From the editors at The Showbear Family Circus: Since submitting this essay, writer Michelle Mitchell-Foust has passed away. We extend our deepest condolences to Michelle’s loved ones and dedicate our current issue to her memory. A brief excerpt from her obituary appears below.

“Michelle was a life-long learner.”

Musgrove Mortuaries & Cemeteries

Philosopher Hélène Cixous says writing is a “preknowing and not knowing….” Like painting, “it occurs where blindness and light meet.” Naturally the two can cross-pollinate. In this panel the poets acknowledge the importance of the conversation among poets and painters. These poets find inspiration by examining the work of Kiefer, Miro, Magritte, and Giorgione in a discussion of inspiration in the twenty-first century.

First, the German Expressionist Anslem Kiefer.

The paths of water through the grass seed fields of the Pacific Northwest flow invisibly from the highway. You see them by sheep. The sheep graze and drink on both sides of each path of water. They make a curved line where each field parts, the only deviations being the lambs sitting in the drier places in the grass. Even from a car window, you can catch a puff of breath from a solitary lamb sitting up just outside of the earth’s crevice. Further on the field, one thousand blue geese have landed, several hundred more hovering above them in a parallel plane.

Closer to home, the path of water runs from the mountain that we can see from our window and down the streets.

When we are on the mountain, in the forest on the mountain, the path of water is shot through by filtered light and stopped by the growth of understory. The path of water runs down the black trunks. It soaks the leaves and invites the parasites that make puzzle pieces of their skin. Random leaves shiver in the water’s path. The sound is deceptive. The path of water teaches us to look closer at the soaked fallen trees. The end of the rainbow makes a mushroom weep blood. I follow the path of water, and then I look for the language that accommodates the minute growth: turkey tail, membranous dog lichen, witch’s butter, bracket fungus.

I started watching the path of water when I learned from his journals that Anselm Kiefer studied the path of water at Barjac, the grounds in France that he claimed as studio, with pools, tunnels, caves, and abandoned factories. He measured the temperature of the water as he entered it. He was always monitoring for creation. The kind of creation that makes a path of water through a grass field. With the paintings under the name of “The Morgenthau Plan,” he calls more pointedly on nature’s chromatic variations than his early works do, as a sign of optimism. Kiefer said in an interview: “Nature captivates me just as much as a poem, a piece of music, a Beethoven string quartet. My paintings have often been considered overwhelming. But if we cannot be overwhelmed by beauty, a landscape, or a piece of music, life would be very dull.” The original Morgenthau Plan was named after the actual plan of Henry Morgenthau to prevent any other war, beyond WWII, from being started by Germany. Any work of art that recalls such a marvelous stand against the holocaust and any potential holocausts can be inspiring on this basis alone.

But even more, I can be inspired by The Morgenthau Plan paintings of Anslem Kiefer because his paintings ask that I consider the geometry of their making. Unlike those painters who used the Golden Ratio to create portraiture, Kiefer’s geometry exists not as ratios residing within the painting, but as the most important ratio of painting to the visitor. The paintings are the size of the silk factory walls of Barjac where he makes them. I am necessarily dwarfed by them. I stand before Oh Stalks, Your Stalks, Oh Stalks of the Night as if in miniature. He invites me into the painting, where I can witness a field antithetical to the uniform grass seed fields, the horizon being the definitive point where two planes meet, lines going away from me under lines traveling across my line of sight.

Let us begin again, the furrows deep. The depth of field, an upward sweep, and the stalks, if these are stalks, are black and not fully grown; they are in the process of becoming. Therefore, if I am to be inspired by this painting, I am to be at home with the process and not the product.

And the sky is dark, a night sky. But it isn’t just a night sky. It’s black, soil black, with some lightened places, recalling the rich soil of my Illinois childhood. Even the sky is fertile. Even the sky is a field. Again, if I am to be inspired by the painting, I must be at home with the darkest part of the day, when the light is furthest away, when I can’t see everything. I must be at home with mystery, which is the poet’s strength.

The black sky in the painting is covered by cursive, Kiefer’s I assume, recalling the images of school, when chalk met slate. And these are phrases in German. It’s what we dream of. The language the sky uses every day, either by the scaffolding of trees or the gathering of birds, or the path of water that forms cloud… that language covered by another. And this is a language covering blackness. And it’s one I haven’t spoken. I only know a few words. One is the word for Night. Even with careful consideration and attempt at translation, the words bleed off of the painting; some have letters that are smudged out. Some letters are ambiguous. I can translate “came, came, came in word, came through that night…wanted to light up…ash, ash, ash, night, night, and night and wished to go to the… hum of the breath of night is your camp, the gloom itself… she wakens you up to live, and sleep combs your eyelashes…. She was as rose… Oh halves, halves, halves of night.” And then I stop translating. I resist the urge to know because I cannot know everything. The grammar is ambiguous. The shape of the letter is ambiguous. And I can know this imagery without knowing. Again, the painting asks me to be at home with mystery, which must be a seat of inspiration. As Hélène Cixous says writing is a “preknowing and not knowing….” Like painting, “it occurs where blindness and light meet.”

In Kiefer’s earlier works, the dresses, the garments on the canvas, imply movement, but in this paint, the writing does. It moves. It is like Gertrude Stein’s Continuous Present. And the German in the sky keeps its secret and gives it away at the same time, the way a poem does. It is one language covering another, as the painting is one visual expression over another.

For Oh Stalks, Your Stalks, Oh Stalks of the Night is a palimpsest. The painting began with a photograph of a field taken by Kiefer himself.  So the painting began with light. And then Kiefer covered the photograph with nearly monochromatic paint, and he covered the painting with writing resembling the writing on a chalkboard. I stand before the painting younger than I am, a girl in school. I stand before the painting smaller than I am.  In the twenty-first century, our relationship to the everyday must change. To be inspired, we must recognize the ratios of ourselves to the sublime. We must give ourselves over to what Thoreau called “wildness,” that which is out of reach, out of our hands, beauty we can never hold or grasp entirely.

The nearly monochromatic color palette and proportions and texture of Anslem Kiefer’s Oh Stalks, Your Stalks, Oh Stalks of the Night invite me to enter into a landscape that has both a residue of catastrophe and, more importantly, the landscape that is regenerative. How is making possible? I follow the path of water. I allow a line to carry me. Kiefer directs me this way. I am inside the walls of myth, the only light is the light left over from a deity’s presence, and the scrawl holds on to the energy of creation.

            I write:

Something about an old swimming pool

haunted by counting: Here’s my time today.

Here is my time yesterday, and the day before.

Grotto with the clearest picture of time, no

exaggeration, if you put your hand up

to the wall, you’ll see the stone is still

warm—though the cave is mostly dark.

I am a falconer coaxing

these lines together into a bird

toward my leather wrist. Removing little

fringed hoods for the rest of the day.

I keep hearing myself saying,

for as long as I am a falconer,

Lines, keep heaping beauty on me.

                                    (from IMAGO MUNDI, Elixir Press0