the poplar did it

i have finally figured everything out, the reason for the differences in japanese writing and art and that of the west. it's the trees.

i'm looking at these book covers, the ceramics, the prints and paintings, in this movement we call japonisme, and i see a pattern; you see it too. it's kind of amazing and overwhelming if you have never come across this before.

and beautiful. and when we look at it we see 'japonisme.' the outlines, the simplicity, the blocks of color, the asymmetry, the focus on nature....

some pottery firms featured this style to a greater degree than others. though grueby manufactured many styles of ceramics, this 'through the woods' view, perhaps these tiles were their signature.

but then.... you look at japanese images and the trees are all wiggly! does that mean your understanding of japonisme is all wrong??! where then does the inspiration come from?

not that the japanese don't have their verticals. there's always bamboo.

in fact, japan does have some straight trees.

and they have a strong artistic tradition of vertical counterpoint to diagonal.

but in general, you see trees in japanese prints, and you do not see straight trees. in western ones, you do. i was probing my mind as to a possibility for this discrepancy when suddenly it was so clear.

japan's trees are wiggly. western trees are straight. (i'm talking pines in particular, but not exclusively.) and is it so difficult to imagine that the nature sur- rounding the human will inform all communications of that human? our letterforms are straight; theirs is not. linear v non-linear. does this very simply describe it all?

luxe, calme et volupté

WHITE KIMONO

Sleeves of oyster, smoke and pearl,
linings patterned with chrysanthemum flurries,
rippled fields: the import store's

received a shipment of old robes,
cleaned but neither pressed nor sorted,
and the owner's cut the bindings

so the bales of crumpled silks
swell and breathe. It's raining out, off-season,
nearly everything closed,

so Lynda and I spend an hour
overcome by wrinkly luxuries we'd never wear,
even if we could: clouds of--

are they plum blossoms?--
billowing on mauve, thunderheads
of pine mounting a stony slope,

tousled fields of embroidery
in twenty shades of jade:
costumes for some Japanese

midsummer's eve. And there,
against the back wall, a garment
which seems itself an artifact

of dream: tiny gossamer sleeves
like moth wings worrying a midnight lamp,
translucent silk so delicate

it might shatter at the weight
of a breath or glance.
The mere idea of a robe,

a slip of a thing
(even a small shoulder
might rip it apart)

which seems to tremble a little,
in the humid air. The owner--
enjoying our pleasure, this slow afternoon,

in the lush tumble of his wares--
gives us a deal. A struggle, to narrow it
to three: deep blue for Lynda,

lined with a secretive orange splendor
of flowers; a long scholarly gray for me,
severe, slightly pearly, meditative;

a rough raw silk for Wally,
its slubbed green the color of day-old grass
wet against lawn-mower blades. Home,

we iron till the kitchen steams,
revealing drape and luster.
Wally comes out and sits with us, too,

though he's already tired all the time,
and the three of us fog up the rainy windows,
talking, ironing, imagining mulberry acres

spun to this unlikely filament
--nearly animate stuff--and the endless
labor of unwinding the cocoons.

What strength and subtlety in these hues.
Doesn't rain make a memory more intimate?
We're pleased with our own calm privacy,

our part in the work of restoration,
that kitchen's achieved, common warmth,
the time-out-of-time sheen

of happiness to it, unmistakable
as the surface of those silks. And
all the while that fluttering spirit

of a kimono hung in the shop
like a lunar token, something
the ghost of a moth might have worn,

stirring on its hanger whenever
the door was opened--petal, phantom,
little milky flame lifting

like a curtain in the wind
--which even Lynda, slight as she was,
did not dare to try on.

Mark Doty

from Sweet Machine by Mark Doty. All rights reserved, HarperCollins Publishers.

saturday evening girls

as a response to unem- ployment, lack of education, and dismal living conditions amongst north boston immigrants, a local library organized a group for jewish and italian teenaged girls. for at least one night a week it got them off the street, and it got them reading.

as the women running the program began to recognize the girls' real needs, a program was begun wherein the girls were taught a trade: pottery making. and thus paul revere pottery was born.

today at auction a lovely SEG bowl might fetch $21,000.

[In the above example, the artist] interpreted Queen Anne's lace in a stylized manner with a heavy black outline [as in japanese prints] from several points of view and at varying stages of bloom. Broad bands shift from white through three shades of blue to a grayish yellow-green, which merges with the plants' foliage. This effect reveals the influence of color theories espoused by tonalist artist Arthur Wesley Dow. [and as seen in the japanese prints] 1

and, wonderfully, somehow, i think, this was not an anomaly. newcomb pottery, marblehead pottery, arquipa pottery, and others as has very similar circumstances as their beginnings.