Lois Wilson + Yayoi Kusama = whimsical art!

 Hello and Happy Poetry Friday! Be sure to visit Linda at TeacherDance for Roundup.

Tomorrow I'll be at the Fayette Art Festival, sharing my micropress project, The Whimsical World of Lois Wilson: Transforming Trash into Art.

It's the story of Alabama outsider artist Lois Wilson (1905-1980) and her journey—from sharecropper beginnings to the trash piles of New York City and back to Fayette, Alabama, where 2,500 of her works are housed. Lois created art from discarded items: plastic lids, table legs, drawer parts, even a toilet seat! 

Anything can be art.

Meanwhile, today's ArtSpeak: WOMEN poem is after Yayoi Kusama's Mushrooms. Talk about whimsy! I think Lois and Yayoi are somewhere right now creating art together. 

I have previously shared poems after art by both these women:

When I Ride My Bike in Spring (Lois Wilson)

A Polkadot Poem (Yayoi Kusama)

Thanks so much for reading!

Forest Wake

moon or no moon
mushrooms pop their tents

while some of us sleep,
some of us keen

they work in determined silence

soon a campfire ring
blazes the trail—

                    drifters
dancing with the dead

- Irene Latham

2024 One Little Word: BEAUTY

Hello and Happy Poetry Friday! Be sure to visit marvelous Marcie Flinchum Atkins for Roundup. Lucky me: I was the winner of Marcie's gorgeous haiku/poetry calendar! Here it is, happy in its new home. I love it so much!

Earlier this week I posted a quote from Joyce Sidman over at Smack Dab in the Middle about poetry's power to bring us epiphanies. Don't miss it...it's a good one!

This is my 17th year to choose One Little Word to guide and inspire my year. It's a spiritual practice I'm quite devoted to. 

My One Little Word list (so far):

2008 joy
2009 listen
2010 celebrate
2011 deeper
2012 fierce
2013 sky
2014 mystery
2015 wild
2016 delight
2017 abundance
2018 behold
2019 happy
2020 red
2021 bewilderment
2022 whimsy

2023 space

Last year I created a quilt out of blocks I made for each of the first fifteen years. Now I've got a new project going: DIY garden word bricks!

I'm excited about this year's word. "Beauty" has been on my shortlist many years. It was reading the passage on beauty from Consolations: the Solace, Nourishment and Underlying meaning of Everyday Words by David Whyte that pushed it from bridesmaid to bride status. Here are some excerpts:

"Beauty is the harvest of presence"

"Beauty is an achieved state of both deep attention and self-forgetting"

"Beauty especially occurs in the meeting of time with the timeless"

"Beauty invites us, through entrancement, to that fearful frontier between what we think makes us; and what we think makes the world."

*So many thanks to joyous and wise poet-friend Jan Annino for recommending this book!

For this year's ArtSpeak theme, I've selected another many-times-contender: FOLK ART. 

I love folk art, outsider art, primitive art. Art created from everyday objects. Art created by those who create not from formal training, but from life. Art made for the sake of art, for fulfillment (not for money or fame).

And, a few years back, when my Poetic Forever Friend Charles Waters was living in New York City, he gifted me a postcard book from the American Folk Art Museum. It contains 30 postcards, so voila!, right away I've got a nice selection of art to choose from. 

Thank you, Charles!

I'll also be showcasing some southern folk artists, especially from my home state of Alabama...starting with Lois Wilson. Lois pulled items from the trash and turned them into art. I love that! (I have written a picture book manuscript about Lois. I hope to find a publisher for it someday!)

Here's a tricube for you after one of her joyous pieces created on a piece of wood. Many of her pieces are on wood...you can view her (2500!) pieces at the Fayette Museum of Art in Fayette, Alabama.

When I Ride my Bike in Spring

World spins by—
a happy
tide of green.

Wind blows me
open. I
smile so wide.

My feet pump,
my wheels whirr—
I'm alive!

- Irene Latham