Leah at Creative Every Day is sponsoring words in art for February.  So I dug out this watercolor I did several years back.  It's one of my favorites – both the words and the way I managed to get the paint to work, watercolors being far from my strong suit.

Additionally, I dug out my chapbook, Shift, and decided to post a poem.  We're almost half way through February and I haven't much played with words and art but I have both:  words and art and words with art.  And it's easy just to copy what I've already done.  The cover art for the Chapbook is one of my paintings manipulated in photoshop.

Grace Cavalieri (she of The Poet and the Poem on NPR), writing for the Montserrat Review, says:  "Tammy Vitale's fist book "Shift" is a blueprint of her journey through social change to self-actualization.  it is a triumph over dark forces and the internal quarrels that eventually turn into strength.  Women's self realizations are surprisingly the same:  Mainstream, women poets live through a sense of isolation, guilt, then the powerful current of hope that uplifts the poem from the page…."

Maureen Sherbondy  writes "There is a dream-like quality to these colorful poems – reading them is like viewing a verbal masterpiece…Vitale is not afraid to explore scary things…There are gnawed bones and dragons…"

(both excerpted from comments on Amazon.com)

So here's a poem:

Gift

If white is the presence of all colors,

is silence the sound of all spoken words?

And if the answer is yes,

what exactly does that mean?

I am searching for a way to tell you

about my life and the only voice I can find

is carved into clay in a language

I don't understand.

(I am not good at this)

I am looking for the original mud, but

know if I submit my own symbols

to its wet waiting

the fire will harden them precisely

like those I hold in my hand

trying to read.

If I do not wish to be silent,

must I learn how not to speak?

I posted another poem from "Shift" in comments in Leah's blog post today.  I have taken to visiting Pictures, Poetry and Prose blog to practice snippets of writing.  Haven't focused on writing in easily 10 years.  Am happier immersed in art than in written words – different side of the brain.

thought for the day:  Sophocles once warned, "Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse."…There exists ample evidence that any society acquiring the written word experiences explosive changes.  for the most part, these changes can be characterized as progress.  But one pernicious effect of literacy has gone largely unnoticed:  writing subliminally fosters a patriarchal outlook.  Writing of any kind, but especially its alphabetic form, diminishes feminine values and with them, women's power in the culture…Robert Logan [wrote]…A medium of communication is not merely a passive conduit for the transmission of information but rather an active force in creating new social patterns and new perceptual realities…The alphabet, independent of the spoken languages it transcribes or the information it makes available, has its own intrinsic impacts.  Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image