Scotland. Brunvand was recently named one<br />
of Utah’s 15 most influential artists, voted on<br />
by Utah’s on-line arts magazine, Artists of<br />
Utah-15BYTES.<br />
“This multi-part work is from an ongoing<br />
series, The Positive of Space of Silence. These<br />
works use player piano scrolls as a substrate<br />
and as an integral part of the concept. The<br />
scrolls are encodings of music, but by themselves<br />
are silent.<br />
Sandy Brunvand<br />
Born in Michigan, Sandy Brunvand moved to<br />
Salt Lake City in 1982. Sandy is an Assistant<br />
Professor (Lecturer) in studio art & art education<br />
in the Department of Art and Art History,<br />
University of Utah. After receiving her MFA in<br />
2003, she co-founded Saltgrass Printmakers, a<br />
non-profit printmaking studio and gallery<br />
located in Salt Lake City. Brunvand’s artwork<br />
incorporates painting, drawing, printmaking,<br />
and mixed media and has shown throughout<br />
the United States, as well as in Canada,<br />
England, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Bosnia,<br />
China, Colombia, Palestine, Hungary, and<br />
Their negative space encodes the notes, but<br />
the actual scrolls are composed primarily of<br />
positive space. Not only are the scrolls<br />
reminiscent of Asian scrolls in their physical<br />
aspect, I am also emulating the Asian tradition<br />
of grouping scrolls into four seasons of<br />
images, although not as literally as tradition<br />
dictates. There is no season recognition in<br />
war or peace. The titles of the individual<br />
scrolls, when placed in this setting, take on an<br />
entirely different interpretation from their<br />
original intent. Each scroll has images<br />
depicting both a darker turmoil and a hopeful,<br />
peaceful portion rising to the top of the<br />
scroll.<br />
Each of the scrolls is held down at the base<br />
with one or more wishing stones.”<br />
Sandy Brunvand | April 2018<br />
Positive Space of Silence, Peace<br />
4 Piano scrolls with ink painting<br />
244 x 152 cm | 2017<br />
www.sandybrunvand.com
from The Fund for Environmental Journalism.<br />
As a Community Fellow with the Open Society<br />
Institute (Baltimore), he co-directed the<br />
innovative program Healing Images, providing<br />
digital cameras, instruction and therapy to<br />
survivors of torture. His current projects<br />
investigate the rise of wind energy in the<br />
Midwest, the precarious conditions of Burmese<br />
Chin refugees in India, the upsurge of diabetes<br />
in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the social and<br />
environmental impacts of Marcellus Shale gas<br />
development in Pennsylvania.<br />
Steven Rubin<br />
Steven Rubin is an Associate Professor of Art in<br />
the Photography Department at Penn State<br />
University. Previously, he worked for more than<br />
twenty years as a freelance photojournalist<br />
and documentary photographer, traveling on<br />
assignment around the world and throughout<br />
the United States.<br />
His photographs have been published in The<br />
New York Times Magazine, National Geographic,<br />
Time, Newsweek and The Village Voice,<br />
and internationally in Stern, GEO, Focus,<br />
L’Express and The London Independent Magazine,<br />
among numerous other publications.<br />
His work has been exhibited across the United<br />
States and in Europe, Asia and Central<br />
America. A Fulbright-Nehru Scholar in<br />
northeast India, he is also the recipient of the<br />
Leica Medal of Excellence, a New York<br />
Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship, a<br />
Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, an Alicia<br />
Patterson Journalism Fellowship and a grant<br />
“The photographs and poem included in the<br />
exhibition are part of Shale Play, a book of<br />
documentary poems and color photographs<br />
created between 2012 and 2017 with poet<br />
Julia Spicher Kasdorf, in response to the rush<br />
to exploit the Marcellus Shale natural gas<br />
formation in Pennsylvania by means of the<br />
controversial well stimulation method commonly<br />
called fracking.<br />
The photograph here depicts a farm silo and<br />
Chevron gas condensate tanks on the Honsaker<br />
Farm in Masontown, German Township,<br />
Fayette County, Pennsylvania. In many Pennsylvania<br />
communities, farmers no longer find<br />
dairy and crop farming profitable, but they<br />
can gain substantial profit from leasing their<br />
land for natural gas development.”<br />
Steven Rubin | April 2018<br />
Silo and Chevron gas condensate tanks<br />
Pigmented inkjet print<br />
41 x 61 cm | 2015<br />
www.stevenrubin.com
TEIL 2<br />
POESIE<br />
CHAPTER 2<br />
POETRY
Carolyn Forché<br />
Forché was born in Detroit, Michigan. Forché<br />
earned a Bachelor of Arts (B.A) in Creative<br />
Writing at Michigan State University in 1972,<br />
and MFA at Bowling Green State University in<br />
1974. She taught at a number of universities,<br />
including Bowling Green State University,<br />
Michigan State University, the University of<br />
Virginia, Skidmore College, Columbia University,<br />
San Diego State University and in the<br />
Master of Fine Arts program at George Mason<br />
University. She is now Director of the Lannan<br />
Center for Poetry and Poetics and holds the<br />
Lannan Chair in Poetry at Georgetown University<br />
in Washington, D.C.<br />
Forché lives in Maryland with her husband,<br />
Harry Mattison, a photographer, whom she<br />
married in 1984.<br />
Forché's first poetry collection, Gathering the<br />
Tribes (1976), won the Yale Series of Younger<br />
Poets Competition, leading to publication by<br />
Yale University Press.[6] In 1977, she traveled<br />
to Spain to translate the work of Salvadoranexiled<br />
poet Claribel Alegría. She has also<br />
translated the work of Georg Trakl and<br />
Mahmoud Darwish, as well as many others.<br />
Upon her return from Spain, she received a<br />
Guggenheim Fellowship, which enabled her to<br />
travel to El Salvador, where she worked as a<br />
human rights advocate. Her second book, The<br />
Country Between Us (1981), was published<br />
with the help of Margaret Atwood. It received<br />
the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di<br />
Castagnola Award, and was also the Lamont<br />
Poetry Selection of the Academy of American<br />
Poets. She won the 2006 Robert Creeley Award.<br />
Although Forché is sometimes described as a<br />
political poet, she considers herself a poet who<br />
is politically engaged. After first acquiring both<br />
fame and notoriety for her second volume of<br />
poems, The Country Between Us, she pointed<br />
out that this reputation rested on a limited<br />
number of poems describing what she<br />
personally had experienced in El Salvador<br />
during the Salvadoran Civil War. Her aesthetic<br />
is more one of rendered experience and at<br />
times of mysticism rather than one of ideology<br />
or agitprop. Forché is particularly interested in<br />
the effect of political trauma on the poet's use<br />
of language.<br />
www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/carolyn-forche<br />
Image Credit: Don J. Usner.<br />
Courtesy of Blue Flower Arts.
The Boatman<br />
We were thirty-one souls all, he said, on the gray-sick of sea<br />
in a cold rubber boat, rising and falling in our filth.<br />
By morning this didn’t matter, no land was in sight,<br />
all were soaked to the bone, living and dead.<br />
We could still float, we said, from war to war.<br />
What lay behind us but ruins of stone piled on ruins of stone?<br />
City called “mother of the poor” surrounded by fields<br />
of cotton and millet, city of jewelers and cloak-makers,<br />
with the oldest church in Christendom and the Sword of Allah.<br />
If anyone remains there now, he assures, they would be utterly alone.<br />
There is a hotel named for it in Rome two hundred meters<br />
from the Piazza di Spagna, where you can have breakfast under<br />
the portraits of film stars. There the staff cannot do enough for you.<br />
But I am talking nonsense again, as I have since that night<br />
we fetched a child, not ours, from the sea, drifting facedown<br />
in a life vest, its eyes taken by fish or the birds above us.<br />
After that, Aleppo went up in smoke, and Raqqa came under a rain<br />
of leaflets warning everyone to go. Leave, yes, but go where?<br />
We lived through the Americans and Russians, through Americans<br />
again, many nights of death from the clouds, mornings surprised<br />
to be waking from the sleep of death, still unburied and alive<br />
but with no safe place. Leave, yes, we obey the leaflets, but go where?<br />
To the sea to be eaten, to the shores of Europe to be caged?<br />
To camp misery and camp remain here. I ask you then, where?<br />
You tell me you are a poet. If so, our destination is the same.<br />
I find myself now the boatman, driving a taxi at the end of the world.<br />
I will see that you arrive safely, my friend, I will get you there.<br />
Carolyn Forché
R.E. Foundation Award for Outstanding Poetry<br />
and her work has been nominated for the 2014<br />
Pushcart Prize. Her debut collection, Traces,<br />
was published by I. Giraffe Press in 2013.<br />
She has been a featured reader in Baltimore,<br />
Philadelphia, Harrisburg, Reading, Gettysburg,<br />
and Lancaster events.<br />
www.dainasavage.com<br />
Daina Savage<br />
Daina Savage, works as a freelance journalist<br />
for magazines and newspapers in the Mid-<br />
Atlantic region, with more than 3,000 published<br />
stories. She is a co-founder and codirector<br />
of the Spoken Word Festival in<br />
Lancaster, Pennsylvania.<br />
As the director of the Lancaster Poetry<br />
Continuum, she organized numerous poetry<br />
reading series in Lancaster museums, bookstores,<br />
and coffee shops. She is the co-founder<br />
of the Lancaster County Young Writers Workshop.<br />
Her poetry has been published in numerous<br />
regional journals and has garnered many<br />
writing awards. She is the 2013 recipient of the
How to Live, Riga 1939-2017<br />
Butter the black<br />
bread. Snip sheaves<br />
of dill fold<br />
into sour<br />
cream. Line<br />
up the sprats<br />
like little soldiers,<br />
gold of their scales<br />
winking in the morning<br />
light.<br />
Remember the taste<br />
of hunger. Fry<br />
bacon. Render<br />
onions translucent<br />
as ration-cards<br />
in sweaty<br />
hands.<br />
Fill your plate<br />
with gratitude.<br />
Let there be enough<br />
now.<br />
Be enough<br />
now.<br />
Daina Savage
Movement and the Chinese Diaspora, 1919-<br />
1932 (New York: Routledge Press, 2003, 2007,<br />
2013) and Modern China (Association for Asian<br />
Studies, 2012), and Contested Communities:<br />
Identities, Spaces, and Hierarchies of the<br />
Chinese in Havana, 1902-1968 (Brill, 2017). He<br />
has also researched Brethren mission<br />
peacemaking activities in China, and has<br />
published his findings in the Journal of Asian<br />
History.<br />
users.etown.edu/k/kenleyd<br />
David Kenley<br />
Dr. Kenley is Professor of Chinese History and<br />
Director of the Center for Global<br />
Understanding and <strong>Peacemaking</strong> at<br />
Elizabethtown College. His teaching and<br />
research interests focus on Chinese intellectual<br />
history and overseas migration. Some of his<br />
representative publications include New<br />
Culture in a New World: The May Fourth
War Memorials: Picturing Peace or Graphic Reminders<br />
of Violence<br />
They were arranged in neat rows, one on top of the other. Each was a<br />
dingy greyish color, not the bright sun-bleached white you often see in the<br />
movies. Row upon row they were stacked up, reaching to the ceiling at the<br />
top of the pagoda, maybe 20 or 30 feet above my head. It was, in essence, a<br />
sacred cathedral constructed of discolored human skulls.<br />
Should I take a photo of them? Should I stand in<br />
front of the pile and ask someone to take a photo with<br />
me in it? Certainly this wasn’t the right time for a<br />
“selfie.” That was beyond the question. But what is<br />
the right thing to do at a place such as this? Some of<br />
those around me were crying, but the overwhelming size<br />
of this pile of skulls was quite numbing, leaving me<br />
feeling strangely dumbfounded.<br />
When Cambodia’s government authorities decided to<br />
build this Killing Fields Memorial to the victims of<br />
Pol Pot’s murderous Khmer Rouge regime, how exactly<br />
did they want me to respond as a first-time visitor?<br />
More importantly what do the souls who formerly<br />
possessed these skulls think about this monument? After being beaten,<br />
tortured, and beheaded, are they happy to contribute to this massive jigsaw<br />
puzzle, or to they feel doubly victimized to be publically displayed for<br />
the purpose of shock and awe? Is this the proper way to memorialize the<br />
dead, and if not, is it justified to use them to educate others, forcing<br />
them never to forget?<br />
As a professional historian, I am fascinated with the ways in which<br />
politicians, journalists, film-makers, and museum curators seek to preserve<br />
the past and teach appropriate lessons for those who will follow. For<br />
better or for worse, I have visited and studied many war memorials around<br />
the world. Some, such as the World War II memorial in Washington, are<br />
celebratory and triumphalist. Others, including its neighboring Vietnam<br />
memorial just a stone’s throw away, are serene, somber, and quite literally<br />
reflective. Many, including the memorial in Cambodia, are graphic,<br />
disturbing, and even nauseating. Like the Killing Fields pagoda, the Rape
of Nanjing memorial in China also relies on skulls and human bones to shock<br />
its visitors. By contrast, the Hiroshima Peace Park in Japan uses life-size<br />
wax figurines of small children. Portraying the moments after the atomic<br />
flash, the flesh on these children drips from their arms, much like a<br />
melting candle. In the War Remnants museum in Saigon, curators display<br />
actual dead babies, floating in clear glass jars of formaldehyde. Their<br />
tiny deformed bodies are meant to be a warning — and a condemnation —<br />
against the US government’s use of the dreaded Agent Orange. Closer to<br />
home, American museum directors have also resorted to such methods when<br />
constructing their exhibits. At the National Holocaust Memorial in<br />
Washington, visitors enter a large room filled with old shoes. A poem on<br />
the wall reads:<br />
We are the shoes, we are the last witnesses.<br />
We are shoes from grandchildren and grandfathers<br />
From Prague, Paris, and Amsterdam,<br />
And because we are only made of fabric and leather<br />
And not of blood and flesh, each one of us avoided the hellfire. 1<br />
The use of such graphically violent symbols has all the subtlety of a<br />
sledge hammer.<br />
For those committed to peace, truth, and reconciliation, how should we<br />
feel about war memorials? Do they promote reconciliation, or are they<br />
counterproductive, producing feelings of disgust and even anger? Like me,<br />
the Vietnamese-American Viet Thanh Nguyen has asked many of these same<br />
questions. Nguyen warns that war memorials are themselves implicated in<br />
power politics. Those with access to power — including politicians, film<br />
producers, and well-funded curators — continually seek to dictate the<br />
parameters of historical narrative and public memory. But power, Nguyen<br />
cautions, “even when carried out with the elevated intention of justice,<br />
incites rebellion from those below and suppression from those above.”<br />
Continuing, Nguyen argues, “As fraught as engaging with power may be, one<br />
must confront it and hope that one can manage it, and oneself, ethically.<br />
Our use of power must be done with the full awareness of our own humanity<br />
and inhumanity, our capacity for both good and bad.” 2<br />
What should a war memorial look like? How can we picture peace if we<br />
remain committed to graphically portraying past violence? How do we account<br />
for unequal power relations in the construction and maintenance of war
memorials? Most importantly, how do we gain an awareness of our own<br />
capacity for both good and bad as we seek humanely to remember the past?<br />
While there are no easy answers to such questions, we must ask them of<br />
ourselves and others.<br />
After visiting the Killing Fields Memorial, I spent the rest of the<br />
afternoon wandering somewhat aimlessly through the streets of Phnom Penh,<br />
contemplating the awful scenes I had witnessed. By the end of the day, I<br />
was hot, exhausted, and emotionally drained. Fortunately I found a<br />
wonderful ice cream parlor overlooking the beautiful confluence of the<br />
Tonlé Sap and Mekong Rivers. As I ate my sundae and reflected on my day, I<br />
came to a banal yet provocative conclusion: the world needs fewer war<br />
memorial and more ice cream parlors. Until then, I will keep visiting these<br />
memorials, asking tough questions that defy simplistic answers.<br />
David Kenley | August 9, 2017<br />
1<br />
This is written by Moses Schulstein and the shoes were from prisoners in<br />
Poland’s Majdanek Concentration Camp. See Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the<br />
Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 152.<br />
2<br />
Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War<br />
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 253.
Rand Hess. She was the literacy coach and<br />
design specialist for Book-in-a-day and<br />
worked as regional coordinator in Northern<br />
and Western Maryland for Poetry Out Loud,<br />
a national poetry recitation contest.<br />
She is a Jin Shin Jyutsu (a Japanese healing<br />
art) practitioner in Baltimore, MD, and is<br />
currently working on a children's novel-inverse.<br />
www.deannanikaido.com<br />
Deanna Nikaido<br />
Deanna Nikaido is a graduate from Art<br />
Center College of Design in Pasadena,<br />
California, with a degree in Illustration and<br />
has authored two collection of poetry,<br />
Voice Like Water and Vibrating with Silence<br />
and the children’s book, Animal Ark, coauthored<br />
with Kwame Alexander and Mary
May It Be<br />
Before I knew skin was separation<br />
or had any sense that the body was boundary,<br />
I was everything you are.<br />
Everything sky is.<br />
Or ocean does.<br />
The way a flock of birds migrate as a single wing.<br />
Or a school of fish fit to water.<br />
The way my grandson sees the world<br />
without words<br />
barefoot and antenna.<br />
Picasso tried<br />
to peel away the strokes<br />
with his first set of eyes.<br />
Lessen the weight of all his looking.<br />
Shed what isn’t there—<br />
What would it take<br />
to remember<br />
that we are all strung like stars<br />
in constellation?<br />
Inseparable from.<br />
The center of.<br />
Completement<br />
for each other.<br />
Whatever ingredients you hold,<br />
may they be kind<br />
may they add to the wholeness of<br />
shining itself.<br />
Deanna Nikaido
In 1996, Miller delivered the commencement<br />
address at Emory and Henry College and was<br />
awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of<br />
Literature. He has been a Fulbright Senior<br />
Specialist Program Fellow to Israel in 2004 and<br />
2012.<br />
Miller is often heard on National Public Radio.<br />
He is host of the weekly morning radio show<br />
On the Margin which airs on WPFW-FM 89.3.<br />
Miller is host and producer of The Scholars on<br />
UDC-TV, and his E-Notes has been a popular<br />
blog since 2004. On April 19, 2015, Miller was<br />
inducted into the Washington DC Hall of Fame.<br />
In 2016, Miller received the AWP George<br />
Garrett Award for Outstanding Community<br />
Service in Literature and the DC Mayor’s Arts<br />
Award for Distinguished Honor.<br />
E. Ethelbert Miller<br />
E. Ethelbert Miller is a writer and literary<br />
activist. He is the author of several collections<br />
of poetry and two memoirs. Miller serves as<br />
the board chair of the Institute for Policy<br />
Studies (IPS), a progressive think tank located<br />
in Washington, D.C. and is a board member for<br />
The Community Foundation for the National<br />
Capital Region. For fourteen years he has been<br />
the editor of Poet Lore, the oldest poetry<br />
magazine published in the United States.<br />
His latest book of poetry, The Collected Poems<br />
of E. Ethelbert Miller, edited by Kirsten Porter<br />
and published in March 2016 by Aquarius<br />
Press, is a comprehensive collection that<br />
represents over 40 years of his career as a<br />
poet.<br />
www.eethelbertmiller.com<br />
Image Credit: Rick Reinhard
THE LAST RITUAL<br />
We need to wash our bowls.<br />
Place them in the sun.<br />
Ah - the belly is filled with joy.<br />
No more hunger for Peace.<br />
E. Ethelbert Miller
Vermont Studio Center, and is currently<br />
Director of the Bowers Writers House at<br />
Elizabethtown College.<br />
Jesse's fiction, poetry and non-fiction work has<br />
been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes,<br />
and has appeared nationally and internationally<br />
in such journals as The Adirondack<br />
Review, Coal Hill Review, The Cortland Review,<br />
Cimarron Review, Iowa Review, River Styx,<br />
Slide, Story Quarterly, Southeast Review,<br />
Sycamore Review and others.<br />
His first collection of poems, HUMAN<br />
RESOURCES, was published by Inkbrush Press in<br />
2011. Jesse's first collection of short fiction,<br />
SO LET ME GET THIS STRAIGHT was published<br />
in March of 2018 by Paycock Press.<br />
www.etown.edu/centers/writershouse/staff.aspx<br />
Jesse Waters<br />
A winner of the River Styx International Poetry<br />
Contest, runner-up for the Iowa Review Fiction<br />
Prize and Finalist in The Starcherone Prize, the<br />
DIAGRAM Innovative Fiction Prize and the Paul<br />
Bowles Fiction Award, Prof. Jesse Waters is a<br />
recipient of a NC Artist’s Grant to attend the
An Apple from Dachau<br />
It's the eighteenth day of Nissan,<br />
the first month of the Jewish year, April 21st –<br />
Passover's third day. I’m on a backways cobblestone street.<br />
"Liebling" a woman selling apples says to me<br />
but I don't speak German. She smiles, and nods<br />
to the euro coins in my palm.<br />
It's one fine apple, shining up at me<br />
from the center of my hand. And still<br />
I have no idea how to be sacred.<br />
Any fruit, even just the core<br />
or shed skin, is holy when you’re lonely.<br />
At dusk, with a cup of rum-laced tea, I watch<br />
out my window to where the vendors stay out at their carts<br />
until the light goes dead, eating whitefish<br />
from wax paper, and one half of an orange.<br />
Something so beautiful as to give up seed<br />
is lonely, and to shed its skin for hunger is holy.<br />
If you plant an apple seed in the far town field<br />
where snow never stays, even in winter,<br />
and that seed lives, it’s a holy, holy thing.<br />
Not like Gefilte fish. Right now<br />
thirteen hours east, my mother<br />
is in Brooklyn buying two pounds<br />
of Whitefish, Carp and Pike flesh,<br />
chances are the fishmonger<br />
knows her: You'll never find bones,<br />
it's why my relatives always have<br />
Passover at my parent's house.<br />
Keep the shed skin, my mother will tell the Fishmonger<br />
but she's keeping the head, seed and core. The first<br />
spring I remember smelling those fresh<br />
fish bones, I was five. It was the salt smell<br />
fleshwork of my young hunger. My mother will grind
the fish together with seltzer water, nutmeg,<br />
white wine and finely diced celery ribs<br />
while thinking about something sacred.<br />
Anything so beautiful as to give up its hunger<br />
for holiness, and shed its skin for the sacred childheart<br />
is still not enough, won’t show me how to love. And there's nothing<br />
edible in this poem. Nothing holy.<br />
Only an apple, which tastes like apple, smells<br />
like an apple. What else can an<br />
apple mean here, in any other holy place it's the same, sweet fruit –<br />
but on this cobblestone street<br />
in Dachau where my grandmother<br />
is said to have been beaten to death<br />
and no one said Kaddish until a few minutes ago, I would eat<br />
six million perfect apples as the one here in my palm and never feel full.<br />
I’d embrace hundreds of loving and hating<br />
Germans, Koreans, Catholics, Laotians, real women<br />
and men, anything to let go of the ancient shadowboxer<br />
in me who snorts nation<br />
with each jab and wide hook – the one<br />
seed who's never known an enemy<br />
besides his own, dark imagination.<br />
I can't start my life over. The landmarks<br />
I know are all in poems, not in people's hearts.<br />
There are no clear landmarks in this poem.<br />
When I cross back over the Atlantic to Troy,<br />
New York – home -- her milling ball quarry machines<br />
and cookie factories burned like figures<br />
my own youth had no time for – inside the American<br />
womb of plenty up above our sacred, holy world<br />
I'll eat this apple, I'll split it with<br />
my mother and sisters over halvah, macaroons.<br />
Jesse Waters
Her poems were awarded a 2009 NEA<br />
fellowship and a Pushcart Prize and appear in<br />
numerous anthologies.<br />
She thinks about the relationships that writers<br />
have with the communities and places they<br />
come from and also those places they choose<br />
to inhabit. Past projects along these lines<br />
include a collection of essays, The Body and<br />
the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life,<br />
winner of the 2002 Book of the Year Award<br />
from the Conference on Christianity and<br />
Literature, and a monograph, Fixing Tradition:<br />
Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American. She has<br />
worked on new editions of Yoder’s 1940 local<br />
color classic Rosanna of the Amish, which is<br />
set in Centre and Mifflin Counties and Fred<br />
Lewis Pattee’s The House of the Black Ring, set<br />
in Centre County. With Michael Tyrell she coedited<br />
the anthology, Broken Land: Poems of<br />
Brooklyn.<br />
Julia Spicher Kasdorf<br />
Julia Spicher Kasdorf has published three<br />
collections of poetry with the University of<br />
Pittsburgh Press, most recently Poetry in<br />
America.<br />
She is currently working with photographer<br />
Steven Rubin on a poetry project to document<br />
the impacts of natural gas development in<br />
Pennsylvania.<br />
www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/julia-kasdorf<br />
Among the previous collections, Eve’s<br />
Striptease was named one of Library Journal‘s<br />
Top 20 Best Poetry Books of 1998, and Sleeping<br />
Preacher won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry<br />
Prize and the Great Lakes College’s Association<br />
Award for New Writing.
Among Landowners and Industrial Stakeholders, the<br />
Citizen with Too Much Memory Seeks Standing to<br />
Speak of Recent Events in Penn’s Wood<br />
When I drive south on I -78, diagonal highway from New York to Harrisburg,<br />
the Blue Mountain presses my right shoulder for miles, dividing coal<br />
tipples from hex signs on barns, French and Indian territory from the<br />
British colony. At Shartlesville in the parking lot of Roadside America, a<br />
giant Amish couple on a spring wagon marks my ancestors’ settlement at<br />
Northkill, the Hochstetler cabin, torched in 1757.<br />
After the fire, Lenape and Shawnee warriors marched Jacob and two of his<br />
sons for 17 days to the French Fort at Erie. Seven months later, Jacob<br />
escaped, walked nine nights and days through forest, eating grass. At the<br />
Susquehanna, he lashed logs with grape vines and floated south for four<br />
days until British soldiers fished him out, nearly dead, at Fort Augusta or<br />
Shamokin, now Sunbury, corporate headquarters of Weis Markets.<br />
Growing up, we knew the Hochstetlers had guns but would not shoot; the<br />
warriors killed Jacob’s wife, whose name no one recalls, because she<br />
refused to share fruit with them. When we misbehaved, Dad threatened to<br />
give us back to the Indians. We didn’t know that Christian Hochstetler kept<br />
running back to his captors after he was returned to his parents. We didn’t<br />
know Barbara Kauffman grabbed an ax and hacked the fingers of braves as<br />
they tried to climb through her cabin window. The men ran screaming into<br />
the forest.<br />
Penn’s surveyors carved initials into the trunks of great trees—white oak,<br />
black oak, red oak, hickory, and walnut—sighted a compass from the trunk of<br />
the corner tree and stretched iron measuring chains to make boundaries.<br />
Corner trees they called witness trees. When Shikellemy ruled the refugees<br />
at Shamokin, he implored the Lenape, Seneca, and Tutelo to grow corn,<br />
squash, and beans but to refrain from planting apples and peaches for fear<br />
they would create a plantation.<br />
During the French and Indian War, braves from the Forks of the Ohio, now<br />
Pittsburgh, attacked six European families near a trading post on Penns<br />
Creek, slaying 14 and capturing 28, among them the wife and children of
Jacob Beyerly. A woman was found with a chain draped around her neck, a man<br />
with a tomahawk, freshly inscribed with English initials, sunk in his skull<br />
like a log. Bierly is the name of the lawyer who filed papers for my<br />
divorce.<br />
About to swing his ax into a tree, Hannes Miller—three of his children<br />
married Speichers—was shot by an Indian. He was called Wounded Hannes,<br />
Crippled John, or Indian John until his death in Somerset. Some insist they<br />
can hear old trees shriek the instant an ax hits. The Northkill Amish moved<br />
west, seeking more and better land. I live near fields some of them farmed.<br />
By the 1850s, ridges around here were bare, trees baked into charcoal to<br />
fuel the iron furnaces.<br />
In 1955, my father, driving a feed truck for the Belleville Flour Mill,<br />
lost his brakes on Nittany Ridge. He shifted down, laid on the horn, flew<br />
off Centre Hall Mountain, thick with hemlock and rhododendron, and blared<br />
through Pleasant Gap without incident.<br />
In the ten miles I drive to work, I pass three prisons. The oldest opened<br />
in 1915, the year M. G. Brumbaugh became the last ordained pacifist<br />
governor of Pennsylvania. At Rockview, called the Honor Farm, inmates<br />
learned to prune apple trees and tend a Victorian glasshouse. I have seen<br />
guards on horseback beside dark-skinned prisoners swinging scythes in the<br />
ditch along Benner Pike.<br />
In 1939, my great grandfather was killed by a tree that fell the wrong way<br />
when he was logging on Jack’s Mountain. Around that time, the Klan in<br />
Pleasant Gap prevented white Catholics from building a high school in<br />
Bellefonte.<br />
Behind Rockview Prison, in a copse of hemlocks at the foot of the Nittany<br />
Ridge, an electric chair sits in a former field hospital. By the year I was<br />
born, the state had electrocuted 350 people there. Since then, three more<br />
died by lethal injection. The Dunkers never forgave Governor Brumbaugh for<br />
calling the National Guard to shoot strikers in Pittsburgh or for calling<br />
the Pennsylvania militia to arms during the First World War.
In fifth and sixth grade, on the way to Manor School I climbed a black<br />
wooden overpass that spanned the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad.<br />
Some mornings I stopped and stood in the wind roaring above hopper cars<br />
heaped with coal and iron pellets bound for mills along the rivers in<br />
Pittsburgh, and imagined flight.<br />
At the end of Peight’s lane, not far from where a horse and buggy accident<br />
killed my grandmother in 1948, I spied a Texas Eastern Transmission sign.<br />
This aluminum-sided shed is party to the fourth largest natural gas line in<br />
the nation, which runs from the Gulf of Mexico to New York City. How did<br />
that pipe snake in over Jack’s Mountain without my knowledge?<br />
When they clear-cut the right of way to lay pipeline over the Nittany Ridge<br />
in 2009, gas men left good lumber to rot, my handyman says. The Centre<br />
Relay Compressor Station stands on a former cornfield in Pleasant Gap. The<br />
pipe runs past Weis Market, recently built on a razed farm, and ends in gas<br />
storage fields at Leidy, under the Tamarack Swamp. I, who have never eaten<br />
grass out of necessity, drive home and cook my groceries on a gas stove. 1<br />
Julia Spicher Kasdorf<br />
1<br />
Among Landowners and Industrial Stakeholders, the Citizen with Too Much<br />
Memory Seeks Standing to Speak of Recent Events in Penn’s Woods” is<br />
factual, to the best of my knowledge, except that my father’s feed truck<br />
lost its brakes driving off of Tussey Mountain into Stone Valley, instead<br />
of Mount Nittany into Nittany Valley.
included writers such as Kenneth Rexroth, Gary<br />
Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac.<br />
Ferlinghetti is the author of more than thirty<br />
books of poetry, including Time of Useful<br />
Consciousness (New Directions, 2012); Poetry<br />
as Insurgent Art (New Directions, 2007);<br />
Americus, Book I (New Directions, 2004); A Far<br />
Rockaway of the Heart (New Directions, 1997);<br />
and A Coney Island of the Mind (New<br />
Directions, 1958). He has translated the work<br />
of a number of poets including Nicanor Parra,<br />
Jacques Prevert, and Pier Paolo Pasolini.<br />
Ferlinghetti is also the author of more than<br />
eight plays and of the novels Love in the Days<br />
of Rage (Overlook, 1988) and Her (New<br />
Directions, 1966).<br />
Lawrence Ferlinghetti<br />
On March 24, 1919, Lawrence Ferlinghetti was<br />
born in Yonkers, New York. After spending his<br />
early childhood in France, he received his BA<br />
from the University of North Carolina, an MA<br />
from Columbia University, and a PhD from the<br />
Sorbonne. During World War II he served in the<br />
US Naval Reserve and was sent to Nagasaki<br />
shortly after it was bombed. He married in<br />
1951 and has one daughter and one son.<br />
In 1953, Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin began to<br />
publish City Lights magazine. They also opened<br />
the City Lights Books Shop in San Francisco to<br />
help support the magazine. In 1955, they<br />
launched City Light Publishing, a bookpublishing<br />
venture. City Lights became known<br />
as the heart of the “Beat” movement, which<br />
In 1994, San Francisco renamed a street in his<br />
honor. He was also named the first poet<br />
laureate of San Francisco in 1998. His other<br />
awards and honors include the lifetime<br />
achievement award from the National Book<br />
Critics Circle in 2000, the Frost Medal in 2003,<br />
and the Literarian Award in 2005, presented<br />
for “outstanding service to the American<br />
literary community.”<br />
Currently, Ferlinghetti writes a weekly column<br />
for the San Francisco Chronicle. He also continues<br />
to operate the City Lights bookstore,<br />
and he travels frequently to participate in<br />
literary conferences and poetry readings.<br />
www.citylights.com/ferlinghetti<br />
Image Credit: Christopher Felver<br />
Ferlinghetti with Hat | 1981 | Gelatin silver print<br />
Courtesy of George Krevsky
History of the Airplane<br />
And the Wright brothers said they thought they had invented<br />
something that could make peace on earth<br />
(if the wrong brothers didn’t get hold of it)<br />
when their wonderful flying machine took off at Kitty Hawk<br />
into the kingdom of birds but the parliament of birds was freaked out<br />
by this man-made bird and fled to heaven<br />
And then the famous Spirit of Saint Louis took off eastward and<br />
flew across the Big Pond with Lindy at the controls in his leather<br />
helmet and goggles hoping to sight the doves of peace but he did not<br />
Even though he circled Versailles<br />
And then the famous Yankee Clipper took off in the opposite<br />
direction and flew across the terrific Pacific but the pacific doves<br />
were frighted by this strange amphibious bird and hid in the orient sky<br />
And then the famous Flying Fortress took off bristling with guns<br />
and testosterone to make the world safe for peace and capitalism<br />
but the birds of peace were nowhere to be found before or after Hiroshima<br />
And so then clever men built bigger and faster flying machines and<br />
these great man-made birds with jet plumage flew higher than any<br />
real birds and seemed about to fly into the sun and melt their wings<br />
and like Icarus crash to earth<br />
And the Wright brothers were long forgotten in the high-flying<br />
bombers that now began to visit their blessings on various Third<br />
Worlds all the while claiming they were searching for doves of<br />
peace<br />
And they kept flying and flying until they flew right into the 21st<br />
century and then one fine day a Third World struck back and<br />
stormed the great planes and flew them straight into the beating<br />
heart of Skyscraper America where there were no aviaries and no<br />
parliaments of doves and in a blinding flash America became a part<br />
of the scorched earth of the world<br />
And a wind of ashes blows across the land<br />
And for one long moment in eternity<br />
There is chaos and despair<br />
And buried loves and voices<br />
Cries and whispers<br />
Fill the air<br />
Everywhere<br />
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Geschichte des Flugzeugs<br />
Aus dem Amerikanischen von Klaus Berr<br />
Und die gerechten Gebrüder Wright sagten, sie dachten, sie hätten etwas<br />
erfunden, das der Erde Friede bringen könnte<br />
wenn es nicht die falschen Gebrüder in die Hände bekamen)<br />
als ihre wunderbare Flugmaschine abhob bei Kitty Hawk<br />
ins Reich der Vögel doch das Parlament der Vögel fürchtete sich<br />
vor diesem Menschenwerk-Vogel und floh in den Himmel<br />
Und dann hob ab die berühmte Spirit of Saint Louis nach Osten und<br />
flog über den großen Teich mit Lindbergh am Steuer in seinem Lederhelm<br />
und der Brille der hoffte die Friedenstauben zu sehen doch er sah sie nicht<br />
obwohl er über Versailles kreiste<br />
Und dann hob ab der berühmte Yankee Clipper in die entgegengesetzte<br />
Richtung und flog über den prächtigen Pazifik doch die pazifistischen Tauben<br />
hatten Angst vor diesem komischen Wasservogel und versteckten sich den Wolken des<br />
Orients<br />
Und dann hob ab die berühmte Fliegende Festung starrend vor Waffen<br />
und Testosteron um die Welt sicher zu machen für Frieden und Kapitalismus<br />
doch Vögel des Friedens waren nach Hiroshima nirgends zu sehen<br />
Und so bauten dann schlaue Männer größere und schnellere Flugmaschinen und<br />
diese prächtigen Menschenwerk-Vögel mit Düsengefieder flogen höher als jeder<br />
echte Vogel als wollten in die Sonne sie fliegen um ihre Flügel zu schmelzen<br />
und wie Ikarus zur Erde stürzen<br />
Und die Gebrüder Wright waren längst vergessen in den hoch fliegenden<br />
Bombern die jetzt mit ihren Segnungen heimsuchten diverse Dritte<br />
Welten und dabei so taten als sie suchten die Tauben des<br />
Friedens.<br />
Und sie flogen und flogen und flogen direkt ins 21.<br />
Jahrhundert und dann schlug eines Tages eine Dritte Welt zurück und<br />
stürmte die prächtigen Flieger und flog sie direkt ins schlagende<br />
Herz des Wolkenkratzer-Amerika wo es keine Häuser und keine<br />
Parlamente der Tauben gab und in einem grellen Blitz wurde Amerika Teil<br />
der verbrannten Erde der Welt<br />
Und ein Wind bläst Asche über das Land<br />
Und für einen langen Augenblick in der Ewigkeit<br />
Herrscht Chaos und Verzweiflung<br />
Und verschüttete Lieben und Stimmen<br />
Schreien und Flüstern<br />
Erfüllen die Luft<br />
Allüberall
Winner of the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry<br />
(2004), and the Gretchen Warren Prize from<br />
the New England Poetry Club, she has been<br />
awarded residencies at Hedgebrook and the<br />
Vermont Studio Center, as well as funding from<br />
the CT Commission on the Arts and the<br />
Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation.<br />
Her poems and interviews have been published<br />
or are forthcoming in Agni, Poetry magazine,<br />
The Academy of American Poets, The Writer’s<br />
Chronicle, and The Yale Review.<br />
Leslie McGrath<br />
Leslie McGrath is the author three collections<br />
of poetry, most recently Feminists Are Passing<br />
from Our Lives (The Word Works, 2018), and<br />
two chapbooks.<br />
McGrath teaches creative writing at Central<br />
Connecticut State University and is series<br />
editor of The Tenth Gate, a poetry imprint of<br />
The Word Works Press.<br />
lesliemcgrath.com
Rest in Warning<br />
In the dark before morning lay the living in their beds<br />
and lay we the dead in ours. Each earth-lidded terminus<br />
not a chamber of rest, but a listening ear to the past.<br />
The dead are with you, difficult as this is to believe.<br />
We know how quickly you turn from mourning<br />
back to the distractions you stretch from hour to hour.<br />
You buy green mangoes from the street vendor<br />
and pink tulips from the corner bodega. Finally alone<br />
in your apartment, the bolt slid against strangers<br />
you collapse in exhaustion. No news, you vow<br />
no devices all the long weekend. The cat nuzzles<br />
your tulips and pushes the vase off the kitchen table.<br />
You can’t get her off the furniture. Here in the yard<br />
at the edge of the Old Town, there’s no keeping<br />
the living out. You are our news, constant and uninvited<br />
opening the iron gate to stroll among our rows.<br />
You place pebbles atop granite markers, whisper our names<br />
as though we can no longer speak. We speak<br />
in the dark before morning when the hooligans come<br />
tagging hate and toppling headstones. They give us voice.<br />
Each thud’s a certain warning that the past is never gone.<br />
As long as the beaver slaps her tail on the pond’s surface<br />
as long as the rabbit stomps his hind leg, this sound<br />
the only sound we make, is our sound of warning.<br />
Leslie McGrath
His memoir, Travels in Vermeer, was longlisted<br />
for the 2015 National Book Award. He has<br />
published poetry and prose in The Paris<br />
Review, The New Republic, The Kenyon<br />
Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa<br />
Review, The Missouri Review, The Best<br />
American Poetry, and many others.<br />
White has taught in the MFA program at The<br />
University of North Carolina at Wilmington<br />
since 1994.<br />
www.michaelwhitepoet.com<br />
Michael White<br />
Michael White was educated at the University<br />
of Missouri and the University of Utah, where<br />
he received his PhD in English and Creative<br />
Writing in 1993.<br />
His poetry books are The Island, Palma<br />
Cathedral (winner of the Colorado Prize), Reentry<br />
(winner of the Vassar Miller Prize), and<br />
Vermeer in Hell (winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky<br />
Editors’ Prize).
Woman Holding a Balance<br />
If the painting-within-the-painting, hanging on the wall<br />
behind the standing woman—<br />
with its sinners wailing at Christ’s feet on Judgment Day—<br />
if that might be one way<br />
of looking at it, then the woman herself, who half<br />
obscures the painting, is<br />
another. All we know of her is what we see:<br />
how—weightless, effortless<br />
as flame—she stands to face the lightfall over the umber,<br />
oilcloth-covered table.<br />
How each of the nails on her right hand, at the center of<br />
the composition, burns<br />
like phosphor. How—what word would one use?—beneficent?<br />
her aspect is: the source<br />
of light from beneath her skin, such sweetly sculptural eyelids<br />
& cheekbones, blessing of<br />
her waistline’s fullness. Objects here are neither more<br />
nor less than what they seem<br />
to be: the table, for instance, offering itself—<br />
the ornate carvings of<br />
its vase-shaped legs—to the benediction of her touch,<br />
her left-hand fingertips<br />
alight on its very edge. Or the strand of pearls, with its yellow<br />
satin ribbon, furled<br />
all but unnoticed on the oilcloth there—where three<br />
gold coins, & a silver one,
all but unnoticed on the oilcloth there—where three<br />
gold coins, & a silver one,<br />
have casually been placed. The woman focuses<br />
on the equilibrium of<br />
the scales, which contain nothing except sun-glint . . . Now<br />
the shadow-hand—the almost<br />
subliminal shadow caressing the left side of her linen<br />
bonnet—lends support<br />
to her head, as she leans gently back against the hand.<br />
Behind her, on the wall,<br />
the Bosch-like spirits writhe in faceless terror. Christ,<br />
in his golden nimbus, floats<br />
above their heads. But it barely registers—the Judgment<br />
scene, the reckoning—<br />
as relevant, in light of her, her certitude<br />
suspended in the air<br />
from thumb & index finger . . . It won’t come again—<br />
this equipoise between<br />
the figure & the room. Vermeer is thirty-two—<br />
the death-carts creaking through<br />
the black smoke of North Europe. Twenty-four thousand dead<br />
in Amsterdam this year.<br />
In June, the war with England will resume. So it<br />
won’t come again, I’m thinking,<br />
not with such full-bodied ease. But for the moment,<br />
here she stands. Is realized.<br />
Michael White
Romie Lie wurde 1954 in Langnau im Emmental<br />
geboren. Sie wächst in französischer Muttersprache<br />
auf, Deutsch lernt sie in der Schule.<br />
Ausbildung zur Krankenschwester in Biel.<br />
Auslandsaufenthalte in Europa und USA. Seit<br />
1981 freischaffende Schriftstellerin. Romie Lie<br />
leitet seit 1990 Schreibwerkstätten in verschiedenen<br />
Institutionen. Sie lebt in Wohlen bei<br />
Bern.<br />
Sie schreibt Beiträge für das Radio, für Anthologien<br />
und Literaturzeitschriften.<br />
Seit 2002 veröffentlichte sie sieben Lyrikbände.<br />
In 2010 erhält Romie Lie einen Literaturpreis<br />
des Kantons Bern.<br />
Mitarbeit an «Sammlung der Schweizer Poesie<br />
2013, alla chiara fonte editore, Lugano 2013».<br />
Romie Lie<br />
www.romie-lie.ch
au printemps jamais je<br />
n’oublie<br />
au printemps jamais je n’oublie<br />
to chant<br />
das apfelgebet<br />
joie joie joie<br />
even my life is shorter<br />
als eine blüte<br />
joie joie joie car<br />
the lifeforce runs through me<br />
noch nach meinem tod<br />
éternellement<br />
godly<br />
in gott<br />
in the spring I never<br />
forget<br />
in the spring I never forget<br />
the chant<br />
the prayer of the apple<br />
joy joy joy<br />
even my life is shorter<br />
as a blossom<br />
joy joy joy because<br />
the lifeforce runs through me<br />
still after my death<br />
eternal<br />
godly<br />
in god<br />
Romie Lie | 2018
He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006,<br />
and the Denise Levertov Award in 2014. His<br />
new projects include Descent to the Heart,<br />
verse adaptations of selections from the<br />
writings of Saint Isaak of Syria, and a new<br />
poetry collection, Anaphora.<br />
www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/scott-cairns<br />
Scott Cairns<br />
Librettist, essayist, translator, and author of<br />
eight poetry collections, Scott Cairns is<br />
Curators’ Professor of English at University of<br />
Missouri, and Director of the Low-Residency<br />
MFA Program at Seattle Pacific University.<br />
His poems and essays have appeared in Poetry,<br />
Image, Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly,<br />
The New Republic, Plume, etc., and both have<br />
been anthologized in multiple editions of<br />
Best American Spiritual Writing.<br />
He blogs for the Religion Section of The<br />
Huffington Post. His recent books include Slow<br />
Pilgrim: The Collected Poems (2015), Idiot<br />
Psalms (2014), Short Trip to the Edge<br />
(spiritual memoir, 2016), Endless Life (translations<br />
and adaptations of Christian mystics,<br />
2014), and a book- length essay, The End of<br />
Suffering (2009).<br />
Image Credit: Lancia E. Smith<br />
www.lanciaesmith.com
Beyond Knowing<br />
—η ειρήνη του θεού η υπερέχουσα πάντα νουν<br />
The peace I pray to know is that same peace<br />
surpassing knowledge, that deep peace<br />
one finds most often in the sweet descent<br />
that drops the pilgrim to his knees.<br />
Abandoned at the bottom of the well<br />
the dear belovéd son might still<br />
uplift his eyes to witness through his tears<br />
the calm obtaining mid the stars;<br />
In the belly of the beast, the duly<br />
chastened prophet might yet extend<br />
his arms accepting the embrace that serves<br />
to prove a new serenity.<br />
And here, amid the daily tumult, we<br />
might still descend into what calm<br />
lies waiting in the bower of the heart,<br />
a stillness ever beckoning.<br />
Scott Cairns
city of Nantes, France, Academy prize from the<br />
Royal Academy of arts, science and literature<br />
from Belgium. She is a Humanist Laureate in<br />
The International Academy for Humanism,USA.<br />
She won Distinguished Humanist Award from<br />
Inter-national Humanist and Ethical Union,<br />
Free-thought Heroine award from Freedom<br />
From Religion foundation, USA., IBKA award,<br />
Ger-many, and Feminist Press Award, USA . She<br />
got the UNESCO Madanjeet Singh prize for<br />
Promo-tion of the Tolerance and Non-violence<br />
in 2005. She received the Medal of honor of<br />
Lyon.<br />
Taslima Nasreen<br />
Taslima Nasreen, an award-winning writer,<br />
physician, secular humanist and human rights<br />
activist, is known for her powerful writings on<br />
women oppression and unflinching criticism of<br />
religion, despite forced exile and multiple<br />
fatwas calling for her death. In India,<br />
Bangladesh and abroad, Nasreen’s fiction,<br />
nonfiction, poetry and memoir have topped<br />
the best-seller’s list.<br />
Taslima Nasreen was born in Bangladesh. She<br />
started writing when she was 13. Her writings<br />
won the hearts of people across the border and<br />
she landed with the prestigious literary award<br />
Ananda from India in 1992. Taslima won The<br />
Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought from<br />
the European Parliament in 1994.<br />
She received the Kurt Tucholsky Award from<br />
Swedish PEN, the Simone de Beauvoir Award<br />
and Human Rights Award from Government of<br />
France, Le Prix de l' Edit de Nantes from the<br />
Bestowed with honorary doctorates from Gent<br />
University and UCL in Belgium, and American<br />
University of Paris and Paris Diderot University<br />
in France, she has addressed gatherings in major<br />
venues of the world like the European Parliament,<br />
National Assembly of France, Universities<br />
of Sorbonne, Oxford, Harvard, Yale, etc.<br />
She got fellowships as a research scholar at<br />
Harvard and New York Universities. She was a<br />
Woodrow Wilson Fellow in the USA in 2009.<br />
Taslima has written 43 books in Bengali, which<br />
includes poetry, essays, novels and<br />
autobiography series. Her works have been<br />
translated in thirty different languages. Some<br />
of her books are banned in Bangladesh.<br />
Because of her thoughts and ideas she has<br />
been banned, blacklisted and banished from<br />
Bengal, both from Bangladesh and West Bengal<br />
part of India. She has been prevented by the<br />
authorities from returning to her country since<br />
1994, and to West Bengal since 2007.<br />
www.taslimanasrin.com
You Go Girl!<br />
They said—take it easy…<br />
Said—calm down…<br />
Said—stop talkin'…<br />
Said—shut up….<br />
They said—sit down….<br />
Said—bow your head…<br />
Said—keep on cryin', let the tears roll…<br />
What should you do in response?<br />
You should stand up now<br />
Should stand right up<br />
Hold your back straight<br />
Hold your head high…<br />
You should speak<br />
Speak your mind<br />
Speak it loudly<br />
Scream!<br />
You should scream so loud that they must run for cover.<br />
They will say—'You are shameless!'<br />
When you hear that, just laugh…<br />
They will say— 'You have a loose character!'<br />
When you hear that, just laugh louder…<br />
They will say—'You are rotten!'<br />
So just laugh, laugh even louder…<br />
Hearing you laugh, they will shout,<br />
'You are a whore!'
When they say that,<br />
just put your hands on your hips,<br />
stand firm and say,<br />
"Yes, yes, I am a whore!"<br />
They will be shocked.<br />
They will stare in disbelief.<br />
They will wait for you to say more, much more…<br />
The men amongst them will turn red and sweat.<br />
The women amongst them will dream to be a whore like you.<br />
Taslima Nasreen
TEIL 3<br />
TEILNEHMENDE STUDENTEN<br />
CHAPTER 3<br />
PARTICIPATING STUDENTS
Adam Way<br />
Adam Way, born in Elizabethtown, is studying<br />
fine arts at Elizabethtown college. His main<br />
focus is on improving his 3 dimensional skills<br />
along with improving and discovering other<br />
techniques in different mediums.<br />
“The expressions we feel as people can be<br />
difficult to explain. Only through the artistic<br />
language and creative experimentation can we<br />
become something more than what we are<br />
now. This is what I hope to accomplish in my<br />
work.”<br />
Adam Way | April 2018<br />
Human Condition #2<br />
Ceramic and wood<br />
25 x 25 x 25 cm | 2017
Cooper Siegel<br />
Cooper Siegel is a sculptor who works primarily<br />
in bronze and clay, exploring emotion and the<br />
human figure. Cooper is currently a student at<br />
Elizabethtown College, majoring in Engineering<br />
and minoring in Studio Art. Cooper has studied<br />
fine art in Rome and aspires to attend<br />
graduate school for a Masters in Fine Art.<br />
“Mans struggle to attain peace has been with<br />
us since the dawn of time. The history books<br />
are filled with accounts of these struggles.<br />
“The Hand That Holds Us” is an attempt to<br />
document the inner struggle to attain our own<br />
individual peace. It is the hope of the artist<br />
that if the viewer can obtain inner peace for<br />
even just a moment then we can collectively<br />
move towards an external peace.”<br />
Cooper Siegel<br />
The Hand That Holds Us<br />
Bronze and marble<br />
38 x 23 x 38 cm | 2017
Georgia Grimm<br />
Georgia Grimm is an Elizabethtown College<br />
student majoring in Philosophy with minors in<br />
Science, International Studies and Visual Art.<br />
She aims to address the issue of climate<br />
change through writing and art with a<br />
philosophical critique of society and an<br />
understanding of scientific concepts. Aside<br />
from art, she enjoys music, caring for her<br />
animals, cooking, and spending time outside.<br />
“Art has always been an important part of<br />
who I am, growing and changing with me as I<br />
have done the same. I particularly enjoy<br />
painting, mixed media, collages, and drawing,<br />
although I like to consider fashion another<br />
form of art that allows me to be expressive<br />
each day. Color and texture both play an<br />
important role in my artistic process, helping<br />
me to create something reflective of what I<br />
am feeling internally. Nature in all its forms is<br />
my main inspiration, captivating me with its<br />
complexity.<br />
collected many small objects with the<br />
intention of using them in a future piece of<br />
art. This work is assembled out of three<br />
different projects: the girl, the mobile, and<br />
the base.<br />
In the same way that this piece was created<br />
out of both found and original objects, I<br />
believe humanity must come together with old<br />
and new ideas to create an ecocentric ethic<br />
for the purpose of healing both society and<br />
the environment. The girl in this piece stands<br />
upon the ground, surrounded by representations<br />
of life and her passionate and spiritual<br />
adoration of the Earth.”<br />
Georgia Grimm | April 2018<br />
Veneration of the Earth<br />
Mixed media<br />
81 x 23 x 23 cm | 2018<br />
The human form in particular is a reoccurring<br />
subject in my works, particularly in my<br />
drawings. Furthermore, my passion for various<br />
philosophical concepts regarding society, the<br />
environment, and metaphysics is another<br />
major theme within my designs, one that I aim<br />
to use to share my own philosophy in addition<br />
to writing.<br />
On “Veneration of the Earth”: This piece is a<br />
reflection of my love of nature and my<br />
concerns about society and the current<br />
environmental crisis. Over the years, I have