My Ceramics

This haiku expresses how I feel about ceramic sculpting and hand building.

The peace

of working

moist clay

***

When I was a kid, my mother had a thing about cleanliness and was horrified if I even got near mud. Maybe that's why I've always been fascinated with clay. During my senior year in college, I audited a class in ceramics. I spent fifteen to twenty hours extra each week in the ceramics "lab."

The piece on the left is one of my very first.

I made piece after piece after piece, experimenting with a variety of types and styles.


Finally, the professor told me that I'd have to stop making so many things because I was taking up half the space in the kiln for each firing! Oh, well...

After graduation, life intruded. My family and I moved so many times that it was impractical to set up a kiln. In 1970 I worked in summer stock. There was a series of shops at the theatre, one of which a ceramicist owned. He said he'd provide clay free for any interested members of the cast or crew. Not only that, but he'd do the firing of finished pieces. Of course, I took him up on it. This poem came from one of my pieces.

On a side porch

of an old white farmhouse

I picked up a lump of clay.

corn stood green in the field.

I pounded, dug, shaped, molded

and finished a mug-

heavy, medieval, brown-

years before we met,

when the future stretched ahead

like the harrowed rows of corn.

Everyone and everything are different

now except that mug.

Only it remains constant and real-

as once was our love.

At the end of the summer I couldn't get my ceramics back! Nor could I find out why or even where they were. The business manager finally told me my work was being exhibited in the front window of the theatre's permanent downtown office. Who could object to that?

 

 

I finished grad school, moved again and again. I couldn't have a kiln. Then I came to California and a new friend, poet and doll maker Jackie Ball, let me use her kiln. I took another class in ceramics at a local college–once again neglecting everything else just to make "mud pies."

 

In Baja y Yo there's a piece that talks about the the "Trama'-tic Experience" of playing in Mexican MUD.