The Covid 19 pandemic is isolating Alaskan writers. We can no longer attend workshops or public readings. The coffee bars where we met with other writers are closed. To bridge these physical gaps, 49 Writers is providing this on-line forum for Alaskans writing the distance. Today’s poem and photograph were created by poet and ceramic artist Monica Devine.
THE CURE She came out of the fire shock-eyed and half-baked The gaze I created stared back at me as if to say, what? what now? What do we do now? Engobes and washes and patina, black like the desert varnish on the surface of a rock. It’s simple, I tell her we take form, we weather, and tarnish in place. It is a whole-body experience the build-up and forming of malleable clay, and then there’s the subtraction the canceling of all that’s extraneous, unnecessary. We build and we coil and we bend, and then witness our cracking in the plainest of ways, all of it falls apart, fades away. In the long run potters and poets know their place baking bread in a micaceous clay pot secret mark-making in the lines of a poem. In the short run the cure for isolation, loneliness is this: kiln-love, patience, and a soft #2.
Monica Devine’s recent book Water Mask, is a collection of Alaskan stories about motherhood, place, memory, art and perception in the natural world. monicadevine.com