Last spring, when a poet friend, Sally Nacker, told me about the online publication, ONE ART: A Journal of Poetry, brainchild of poet Mark Danowsky, I was reading the biography of Elizabeth Bishop by Thomas Travisano. (I posted a bit about this biography, Love Unknown, in April.) Bishop’s splendid poem, “One Art”, has been on my refrigerator, where I see it several times every day, for a long time now.
(Last week, The New York Times honored it with a close-up and succinct analysis: “19 Lines That Turn Anguish Into Art” by Dwight Garner and Parul Sehgal.)
In May, I made my first submission to ONE ART, and was delighted when I learned that Mark had accepted my poem, “I Wanted to Be a Painter”, for publication on June 22, 2021–today! I have always yearned for the visual arts, doing my best with quilting and photography, but (though dabbling) never gaining much skill with the brush myself. (Indeed, even quotidian painting tasks can cause crises of confidence for a time, as my partially painted basement stairs project, started last June, stands witness at the moment!) I wrote this poem last fall, coincidentally (or not) when Tim and I were staying in the Art Loft apartment in Lanesboro, Minnesota, (above the local Arts Guild), the same apartment where I first stayed with my friend, Ann Lacy in 2015, and where I took my cover photograph for my first collection of poems, and then, the next foggy morning, wrote the final poem (and title poem). (Below is a photograph I look from the Art Loft window that July.)
And ONE ART itself celebrates the interconnectedness of all the arts (perhaps their common root) on its home page with a superb banner photograph of an Esso station. Not only is the imaging compelling in and of itself, it recalls, with a clean twist, one of the poems of Elizabeth Bishop that I love most, “Filling Station,” from the “Elsewhere” section of her 1965 collection, Questions of Travel. The interconnectedness of the arts (and their entanglement in all of life) is much on my mind this week as I finished reading Rebecca West’s marvelous 1965 novel (autobiographical fiction of her childhood) titled The Fountain Overflows, and it has prompted me to send off for a copy of her 1928 collection of essays on art The Strange Necessity.
As I look back over my own photographs, I find few of filling stations, but I did take this one up on the North Shore when there on a trip with my friend, Jan, some years back, outside a restaurant (a different kind of filling station).
Wishing you an art-filled day! LESLIE
