Glassblowers and Poets

What (and who) it takes to make a thing

Picture published September 2021 in “Skylights,” the blog of Tanglewood Conservatory, Denton, MD.

When I drafted this poem I turned my notebook sideways, to give myself the whole length of the page. Long lines, is what I’m saying. ‘Way easier to read on a full-size screen.

---

ATELIER


Someone has made a television diary of Dale Chihuly
at work on a show of art glass for the DeYoung Museum,
and for an hour I sit mesmerized and watch this pirate-shirted,
round-bellied sprite with grey curls and an eyepatch
lumber through his enormous studio, calling color and light
into shape and substance – forms and hues nesting,
rooted, in one another, each massive fragile brightness
created as itself, then joined to others:  column, blossom, 
chandelier, each called together from a hundred parts, 
each seeming to explode whole, alive, into air
in one intricate burst. In the museum, wide-eyed crowds 
shuffle through rooms full of works placed just so, works full 
of pieces placed just so, pieces each a miracle of shape, color, light – 
 				   				
and what the crowds don’t see (unless this film-diary catches them too) 
is the willing village at work in Chihuly’s atelier: 
young men who heave and spin the molten glass and shape it while he
    watches;
the silver-haired witch who murmurs to him while she blends paints and dyes
that he then daubs, dollops, swirls with such off-hand prodigal authority;
metal-smiths coaxing bright wire into shapes (horse’s head, arrow, sun)
that he then melds to glass; a room full of clear voices and hard hands
to clap and hoot and cheer when each new-fired, never-seen-before shape
is hoisted for the last time from the furnace,
carried high in triumph down the room to a cooling shelf. 

Well, I think, what he does is no more silly
than making poems; there is room in the world, love even
in the world for Chihuly’s glass, so write something why don’t you, 
find the artisans inside yourself to help you shape a new creation – 
one who stokes the furnace to a transforming heat, one who mixes
undiscovered colors, one who lifts a cold and clumsy lump 
at the end of a heavy rod and sets it spinning in the blaze, 
melting, bending as you watch until you recognize the shape of something
never seen before, then one who shouts in triumph and hoists it high,
carries it down the long room of your heart and sets it to rest (softly,
softly, to rest – they shatter, these shapes) in a place where it can breathe
and cool; sets it down next to uncounted others, while you catch your breath
and muse on which shape goes where, what new design their joining will
    create,
how best to balance and connect. Surely all these ones are you
and more than merely you, surely within the walls of your capacious self 
is room for a village to be at work: vision, heat, muscle, craft, and above all
    that shout 
ringing down the room as a new truth rises, massive and fragile, from the fire.

---

[You can listen to an audio version of the poem using the little widget above the (first) photograph. Some technical issues with getting this audio recorded, and it’s not perfect, but I really wanted to read this one to you.]

I drafted this poem (lengthwise in my notebook) in 2014, literally right after watching a PBS documentary on Chihuly and his work. At the time — well, and still — the heart of the poem for me was in the lines: “there is room in the world, love even / in the world for Chihuly’s glass, so write something why don’t you….” All that imagination, passion, effort, spent on creating something that in practical terms is completely useless? Yes, go for it. “Useful” doesn’t always mean what you think it means. Make the thing; see how the making changes you, see how the world makes room for what you’ve made.

More recently (as in, oh, during the last two weeks or so) I’ve been revising the poem: partly to get the line-breaks less clunky, mostly to underline another point that the poem wants to make, an ironic point about the glassblower surrounded by skilled helpers in his studio¹ and the poet sitting at her desk alone except for the voices in her head. Not a fair contrast, really, even in irony, when you think about furnace-heat and heavy lifting as physical realities instead of metaphors. It stays with me, though, and it makes me wonder. Would I want — really want — an atelier full of assistants to help me write my poems? Do I have one already? The poets I’ve read whose passion and craft light me up and also show me (for example) how to make line-breaks less clunky; the friends who’ve encouraged me to make room in the world for my writing; the readers who make room in their days to read what I write and talk to me about it; yes, grateful. And it’s me, every day, who gets to stoke the furnace and lift the glass into it, to see what new shapes can be made. Most days, I’m grateful for that as well.

1. As the result of injuries from a car crash years ago, Dale Chihuly is blind in one eye and not physically able to do the heavy lifting involved in shaping molten glass. He conceives and sketches his creations and works closely with the skilled assistants who bring his visions into being.