20 May 2017
Sewing without a pattern, a night gown I’ve wanted to attempt for months, but kept scaring myself out of trying.
Make art about attempting something you’ve been scared to try.
21 May 2017
Make art about making moments of peace among the tumult.
22 April 2017
I can’t join the March for Science today, so to honor those who march–
Make art inspired by this.
17 March 2017
Make art about an immigrant story, about the realities, about how America was built on the very backs of the immigrants they revile.
Music as prayer today.
11/18/2016
Thinking on how it wasn’t all that long ago that it was my Irish ancestors that many people wanted out of the country, saw as less than human, thought they were taking their jobs, hated for their faith and their culture.
Make art about fear and exclusion.
11/7/2016
“I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”–Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, Monday, March 4, 1861
Make art about the better angels of our nature (’cause we sure need ’em now).
10/4/2016
I grew up in Hurricane Alley, eastern North Carolina, so the preparation for these big storms is something I learned early. Hurricane Matthew has ripped through Haiti, and is on his way to the US East Coast. All my provisions are laid in, flashlights and emergency equipment in place and ready, and I’ve battened down as much as I can. But sometimes Mama Nature’s just too big and unpredictable for any kind of preparation.
Make art about preparing the best you can.
10/5/2016
Thinking a lot today about all the ways people find their way to, or demonstrate faith. Took me immediately to one of my top three favorite songs, The Mountain, by Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer.
Excerpted Lyrics by Dave Carter
Some build temples and some find altars,
some come in tall hats and robes spun fine.
Some in rags, some in gemstone halters,
some push the pegs back in line.
I see the mountain, the mountain comes to me,
I see the mountain and that is all I see.
Make art about temples or altars or shrines, faith in some unexpected way.
10/6/2016
Road Angel Andrea at Walmart today told me about her grandmama teaching her to sew, first by making curtains, long straight hems, she said, over and over again, summer curtains, winter curtains with their heavy lining. She said her grandmama was patient but tough, making her tear out crooked stitches, and try again til she got it right. “I learned to take my time,” she said. “I learned to take my time, look ahead of the foot, and how a pair of curtains can make all the difference in a room.”
Make art about curtains. Or about what you learned from an elder.
The most recent book from one of my always favorite poets, Pattiann Rogers.
Ms. Rogers has published eleven books of poetry; two book-length essay collections, The Dream of the Marsh Wren and The Grand Array; and A Covenant of Seasons, poems and monotypes, in collaboration with Joellyn Duesberry. She is the recipient of two NEA grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Award for poetry. She lives in Colorado.
Read the title poem here in American Scientist
http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/holy-heathen-rhapsody
Buy Holy Heathen Rhapsody
https://www.amazon.com/Holy-Heathen-Rhapsody-Penguin-Poets/dp/0143123882
Praise for Holy Heathen Rhapsody
“I believe Pattiann Rogers walks the world at night when we are sleeping. Her poems are translations of our dreaming life—what we know to be true but fail to remember. We read her words, sentence by sentence, image by image, and return to all that is beautiful, mysterious, and erotic.”
—Terry Tempest Williams
“Pattiann Rogers is a visionary of reality, perceiving the material world with such intensity of response that impulse, intention, meaning, interconnections beyond the skin of appearance are revealed. Her language, unmarred by clichés, springs up out of a sense of how various and endlessly amazing are the forms of life and the human ability to notice them.”
—Denise Levertov
“How the densely detailed, thickly textured, imaged stanzas of Pattiann Rogers result in so much light-as-air wonderment is surely one of the greater questions—one of the greater magics—of contemporary poetry. But however it happens, we must be thankful—for both the science text and the psalter of her work, for both the physical abundance and for the spirit flimmering over it.”
—Albert Goldbarth
Read More from Ms. Rogers Online
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/pattiann-rogers#about
http://www.terrain.org/2014/poetry/two-poems-by-pattiann-rogers/
https://orionmagazine.org/poetry/pattiann-rogers-poem/
https://imagejournal.org/article/speak-rain/
Interviews
http://www.missourireview.com/anthology/interview-with-pattiann-rogers
http://www.pw.org/content/interview_poet_pattiann_rogers?cmnt_all=1
Ms. Rogers on Merging Science and Poetry:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gicNcqk08Pk
http://www.cennamology.com/home/pattiann-rogers-review-merging-poetry-science-and-philosophy
Reading
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vBelOceSMA
Happy Reading!
xo
Mary
9/30/2016
Make art about the struggle between faith and fear, or about faith overcoming fear.
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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