contact LINDA ARMSTRONG
PS : to sponsor poetry
visit Poetry Sponsors
 |
LINDA ARMSTRONG
Art Among Friends
Though I did not know it at the time, I had a very unusual and privileged youth.
The first child of California scene painter Charles F. Keck, I rode in the back seat
as he and a friend he had met at Choinnard Art Institute raced to remote farms to
catch the sweet light of late afternoon on fields of glowing alfalfa. I sat, quiet, in the
corner of our tiny apartment, as he, my mother, and their friends from Alaska talked
about art, and travel, and plans for the future. Dressed in my best outfit, I accompanied
him to open house events at the Hollywood art school where he taught part time,
and to Watercolor Society exhibitions in Laguna. People were always glad to see
my father. In my young mind, art became associated with friendship.
As a child, I always wrote poems for people I liked or admired. Excruciatingly shy,
I usually delivered these creations anonymously, and watched surreptitiously for
a reaction. Needless to say, this approach won neither friends nor admirers. Much
later in life, after the birth of my own child, I began to write poetry seriously, and
found an ally, Anna Mae Terrell, at the elementary school where I was teaching.
She convinced me to go up to Barnaby Conrad's Santa Barbara Writer's Conference
with her. For that special early summer week, the Miramar, a blue-roofed seaside
hotel with the names of presidents in its register, was crawling with a few famous
writers and hundreds of fellow dreamers. It was there that I met Perie Longo. She
was teaching the poetry workshop there, and she became a friend, as well as my
teacher. She nudged me away from overly abstract themes toward more grounded,
detailed, and personal work.
Perie and I have taken separate roads lately. I have moved to Colorado and
grown roots, while she has become a world traveler. Sometimes we send
each other poems. When I was invited to submit a poem with a friend, I
immediately asked Perie. Happy to comply, she sent a batch including
“Toward Solace.” I cannot improve on what she said about it,
“As you can tell from the date, I wrote it the day after 9/11. Why it struck
me last night is that I have just come back from Kuwait. I knew little
about the Middle-East at the time of 9/11 and now I've been there! On the
way home we flew over Baghdad. Plumes of black smoke were rising from
the interminable sea of desert, buildings representing brown bumps 34,000
ft. below. I cried to think people were dying down there, and because of 9/11.
When I came across this poem, it gave me an odd solace, that there is little
you can depend on sometimes except the stars, when death comes. Phil
(Perie's husband) had just died 2 months before, so I was weaving all kinds
of loss into the poem. I have some friends and a niece in NY, so they were
sending me messages on email what it was like, the smoldering and running
from fear toward an unclear safety. Only love, after all, helps us in such
moments, and we need all we can get. Love is what gives us courage to
survive until we don't. Then we can be with the stars.”
My poem, Cezanne, inspired by Perie's, begins with a reference to my trip
on a Greyhound bus from my Colorado home to Los Angeles for my father's
funeral. There was, at the time, an enormous forest fire raging in the mountains
above Cajon Pass, and the valley was filled with smoke, but, as mentioned in
the poem, off to the right there was a beautiful green valley, just like those my
father had painted when I was a little girl.
That sad journey was several years ago, and Dad's work is now becoming
more valuable. On one of my trips out to visit my mother, she gave me a
picture that none of the dealers wanted. It is a watercolor of a blue California
peak with bare-branched sycamores in the foreground, but it is also a re-vision
of a famous painting by Cezanne.
I remember a large canvas-bound volume containing Cezanne reproductions
by my dad's workbench and, like the green valley, I feel that the painting is a
message for me. Once, talking about landscape, my dad said that the branches
of a river coming out of the mountains and the branches of a tree are the same.
Looking at the rock-like solidity of Cezanne's compositions, I cannot but think
that the peace of art arises from its integrity, in the sense of integration of
seemingly unlike elements. Cezanne, my father, my dear friend Perie, and I are
very different, and yet we are rivers out of the same mountain, and spaces
among the branches of the same tree.
Copyright 2006, all rights retained by the poet |
 |
|
|
|
