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