B.H. Fairchild is a son of small-town midwestern America, multiple award winner and recipient of many fellowships, including the Guggenheim and NEA grants. He often writes of his growing-up years in his father's machine shop, of beauty, and of mystery.

He's also my husband's favorite poet. 

Hitchcock

Before the lights went out, looking back
in a full house, you must have seen
old faces child-like with expectancy.
The strangest things can happen. Here.
And then you knew we wanted dreams
where all the terrors that we learned
weren’t real, were real, here, in the dark:
dreams that flickered like venetian blinds
in white-frame houses where we stood
in halls with roses on the walls, stared
at doors the wind slammed shut, yelled
up stairs before we took one step,
and then another, up. And ran back down.
You took us only where we’d been
before, and then made every fear
come true. The hall that darkens
at the end, leads to darker rooms.
The door that keeps the unknown out,
lets it come in. The winding stairs
that draws us from our mothers’ laps,
won’t let us come back. We stand there,
looking up, and all the shrieks and
flapping wings we were woke up from,
we wake up to. And when we leave,
glad for light outside dim movie houses,
we grow back into day and wide, white streets.

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Have you listened to Jose Gonzales' great little song, "It's in our nature"? You can listen to little of it here. The whole of the lyrics are really simple: A bent towards peace and justice is in us, inside our hearts, in our nature.

Therefore, Gonzalez seems to posit, put down your sword, open up your heart, and let down your guard. This marvelous music is packed with anthropological and theological questions. Here are a few of them, along with my own understanding of answers offered us in the Scriptures.

Is it in our nature? Yes. God has placed eternity in the hearts of all people, so that there's something in us that longs for peace, longs for justice, longs of safety and intimacy. This is why we're outraged at so much that we see in the world, or should be. 30,000 people a day are dying of diseases that are easily treatable. It's in our nature to be outraged because we believe the world ought to be different than this, ought to be a place where sick people are able to get care, and hungry people are able to get food, and all of us can sleep soundly at night without worrying about getting whacked by a gun, or a terrorist. It is in our nature to care for these things.

At the IAM Conference last weekend, Joyce Robinson, the vice president and executive director of the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, and three artists who have benefited from the Foundation’s studio space program spoke at a panel about providing for the needs of artists. The Sharpe Foundation provides free studio space in DUMBO (acronym for “Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass”- a Brooklyn neighborhood) for up to a year to artists who need it. The pool of applicants is big and highly competitive – one of the artists who had a Foundation studio and spoke at the conference, Tara Donovan, currently has a fantastic installment at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is a public agency dedicated to supporting excellence in the arts, both new and established; bringing the arts to all Americans; and providing leadership in arts education. Established by Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government, the Endowment is the nation's largest annual funder of the arts, bringing great art to all 50 states, including rural areas, inner cities, and military bases.

The National Council on the Arts advises the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, who also chairs the Council, on agency policies and programs. It reviews and makes recommendations to the Chairman on applications for grants, funding guidelines, and leadership initiatives.

Artist Makoto Fujimura was appointed to the National Council for the Arts in 2002. Recently, Christy Tennant sat down with Mako and asked him about his work with the NEA.

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Wallace Stevens is an important American modernist poet; he also is notable for writing his poetry while serving as the vice president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, a post which he continued to hold even after winning a Pulitzer in 1955 and turning down a faculty position at Harvard. Stevens is a great model for artists seeking to make art while still holding down a job, and for businesspeople who feel a call toward the creative.

You can find more information about Stevens and more of his poetry at the website of the Poetry Foundation.

Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion

 

You dweller in the dark cabin,

To whom the watermelon is always purple,

Whose garden is wind and moon,

Of the two dreams, night and day,

What lover, what dreamer, would choose

The one obscured by sleep?

Here is the plantain by your door

And the best cock of red feather

That crew before the clocks.

A feme may come, leaf-green,

Whose coming may give revel

Beyond revelries of sleep,

Yes, and the blackbird spread its tail,

So that the sun may speckle,

While it creaks hail.

You dweller in the dark cabin,

Rise, since rising will not waken,

And hail, cry hail, cry hail.

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The National Council on the Arts advises the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, who also chairs the Council, on agency policies and programs. It reviews and makes recommendations to the Chairman on applications for grants, funding guidelines, and leadership initiatives.

Artist Makoto Fujimura was appointed to the National Council for the Arts in 2002. Recently, Christy Tennant sat down with Mako and asked him about his work with the NEA.

This is the second in a series of five questions about Mako and the NEA.

CT: With the presidential elections upon us, how relevant is the person in the oval office to what goes on in the NCA?

MF: It is important to have the president get behind you in cultural stewardship. President Bush has been an advocate for Dana and the NCA from the beginning. He has a limited exposure to the arts, especially visual arts, but he has a CEO-understanding, that when you hire someone, you release them to do the work you’ve hired them to do, and you reward them for a job well done. Under Dana Gioia’s leadership, the agency has gone from scandal-ridden agency to becoming one of the most creative places to work in Washington.

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Rainer Maria Rilke was a German poet of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, known for not just his poetry but also his prose in works such as Letters to a Young Poet (a wonderful, slim lyrical volume on being an artist).  His poetry was written in German, but thankfully has been translated for our benefit.  Here's one.

The Last Supper

They are assembled, astonished and disturbed
round him, who like a sage resolved his fate,
and now leaves those to whom he most belonged,
leaving and passing by them like a stranger.
The loneliness of old comes over him
which helped mature him for his deepest acts;
now will he once again walk through the olive grove,
and those who love him still will flee before his sight.

To this last supper he has summoned them,
and (like a shot that scatters birds from trees)
their hands draw back from reaching for the loaves
upon his word: they fly across to him;
they flutter, frightened, round the supper table
searching for an escape. But he is present
everywhere like an all-pervading twilight-hour.

On seeing Leonardo da Vinci's "Last Supper", Milan 1904
Translated by Albert Ernest Flemming

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In Acts 17, when Paul wants to share Christ with the Athenians, he doesn't begin with Old Testament prophecy or history because that would be like opening a sermon in Nepal with an illustration taken from the Super Bowl. It's a matter of emotional intelligence more than anything else; the simply capacity to get inside the head of the hearer and share truth in a way that they'll be able to receive. We need this when we teach, and we need it when we marry and raise children.

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