Red Stones | about the book
I began thinking about writing the poems in this collection one afternoon a few years ago while standing in one of the galleries at the New Britain Museum of American Art, where I have been visiting for some fifty years, and looking once again at McVey’s Barn by Andrew Wyeth. I had seen that painting for the first time as a teenager and was so moved by it then that I wrote a poem, which I admit from this distance in time seems at best rudimentary, to make permanent for myself the astonishing immersion into that piece that I felt while standing before it, absorbing and breathing in its beckoning textures and probing light. I tried, in that early poem, to report my experience, to see if words could recreate my love of that painting, as a visual appreciation and recitation as well as an emotional jolt. I have that poem secure in its anonymity in a closed folder, along with other poems written when I was seventeen. Next to it also is a poem I wrote about seeing that painting again seventeen years later, when I found myself back in that museum after all those years had passed. It is a different kind of poem, layered in a different way, reflecting on the painting, of course, but now seeking not to report on it or on my experience seeing it but instead committed to creating a parallel experience, springboarding from Wyeth more deeply into myself and exploring in that self, as I then knew it, the meanings and significances of the profound sense of loss Wyeth depicts.
I have thought often since those two essential and special moments, separated by the years, in front of that painting, about how seeing the piece affected me not just as a visitor to the gallery who is in some way touched by the works he is seeing but as someone who wishes to capture and present – or perhaps re-present – how and why he has been affected. For me, that had something to do with being an observer as well as a reciprocal participant, engaging and being engaged by the wonderful and often overwhelmingly beautiful objects and colors and shadings of brushstroke and line in front of me. Over the years, I’ve decided that such engagements – across the world and across our lives, and not just linking to works of art but in and through all those special connections that provide insight and revelation – are moments of epiphany. I don’t necessarily mean that in a theological sense, though some of that element is part of my understanding of that idea and present in some of the poems in these pages. I mean, rather, an intense and often startling experience, a sudden and deeply powerful realization of significance and meaning, of the thing seen and of the effect felt or understood.
These “epiphanic moments” provide, for me, a sense of revelation of the pinpoint of experience, in its most immediate expression. That experience is usually free of narrative progression but not necessarily free of the concentric circles of the considered moment, that is, of all the horizontal details of such a moment. There is a story to be told, but it is a story that does not unfold over time but exists in that lightning flash. My goal in writing these poems is to see if I can create those moments, to use and engage what I consider to be the painterly qualities of language, of image and metaphor, and to consider each word within the poem as part of an overlaying of lines and images, as individual strokes of the brush. The epiphanic moments I am interested in exploring in these pages have something to do with such layerings of the world and with the act of unfolding those layers, not to define progression to some conclusion but to encourage immediacy of connection and insight, perhaps much like the experience I had standing in front of McVey’s Barn. So in these poems I have worked to create layers, some overlapping the way stones often overlap in piles, and to do so with the hope that in that act of creation I could ask the reader to see simplicity in texture and, in like fashion, complexity in the simple resonances of words and lines. That may be the essential task of the lyric poem, and I consider these poems lyric in that way.
As I was thinking about this book, in the Museum, I knew that this gathering of poems would be immensely enriched by the kind of parallel artistic experience I had when writing that second poem about Wyeth’s painting. That has something to do with my belief in the reverberant connections between and among works of art, in various genres and forms. All artists, no matter their foundational materials, explore similar themes, and I believed that the epiphanic moments I am interested in would generate new engaging energy through a collaboration with a painter who had a profound understanding of those resonances and who could create not a commentary on my poems but an experience of equal valence. Only one person came to mind: the extraordinary painter, poet, philosopher Steven Schroeder. During the course of the past decade, I have had the joyful privilege of reading his magisterial poetry, celebrating his astonishing paintings, and thinking with him about how and why art, in all its forms, makes us human and alive. His paintings, as the sequence he has created here so beautifully shows, live in a world of insight and revelation. They are autonomous comments on some of the images my poems explore, but more than that they are in and of themselves epiphanies, in each striking element, in each texture and image, in each subtle turn, drawing us into a resonant moment, into the very heart of truth.
I am privileged to have worked with Steve on this book. Our collaboration has been a remarkably satisfying and essential literary experience for me. Regina Schroeder’s masterful presentation of our collaboration brings the works, and all of us, together in art.
Jonas Zdanys
Wallingford and New Britain, February 2016
JONAS ZDANYS is a bilingual poet and translator who was born in New Britain, Connecticut, shortly after his parents arrived in the United States from a United Nations camp for Lithuanian refugees. He is the author of forty-four other books, forty of them collections of his own poetry, written in English and in Lithuanian, and of his translations of Lithuanian literature. He has received a number of prizes, book awards, writing and travel grants, and public recognitions for his own poetry and for his translations. He has taught at the State University of New York and at Yale University, where he also held a number of administrative positions and was a Scholar-in-Residence in the Yale Center for Russian and East European Studies. He served for more than a decade as the state of Connecticut’s Chief Academic Officer and is currently Professor of English and Poet-in-Residence at Sacred Heart University, where he teaches seminars on modern poetry and directs the program in creative writing. More at http://jonaszdanys.org/