I hope you have a meaningful Easter. I hope you experience the richness of the Story - the movement from darkness and death towards light and life.
Smack in the middle of all this comes Holy Saturday. I wrote a poem on Holy Saturday a few years back - here is a newly revised version.
HOLY SATURDAY
And this holy Saturday is
An elastic band, stretched taut
A kingdom held back
just one more day
kinetic
energetic
propulsion potential
The hand
calms the waves
The voice
stills the voices
Not yet,
not yet
But soon
and then ... oh, then!
You will let fly the smile of love
Zip!
To the back of the head
Snap!
But not yet
The band may yet break
The dark is still pregnant
A belly stretched taut
Soon.
Blog for Bleeding Heart!
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Tania Runyan is a poet from Illinois who will be leading the poetry track of our Small, Slow & Beautiful retreat. In this conversation, you'll hear her hopes for the retreat, who it will be a good fit for, the way I screw up her name, and a fair bit of laughter.
You'll also hear Tania Runyan read her lovely poem, "No One Can Boast".
Blog for Bleeding Heart!
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We are excited to share this opportunity to have your work displayed at the Bleeding Heart Art Space this spring in a new group show, curated by local poet and artists, Edward Van Vliet.
Blog for Bleeding Heart!
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Tonight we are gathering to celebrate the ways we, together, are making the world a more beautiful place, and talk about how we can do more of that.
Blog for Bleeding Heart!
You have something to say–why not say it here? Email your blog post idea to dave@bleedingheartart.space and let's chat.
We post a lot on social media. Hopefully you follow?
In no particular order, here are the posts that stuck with our community last week!
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Consider this a 'greatest hits' from the last week of the Bleeding Heart Art Space social media-sphere. These are the posts you liked, clicked on and shared most last week, served together in one tasty meal.
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These summer days, when we might afford appointments with poetry, I encourage you to pick up Fueston's Visitations, which you can order from Finishing Line Press here. You may be lucky enough, like I have been, to sense the intimate embrace of God reaching through the text. You may, like me, want to breathe the words in and then exhale them slowly. You may, like me, find life here.
Blog for Bleeding Heart!
You have something to say–why not say it here? Email your blog post idea to dave@bleedingheartart.space and let's chat.
Sarah Kay is a performance poet. She is also an advocate and activist who has done (like any poet worth her salt) plenty of soul searching. That journey brought her to the TED stage, in a video you can watch by clicking this image right here.
Sarah Kay is involved with Project VOICE, which "is dedicated to promoting empowerment, improving literacy, and encouraging empathy and creative collaboration in classrooms and communities around the world."
She has collaborated on books that fuse her poems with illustrations, such as "B", which you can get from the library as soon as I'm done with it. You'll find a whole collection of her poems in "No Matter the Wreckage", but I've got that one right now, too.
A recent interview on Brain Pickings with Maria Popova includes this exchange;
"MP: And this brings us back to the legitimacy question — if making a living isn’t the metric of success in creative work, if academic credentials aren’t it, then what is? What is your internal barometer for your own legitimacy?
SK: Oof, that’s a big question."
What is your internal barometer for your own legitimacy. Oof.
Sarah Kay writes the types of poems that gain a new flavour in the mouth of the reader. Here are a couple readings by the author to savour, as we edge ever-nearer to Poetry Month.
Poem text and an interview with Sarah about our fear of missing out, being a working artist in today's world, and how we measure creative success: https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/03/07/sarah-kay-interview/
Part of an interview with Sarah about being a working artist in today's world and how we measure creative success, as individuals and as a culture: https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/03/07/sarah-kay-interview/
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You have something to say–why not say it here? Email your blog post idea to dave@bleedingheartart.space and let's chat.
Today I received an email from Image Journal, and in that email was a link to a new poem from Scott Cairns called Lenten Complaint.
This poem reminded my how I've been stirred by the words of Scott Cairns in the past. How when Cairns reminds me that, "He shaped of every sepulcher / a womb", I resonate. How his relationship with Greek Orthodoxy, the Greek language and the Christian faith stirs a potent poetic cocktail. How his phrase 'every womb a sepulchre' How I haven't done so well with Lent this year. How I have my own complaints. How we share a broken hope.
I realized, reading that poem, that you may not know the work of Scott Cairns, and how that would be a shame.
His latest book of collected poems is called Slow Pilgrim. Whatever you are fasting from for Lent, I hope it isn't poetry.
Read Lenten Complaint, from Issue 68 of Image Journal, here.
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We begin with a smaller crowd than usual, but we do begin. When I say smaller I mean both numbers and size. Edward Van Vliet has brought his two sons, Samuel and Aden. Our youngest ArtLuckers in a while. It’s always inspiring to see what kids bring to the table.
On a table by the door, the kids leave their sketchbooks, next to paintings by Daniel Van Heyst. With two Vans and a Von (that’s me), we’re definitely ready to begin.
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You have something to say–why not say it here? Email your blog post idea to dave@bleedingheartart.space and let's chat.