Art Poetry 2019 – Sue Dion and Evan Plante

For our 2019 Art & Poetry pairing, one pairing was with poet Evan Plante and artist Sue Dion.

Here are the works they created!

Sue Dion provided this artwork to Evan:

In response, Evan wrote the following poem:

Natural Log e

The heat that started us
Becomes the cold
That ends us
And in between
We spread

Borde Guth and Vilenkin
Correct Sagan
About a beginning
To all that ever was
And to all there ever will be

But the cold only hints
At the true nothing
That went before
And the hot mass that
Won’t stay forever

A hundred thousand
Million spirals
Push the dark
Pull the dark
For their own secret reasons

A hundred thousand
Million chances
To jettison the idea
That we have no access
To light and to power

Text subtext
And multiple meanings
All nature teaches
That there is more in the author
Than there is in the work

With useful energies
Beyond our ken
He bends light
Toward infinite mass
By decree

Because transcendence
Has advantages
Purpose its place
People their promise
Eternity its pace

He said it is good
This place of woe
As I run across it
Screaming
Like I’m the only one here

Archived in glory
Its natal quarks
Reveal
A fine tuning
That just won’t go away

The second half of this pairing involved Evan giving Sue a poem as a starting point. Evan provided this poem:

Accumulations

The living come and go
but the dead accumulate

First by mass
dust being slowed
by customs
and processes

Second by knowledge
some on paper
some in minds
some in hearts

but all are data
to search, to interpret
to chew forever
a person’s life

And so the mass
we mark by stones
as if to thwart
that dust

and grow them big
upon the plane
of dead-fields
thickened

by shadow, rock
and weeds

We fence them
to keep them in
to keep us out
to define death

to contain it
to bend it to
our flinted will
by iron pickets

and stony caves
as if our building,
defining, and looking
matters.

A bumper crop
of dust
place holders
in the grass

ignored
then attended
by place holders
above.

In response, Sue provided this artwork:

2019 Art-Poetry Pairing main page