Category: Poetry

Guest Blog by Regina Ress: Spiraling into the Center and Outward Bound

JoAnne Tucker / / Guest Posts, Poetry

JoAnne’s Introduction:

When I opened my email a few days ago, I was thrilled to see a message from my good friend Regina Ress, sharing a poem she wrote back in 2013 after we led a workshop for women inmates at the Santa Fe County Adult Correctional Facility. It resonated with me for two reasons. First, the work I have done in prisons and jails since 2002 has been very meaningful, and sometimes Regina and I worked together in those settings. Secondly, I recently built a labyrinth on my property, and walking it is something I do daily as well as encouraging guests to enjoy it.  Regina’s poem was written in a follow-up workshop with the women on writing about our experience together walking a labyrinth (which I helped create) in the barbed wire encircled yard of that county jail.

Thank you, Regina!

About Regina:

Regina Ress, award-winning storyteller, actor, writer and educator, has performed and taught for over fifty years from Broadway to Brazil in a wide variety of settings from grade schools to senior centers, from homeless shelters and prisons to Lincoln Center and the White House.  To learn more about Regina visit her at:  www.reginaress.com/about.html

Spiraling into the Center and Outward Bound:

A Reflection on Walking the Labyrinth with the Women

Santa Fe County Corrections Department Adult Correctional Facility

October 3, 2013

                  by Regina Ress

Being in the Center.

Being is the Center.

Walking slowly

Entering, Centering.

 

The Path winds and doubles back

In and out into the Wider Path

Which winds and definitely doubles

Back upon itself; upon myself.

 

I encounter myself

In all the others

On the Path.

 

I love these women who, willing to walk,

Stay with me, with each other, with themselves

In the Center of this labyrinth.

 

Knowing what?

That we share the space

That we share the grace

Of the Center.

 

What is the way in?

That first step supported by the breath,

Moved forward on the breath;

Forward, spiraling gently in,

And gently out again.

 

The Center awaits us all.

As does the sun glistening on barbed wire.

An oddly beautiful spiral of circles,

Of spiraling circles,

Endless circles reaching out

To the blue sky beyond.

 

An odd gift, this cage.

A glimpse of moving wire

Meant to keep us in

But when looked at from

A different perspective,

It is a Trail, a Path

Of outward bound.

Photo by Judy Naumburg of the barbed wire in the Santa Fe County Corrections Department Adult Correctional Facility.
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Dance and Poetry: An Elegy for Helen Tamiris

JoAnne Tucker / / Dance History, Perry-Mansfield, Personal Life, Poetry, Uncategorized

Recently I signed up for an Introduction to Poetry class.  Several things motivated me.  We had begun a writer’s group where I live, and I thought I would like to share poems. I have loved poetry since I was a teenager, and I have choreographed many pieces to poems.

In our very first class the teacher introduced us to the form of elegy and used Walt Whitman’s O Captain! My Captain! as an example. After going over the format and purpose of the elegy, he asked us to write one. As I reread O Captain! My Captain! I began reflecting on the experience of being in Helen Tamiris’s Dance for Walt Whitman at Perry-Mansfield during the summer of 1958.   That was a defining experience in helping me realize that I wanted a career in dance, and it had provided an excellent example of how poetry can inspire a piece of choreography.

When I look back over my career as a choreographer, I realize how often I turned to poetry as the stimulus for movement.  That idea had been introduced to me by Helen Tamiris, so it was no surprise that I decided to do my elegy for her and to use the structure and rhyming pattern of O Captain! My Captain! as my model.

Elegy for Helen Tamiris

By JoAnne Tucker

A frayed program, carefully saved, recalls long ago days

There is still time to remember and sing your praise

You stood, arms outstretched, framed by aspen gently swaying

Directions given, challenges accepted, our energy outpouring,

            Alas, a google search

            Your name barely marked

            Too many years have passed

            Still a desire remains in my heart.

Those of us, hold tightly onto each other,

Make a chain, rock endlessly, calling the primal mother

We cannot forget, your teaching remains within us living

We have gone forth, as a curious child goes exploring.

            Tamiris, O Tamiris

            Fifty years since you departed

            Your legacy begins to fade

            Memories linger in my heart.

A legacy of movement and poetry continues still,

New writers and dancers passionate with strong will.

So this old crone will continue to sing your praise

Encourage, mentor and celebrate all my days

            To dance to the spoken verse

            To follow your pioneer art

            Words carefully written

            Danced from the heart

Helen Tamiris at Perry-Mansfield, July 1958. Photo taken by JoAnne Tucker.

The first set of poems I choreographed was for a school program in Pittsburgh shortly after leaving Juilliard. The dancers were six high school students, and the program toured several elementary schools and won a Carnegie Award.  Later I would continue to turn to poetry with the Avodah Dance Ensemble, and during my thirty years as Artist Director of that company, I  created dances to a variety of different poems. The ones that stand out the most in my memory are:

  • I Never Saw Another Butterfly, using poems written by children in the Terezin Concentration Camp
  • Shema, incorporating poetry of Italian Holocaust survivor Primo Levi
  • Let My People Go, based on James Weldon Johnson’s poem of the same title
  • In the Garden, drawn from several poems in the collection Wine, Women and Death: Medieval Hebrew Poems on the Good Life, translated by Raymond Scheindlin
  • Selichot Suite, a section of which uses Denise Levertov’s poem The Thread

I end by welcoming dancers and choreographers to share what poems they have enjoyed dancing to or creating movement for.  If you haven’t used poetry and movement together, I strongly encourage you to try it!

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My Kitchen Goddess Painting – An Ekphrastic Challenge

JoAnne Tucker / / Art, Personal Life, Poetry

Nine months ago, I had never heard of the word “Ekphrastic.” In an Introduction to Poetry class that I took last fall, I learned that the word means “description” in Greek.  According to The Poetry Foundation:

An ekphrastic poem is a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art. Through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the “action” of a painting or sculpture, the poet may amplify and expand its meaning. A notable example is Ode on a Grecian Urn, in which the poet John Keats speculates on the identity of the lovers who appear to dance and play music, simultaneously frozen in time and in perpetual motion.  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/ekphrasis

We were assigned to write an ekphrastic poem, and I had fun writing mine inspired by Georgia O’Keefe’s Abstract White Rose, 1927. Here’s a link where you can see the painting: https://www.georgiaokeeffe.net/abstraction-white-rose.jsp 

A Single White Rose

Petals curling and blending

Into each other.  Unclear

Where one begins

 And the other ends.

Grays become white

And white becomes grays

With a touch of yellow

Or maybe lavender or blue.

Circling into the center

And then back out again.

Like breathing in and

Catching one’s breath

And breathing out again.

Curving, circling, catching,

Breathing, weeping, centering,

A single white rose

Awakens a sadness

Deep within.

A second poetry course followed, led by Pam Wax, and later I showed her this poem and appreciated her feedback, which helped me to edit the poem to the version I just shared.  Pam also talked about ekphrastic poetry and told us about Rattle, an online website with the mission of promoting the practice of poetry.  Each month Rattle has an Ekphrastic Challenge where they share a piece of artwork and invite poets to submit poems inspired by the visual image. The artist whose artwork is featured gets to select a favorite poem, as does the editor, Timothy Green. I was fascinated and enjoyed exploring the website, seeing different artwork and the winning responses.  As I continued exploring, I came across a request for artists to submit artwork for the Ekphrastic Challenge.  Twelve pieces would be selected for the coming year.

Soon I was browsing through digital images of my artwork and came up with five pieces I thought might inspire poems.  What a delight to get an email a few weeks later that The Kitchen Goddess had been selected for the February challenge.

In mid-March I received an email from Tim with an attachment that had 25 poems for me to select from.  While 455 poems had been submitted, Tim had chosen just 25 for me to read.  I read and reread the twenty-five submissions, and clearly one kept standing out to me. Before making my final decision, I went back and read them all again to see if I would change my mind.  Here is what I wrote about my experience and the poem I selected, The Rebirth of Venus by Luisa Giulianetti:

I was delighted and surprised at the range of emotions and different journeys that were expressed in the poems which I reviewed. The pastel painting was part of a show calling for work on the theme of the kitchen goddess. I approached the painting from a whimsical point of view placing a dancer in a frying pan. The poem that I have selected captures the playfulness of the painting. It is called The Rebirth of Venus and the opening lines refer back to the painting Birth of Venus by Botticelli. I have fond memories of seeing that painting when I visited the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. I laughed with delight with the phrase ‘found new digs.’ While the Botticelli painting was not on my mind when I created my kitchen goddess, the reference shows how two paintings inspired the poem, and I love that. In the poem, the poet has the dancing goddess opening a scallop and of course the original Venus is standing in a scallop shell. In addition, the poet also captured so well the feeling of the dancer in the kitchen ‘reigning supreme.’

It was first published as the poem of the day on March 23, 20023.  Here’s the link to see Giulietti’s poem: https://www.rattle.com/the-rebirth-of-venus-by-luisa-giulianetti/

Mostly Dance’s editor, Kezia Gleckman Hayman, was with me when I saw the painting Birth of Venus.  We had spent time in Italy setting some of Avodah Dance Ensemble’s repertory on local dancers for a Jewish Film Festival. When our work was done we had a few fun-filled days sightseeing in Florence.  Kezia reminded me that we were so fascinated with the painting that we went back to view it a second time.  Here’s a link to see the Birth of Venus: https://www.uffizi.it/en/artworks/birth-of-venus

I was curious which poem the editor would choose, and I had to wait almost a week until it was published also as a poem of the day on March 30, 2023. He chose Joy by Melissa Madenski.

Comment from the editor, Timothy Green: “The best ekphrastic poems expand on their source image, pushing the experience in a new direction. Joy does that by finding all-too real grounding for the rich symbolism of JoAnne Tucker’s painting. Rather than describe the woman dancing in the frying pan, the poem describes the emotion she represents—and through the otherwise unrelated metaphor of the train. As a result, the poem enriches the painting while the painting enriches the poem, as if the two pieces of art were bound in their own dance together, exploring the complex transition from the darkness of grief back to the brightness of joy.”

Here is the link for Joy by Melissa Madenski: https://www.rattle.com/joy-by-melissa-madenski/

I was fascinated by his selection and that he focused on the emotion my Kitchen Goddess represented.

I encourage Mostly Dance readers to follow the link to the poems and not only to read them but to hear the poet read them.  It adds another dimension.  I am most grateful to Timothy Green for selecting The Kitchen Goddess for the February Ekphrastic Challenge, as it was fun, and an excellent learning experience.  I look forward to following the Ekphrastic Challenges each month and reading the selected poems.  I might even get brave enough to write a poem and submit it.

You can also go to the Ekphrastic Challenge page, scroll down and there is a link to both poems. https://www.rattle.com/ekphrastic/

Here’s the pastel painting The Kitchen Goddess painted around 2008 and accepted into a show in Denver

The Kitchen Goddess, pastel painting by JoAnne Tucker around 2008.

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A Sijo Poem for the Winter Solstice

JoAnne Tucker / / movement rituals, Personal Life, Poetry

I was introduced to the Korean sijo in a recent poetry class I took.   The teacher mentioned it along with haiku and invited us to explore one of the forms.  Since I spent some time last year writing haiku and creating watercolors to accompany text, I was intrigued to delve into this new form I was hearing about for the first time.

What is sijo?  The Poetry Foundation provides a place to start:

A Korean verse form related to haiku and tanka and comprised of three lines of 14-16 syllables each, for a total of 44-46 syllables. Each line contains a pause near the middle, similar to a caesura, though the break need not be metrical. The first half of the line contains six to nine syllables; the second half should contain no fewer than five.

While the form is not as well-known as haiku, a little more research found some treasured classics translated into the English.  This one by Yun Seon Do (1587 – 1671) particularly caught my attention.

You ask how many friends I have? Water and stone, bamboo and pine,
The moon rising over the eastern hill is a joyful comrade.
Besides these five companions, what other pleasure should I ask?

There are regular writing contests for haiku and groups that meet in both the United States and Japan writing and sharing haiku.  There is not as much activity happening with sijo although I did discover that the Sejong Cultural Society has a writing competition.  The Sejong Cultural Society’s purpose is to “advance awareness and understanding of Korea’s cultural heritage among people in the United States by reaching out to the younger generation through contemporary creative and fine arts.”

In the past few weeks I have written several sijo.  I liked the fact that sijo were often shared as songs, sometimes with drum accompaniment.  Soon I was thinking of simple choreography that might fit one of the poems I had written.  Why not explore writing sijo and creating dance movements to accompany the words?  I had fun doing just that.

This sijo is for the winter solstice.

 December darkness descends: fewer hours of sunlight.

Energy emerges from friendships — reach out to each other —

Recognize your inner light: open your heart with joyful love!

And here is a link where you can see the movement.  I invite you to do the simple movement with me.  https://vimeo.com/895910726

When I shared my sijo and movement with the poetry class, one of the members asked if she might share it with her church group.  I was very touched by the request, and that was part of my motivation for figuring out how to video it to share with others.

When I was working with haiku, I created over thirty haiku with watercolor illustration and selected some to share online in this blog.  https://mostlydance.com/2023/03/24/an-experiment-writing-haiku-with-accompanying-watercolor/   While I haven’t decided yet whether to create a series of sijo with accompanying movement, I am intrigued by the idea.

In Costa Rica, being so close to the equator, we only experience a small change in the balance of light and dark each day.  This particular year I am feeling the darkness more.  Let’s light candles and call forth our inner light to remind ourselves that each day after the winter solstice there will be a bit more light. 

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