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Explore poems read by the two authors in conversation with each other, then follow your own fish to unlock your own creativity, and share it with us.
Hello. This is Sue Boudreau here with my friend and neighbor, Deborah Backel Schmidt, your hosts for Follow A Fish, the poetry conversation and inspiration podcast. I'm so enjoying the process of putting together this podcast, particularly chatting with a friend at a much deeper level than the usual how's the family. That deepening of friendships is what we hope to achieve, either as you share an episode with a friend or even better, coming to the next of our live open mic series. The next is on Sunday, June 21, 03:30, at The Good Table here in El Sobrante, California.
Sue:For more information, check out our website at curiositycatspodcasts.com. Today, we are continuing our theme of art inspired poems or ekphrastic poetry. It's a whole different way to enjoy an afternoon at an art gallery. Instead of whizzing around to get my money's worth, I take a notebook and find a painting to just sit with, to go into the picture and look around. What's revealed?
Sue:What might be around the next corner or around the next bend of a trail, pulling my eye in? I think of the Narnia book, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, where Edmund gets up onto the frame of a painting and falls into the ocean to be rescued by the Dawn Treader schooner. I am drawn to paintings, photographs, and sculptures that pull me in, that have a little mystery. Is it this or that? Or a comment on the overlap of the two?
Sue:That's the essence of the very short poem I wrote visiting a great sculpture on a jetty in Reykjavik in Iceland. Deborah is also sharing a poem inspired by art of boats and the sea. So here's art. The inside arches holding up churches are like the upside down ribs of boats sailing souls against the sky.
Deborah:Writing such a concise poem is truly an art, and I think, Sue, you have created a complete miniature world here with your two brief parallel couplets. This is a very short poem, yet it opens nearly to infinity. I love the kinship between the title word arc and the word at the end of your first line arches, and also the correspondence between inside and upside. A good ekphrastic poem does not rely on the visual to be complete, and this one does not. But I still wish that you, our listeners, can see the photos you took of this sculpture in Iceland, and you will be able to see it in the show notes, Against a very dramatic watery shoreline and a blue sky swept with gilded clouds, we see silhouetted what could be the arched keel and ribs of a Viking longship.
Deborah:I also wish our listeners could see this poem on paper, and you will. I encourage you to check it out in the show notes. It actually makes a boat shape on the page. If this was intentional, it is what we call concrete poetry. Did you make that happen on purpose, Sue?
Deborah:No. No? Wow, it's amazing.
Sue:But now I think about it, it does kind of look like the upside down hull of a boat.
Deborah:What I saw was a little sailboat. So the keel is on the bottom resting on the waves, then you see the sail, the first couplet is the sail, and then the tidal arc looks like the pennant flying from the mast up at the top. That's what it looks like to me. You remember the moment when the central comparison of the poem, the one between the arches of the church and the ribs of boats, occurred to you?
Sue:Reykjavik also has this gorgeous church, a cathedral in the middle of it. And there was something about the overlap of this sculpture between the arches of a boat, but also the skeleton of a whale. I And don't know, mean it was just arches all the way down. And it was also something about of a man's hands. You know, the kind of way that a man's hands cradle a boat or a cup or something like that.
Sue:I think it was just those two arches that were very prevalent. That sculpture encapsulates that. Both kinds of arches being almost indistinguishable.
Deborah:Yeah. I can see that. The sculpture itself has the sweep of the keel of an upright boat, but then these ribs are actually inverted Mhmm. Coming down over the keel, which is so interesting and kind of mind bending. And I can see how that would pull you into the church comparison.
Deborah:Your last line, sailing souls against the sky, has such sweep to it and a beautiful alliteration too with all the s's. It opens us up to the voyage of souls in the way that churches can be an arc for seekers. Can you speak about how this line came to you and what it evokes for you? The line, I think, also kind of swam up to me,
Sue:and I do love the sound of it. And sailing souls against the sky seemed like what that boat was doing in that moment with this, with the sky being such a strong part of the photograph that I took. Mean yes the church piece of it but I like churches. I don't like church services very much. And we've talked about that before I think.
Sue:And I like the idea of grace, of something bigger than ourselves, but I don't like it to be constrained by a particular religious tradition. And I guess there was something about the spaciousness of the setting that made me feel that this was a moment of grace. Oh. That it set my soul free to sail somewhere up in the sky.
Deborah:Oh, that's so beautiful. And I just have to ask, the photograph itself is so dramatic and so beautifully shot. And I'm not a photographer, but I understand it's difficult to take
Sue:nighttime photography or twilight photography yet you've got all this light that's present. How did you do that? I took quite a few pictures of it and I walked around and took pictures from different angles and scoped out different angles both up and down, but also around it. And that's something that I've learned to do as a photographer because quite often something interesting will be shown to you if you do more than just take the immediate lazy photo at eye level. Right.
Sue:The second you come across something. Oh wow. So I'm looking at where is the sky going? Where is the boat going? I'm looking for a way to pull the viewer into the picture which is kind of what we talked about in Johanna's story of the alleyway in Yeah.
Sue:But that pulling people into the picture. So I'm aware of that when I'm taking pictures and it makes me look at the world in a different way and it overlaps well with writing poems.
Deborah:Mhmm. Yeah. And I imagine the light was shifting as you took those photos, you probably were kind of struck when you looked at the contact sheet, wow, this one is really an amazing It
Sue:was like, yes, money shot.
Deborah:You know,
Sue:like every now and again a picture stands out to Yeah. And this one is published in a book that I self published called Lacework Light and Dark.
Deborah:Ah, good to know.
Sue:And this one is one of the first ones at the very beginning of the book with the photograph right there on the page.
Deborah:Oh cool, and I hope you'll put the link to your book I'll on that put the link in
Sue:the, yeah, the show notes.
Deborah:Alright, shall I reread it? Sure. The inside arches holding up churches are like the upside down ribs of boats sailing souls against the sky. So here's an ekphrastic one of mine. It's called Red Boat Remembers, and it's to a painting by Lori Lark.
Deborah:Suspended in dry dock, I am surrounded by reminders of what wood comes to in the end. The logs of the old pier beneath me slowly seed their bodies to the sea, to the earth they came from. I too feel the inroads of storm and sunlight, barnacles, tiny unseen creatures, tireless iterations of saltwater. How I dream of the days when my sails bellied in the breeze, my glossy prow cleaved the bright waves, and gulls with their falling cries wheeled above. This I loved.
Deborah:This I was born for. And who can say if it will come again? Yet I am still here with the water, wind, and sun that once made me dance for joy. They are still dancing, and I am becoming one with the dance.
Sue:Well, thank you, Deborah. That was lovely. I had several lines that I particularly enjoyed. I liked, I'm surrounded by reminders of what wood comes to in the end and the logs of the old pier slowly seeding their bodies to the sea. I liked the, I too feel the inroads of storm and sunlight and the allegory of decay of a boat to the passage of time on yourself.
Sue:Another couple of a couplet I like, how I dream of the days when my sails bellied in the breeze. And I love that shifting perspective back to inhabiting the boat as a living and sentient being. And you say, this I loved, this I was born for, and that makes me wonder, my friend, what is it that you have loved and what is it that you feel you were born for?
Deborah:That's a wonderful question. There have been so many things in my life, but I have to say that when I stopped playing the flute, which had been something that I loved, and I first became really active as a poet, and I first did a poetry reading of my own, that felt like, wow, this is coming home. This is what I was meant to be doing. Because I'd always struggled with tremendous performance anxiety with the flute. And I loved playing, but it was a struggle every time.
Deborah:But with reading and speaking, I just have more faith in myself, I think. That's so interesting to Yeah, it's like nobody can take this voice away from me, this is my voice. I can speak, I can always speak even if I'm nervous.
Sue:I love that, I love that. And I guess the other piece I also particularly love is that it came to you quite late in life, right? Yeah. Relatively late. Can you approximately how old were you when you started seriously writing poetry?
Deborah:I had written poetry all my life. I started as a child and I never really stopped, but it was hard to get to it in a very systematic way during the early active years as a parent. I mean, could count those poems and, you know, two or three sets of hands,
Sue:no more. And actually, you wrote a poem about that.
Deborah:I did. And that was
Sue:one of our first episodes, It wasn't was called Counting
Deborah:That's right, yep. Right. Exactly. So it wasn't that I ever gave it up, but I didn't really claim it until I was about 60. Alright.
Sue:Yeah. Nice. And you land on a they are still dancing and I am becoming one with the dance. And this gives the hope restoration and the joy in the here and now even so. Does this reflect your inner state too?
Sue:Yeah, it does.
Deborah:And I think it's a statement really about my belief in the afterlife, that we may come unglued as discrete assemblages of atoms, you know. Our parts are going to turn into stardust and a lot of other things. But that becoming one with something larger than yourself, I think it's something we can look forward to at the end of life.
Sue:So we actually have a resonance between our two poems for that and also the fact that we're both drawn to boats in the sea. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. I love how this poem shimmies and shines, shifting points of view from the boat to the author and back again, making allegorical references that hint at the state of the observer of this beautiful art.
Sue:What You See Is Who You Are was Truffle Johanna's poem about Locke in yesterday's episode, and I wonder what kinds of paintings you are most drawn to write about, Deborah.
Deborah:Well, with this particular one, although I do love the painting, it was really the title that captured me. Oh interesting. It's beautifully alliterative with the R's Red Boat Remembers. And I think I was drawn into the story of the boat, and what the boat was experiencing. I was very touched by the artist entering the world of the boat, which is I think unusual in a landscape artist.
Sue:Yeah, no it's quite an interesting painting. It's not immediately clear to me when I was looking at it what it was showing. It took me a little while. So I hope again our readers will take the time to go to the show notes and find the picture. So when we're talking about creative process, Johanna has one that's, that is quite distinct from the way that I work but how about the way that you work with this creative process to from the conception to the finished poem.
Sue:With ekphrastic poetry,
Deborah:I do like to write in the presence of the object when it first enters my life because I like that immediate response. I mean, will sit in front of a painting or walk around a sculpture for quite a while before I begin to write, but I do like to begin to at least write some sketchy lines right there in the gallery. But then I do take pictures and bring it home with me and sit. And sometimes I do research too before it all comes together.
Sue:Oh nice, I was wondering about that actually. I think maybe we should go to a museum together Yeah, sometime we should, definitely. And are you a sailor? Do you have a close attachment to boats in the sea?
Deborah:You know I went through this incredibly long passionate engagement with everything about the sea. When I was 10, 11, 12 years old I read every book I could get my hands on that had anything to do with sea voyages. I had a pond in my backyard that I sailed a little model boat on. I sailed in the summertime with my dad on the bay. He had a small boat.
Deborah:Oh, interesting. Blue Jay, which is, I forget how many feet long, it's not that big. It's like a two or three person boat. And sailing on the
Sue:bay is not for sissies.
Deborah:Yeah, no, he was quite confident, but I do remember that my stepmother would not go out with us. Right, right. Yeah, she went out once and got absolutely terrified and never did it again. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I did go through this intense engagement with it but it's not something that's really a part of my life anymore.
Deborah:In fact, I'm kind of a water sissy, I must say. Mhmm.
Sue:Well, thank you. I would love to reread your poem. Red Boat Remembers, a painting by Lori Larks. Suspended in dry dock, I am surrounded by reminders of what wood comes to in the end. The logs of the old pier beneath me slowly seed their bodies to the sea, to the earth they came from.
Sue:I too feel the inroads of storm and sunlight, barnacles and tiny unseen creatures, tireless iterations of saltwater. How I dream of the days when my sails bellied in the breeze, my glossy prow cleaved the bright waves, and gulls with their falling cries wheeled above. This I loved. This I was born for, and who can say if it will come again? Yet I am still here with the water, wind, and sun that once made me dance for joy.
Sue:They are still dancing, and I am becoming one with the dance. Today, we have an extra treat. We have a poem which was read out at our last poetry open mic by Beau Sanchez, and she has now sent us a copy of it, story time. Tell me the tale of the place in your heart of which you hold so dear. What does it smell like?
Sue:What does it feel like? Can I hear a stampede coming near? The ocean, it crashes. The cliffs, they too sink. Many a times familiar, but many a times unique.
Sue:I come from a world with delights all around. In the wildest of places, mysteries can be found. For there is a place in your heart yearning to be free, beating and pounding on your drum cavity. Set free your inner world. Set free.
Sue:Set free your inner world. Let be. Thank you, Beau. So my prompt today is, what is a piece of art that really stays with you? Find it again, or go to a gallery and sit in front of a piece that catches your eye.
Sue:Sit with it for a while and write a description as if you're standing right in the middle of it, looking around, seeing, listening, smelling the air. What are you wondering about? What are you remembering? I'm going to commit to writing to this prompt too, and I hope you'll join me. Submit your writing and a photo of the artwork you reacted to, to curiositycatpodcasts@gmail.com.
Sue:We will read out the first two or three at our next open mic on Sunday afternoon, June twenty first at The Good Table Cafe. Come at three to get your tea or coffee for the 03:30 start. And of course, if you want, you could read the poem that you wrote as a response to this prompt. As ever, we'd love to hear from you. See our show notes for more details of the four ekphrastic poems and for the written versions of our poems with artwork that inspired each of them.
Sue:Don't forget to share, subscribe, and tell your friends about our podcast, especially if you actually liked it. Music for season two is Emile Pessard's Andalus, played by Deborah, Backel Schmidt on flute, accompanied by Brian Baker on piano. Production and editing are done by me, Sue Boudreaux, in El Brante, California. Thanks so much for listening.