Tuesday, April 15, 2008


It's dogwood winter here...and it will be blackberry winter later in the spring. This reminder of winter, while the evidence of spring is all around, is a bit jarring.

Spring will soon turn into summer. Like winter, summer will seem that it will never end. Hot, steamy, stormy, dry, wet, muggy, bright Season, endless and long. Yet, ripeness will happen, season will begin again to change. And then, after the brief sunset of fall, winter will return and never seem to end--again.

Someone recently mentioned the poet Galway Kinnell to me. I just read this of his today:


Blackberry Eating

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry -- eating in late September.

Galway Kinnell

2 comments:

  1. Tommye:

    I took a look at your blog and found it very interesting. I'm not that familiar with weaving and it gave me some insights to the art and the craft of the medium. As I am a visual person I also enjoyed scrolling through the photographs. I particularity liked the photos of the truck body and the story about your parents. Very moving. It would be interesting to see if you could capture the personal nature of that image in a weaving. As I said I know little about weaving and not familiar how textiles have been used as personal or emotional expression. So much of it seems to be of a decorative nature. Or that might be just my lack of understanding.

    In your comment on my blog http://www.whatartdidhemaketoday.com/ you said you were "about to venture into a piece with a woven response done each day." I don't quite understand what you meant by that. I will watch your blog to see what evolves.

    John http://www.StreetCredibleArt.com

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  2. Hi John,
    Thanks for taking a look at my blog!
    I'll be posting what happens with the weaving process. A few friends (three who also work in fabric media) and one painter are going to probably join me in the adventure--check out what happens beginning in May! Your links have taken me to many others; by the way, Lynn Hanson's crows were quite moving. I did crows in several tapestry works a decade ago. They were in response to a quite emotional time of life. The tapestries also contained some text from writings I was doing then.
    Tommye

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