Founder’s Focus

Mid-May in Vermont, for many of us, is our favorite time of the year. There’s a haze of green buds/new leaves everywhere, but you can still see through the branches for a sense of space that the full massed green of summer blocks out. Then there are the flowering trees, apple, crab-apple, plum, cherry, and then the lilacs, and then the lilacs (the lilacs are so wonderful they deserve double mention).

Everything is fresh. The new green of the fields is much more intense than further on into the summer when the first crop of hay has already been taken, and its cool 60–70 degrees, which in our geography feels warm. In our geography, where we have strong seasons, the spring comes after the long dark winter, which intensifies its wonder. And the wonder of spring induces “a rebirth of wonder” in the studio, and everything seems fresh and possible.

“Everything is connected, everything changes, pay attention,” VSC Visiting Poet Jane Hirshfield said when a friend asked her to edit a 700 page book on Buddhism. Jane agreed to do it but also told her friend, “You know I can get it down to 7 words” – and those were the words: “Everything is connected, everything changes, pay attention.”

Paying attention to interconnectedness is what makes VSC a special place…an environment and community where everything is connected and artists and writers spend their days in their studios delving into their interconnectedness, with the planet, the spring, the human community, and doing it more easily and fluidly here than elsewhere, because at VSC we work to support the awareness of the connectedness of all things as a foundation for making art that can express our mutual interconnectedness at a meaningful level.

Happy Spring!

Jon Gregg
Founder

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A Selection of Recent Resident Portraits:

Photos by Howard Romero

Every year, the center offers fifty Green Mountain State artists and writers a chance to come together for an intensive week of uninterrupted studio work. The Center — as an expression of their support for Vermont artists — underwrites 75% of the cost of their stay, which includes room and board.  This year marked the 25th annual “Vermont Artist’s Week” at VSC.

Writer and Vermont Public Radio commentator Deborah Luskin was one of this year’s residents.  Visit the VPR website to listen to Deborah speak about what makes a stay at VSC pivotal in the lives of the writers and artists who have spent time here.

Vermont Artist Week 2009 Residents:

Photo by Howard Romero

May Visiting Artists:

Katherine Porter	Andrew Ginzel
Colin Chase	Myrna Harrison

May Visiting Writers:

Dear John, Dear Coltrane
By Michael Harper

 

 

 

a love supreme, a love supreme
a love supreme, a love supreme

Sex fingers toes
in the marketplace
near your father’s church
in Hamlet, North Carolina–
witness to this love
in this calm fallow
of these minds;
there is no substitute for pain:
genitals gone or going,
seed burned out,
you tuck the roots in the earth,
turn back, and move
by river through the swamps,
singing: a love supreme, a love supreme;
what does it all mean?
Loss, so great each black
woman expects your failure
in mute change, the seed gone.
You plod up into the electric city–
you song now crystal and
the blues. You pick up the horn
with some will and blow
into the freezing night:
a love supreme, a love supreme–

Dawn comes and you cook
up the thick sin ‘tween
impotence and death, fuel
the tenor sax cannibal
heart, genitals and sweat
that makes you clean–
a love supreme, a love supreme–

Why you so black?
cause I am
why you so funky?
cause I am
why you so black?
cause I am
why you sweet?
cause I am
why you so black?
cause I am
a love supreme, a love supreme:

So sick you couldn’t play Naima,
so flat we ached
for song you’d concealed
with your own blood,
your diseased liver gave
out its purity,
the inflated heart
pumps out, the tenor kiss,
tenor love:

a love supreme, a love supreme–
a love supreme, a love supreme–

 

 

Watch
By Eamon Grennan

 

 

 

1.

Watching it closely, respecting its mystery,
is the note you’ve pinned above this heavy Dutch table
that takes the light weight of what you work at,
coaxing the seen and any mystery it might secrete
into words that mightn’t fall too far short, might let you
hear how the hum of bees in the pink fuchsia
and among the buttercups and fat blackberries
is echoed by that deep swissshhh sound that is
your own blood coursing its steady laps
and speaking in beats to the drum of your left ear.

2.

When you watch the way the sycamore leaf curls,
browns, dries, and drops from the branch it’s lived on
since spring, to be blown by a soundless breeze
along the seed heads of the uncut grass, then
the mystery that is its movement—the movement,
that is, from seed to leaf-shard and so on
to fructive dust—holds still an instant, gives a glimpse
of something that quickens away from language
into the riddling bustle of just the actual as you
grab at it and it disappears again, again unsaid.

 

June Visiting Artists and Writers:

Sigrid Nunez

Susanna Coffey

Nayland Blake

Carol Hepper

John
 Lees

Lee
 Abbott

 

 

 

 

Nothing great was ever achieved without entusiasm…Enthusiasm is the powerful engine of success.

-Jean Dubuffet

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