Red Stones | about the book

Over the years that I’ve had the pleasure of knowing and working with Jonas Zdanys, I’ve often thought of him not only as a poet but also as a painter whose chosen medium is the written word. Red Stones reflects this at every turn in poems that embody what he refers to as “the epiphanic moment” in lyric poetry. I share Jonas’s fascination with such moments, so I was delighted when he invited me to paint with him in this collection.

I had encountered a number of the poems before – in Cormorants, in the Wonderbook of Poetry, and in all roads will lead you home – so I came to the whole ready to dwell on familiar spaces in new light. It’s important, I think, that the phrase Jonas uses to name the driving force of these poems combines a matter of light (epiphany) with a bit of time (the moment), a combination that is critical to lyric poetry. Dwelling on them, as one does in the close reading that is part of a collaboration like this, adds an experience of space we all know as embodied beings. Whatever we set out to do takes place; and, in the process of doing it, we make places. And that is worthy of reflection.

I’d like to think this place is more like a studio in which we work together than a gallery in which we put our work on display. In this case, Jonas paints with words while I paint with pigment. And, recalling the times Regina (whose medium is paper and print) and I painted together when she was young (and how we never painted the same thing no matter what was right before our eyes), I think it is worth noting that you will find three painters working when you enter this studio.

One effect of recognizing that Jonas and I are painting together is to remove any lingering temptation to illustrate the poems. We have made a shared space in which to paint, but we have not painted at the same time in the same light with the same thing in mind (even when what we’ve had in mind was nothing). And that may shed some light on how dwelling together over time makes a place that has a character that is distinctive and may be interesting.

I wrote earlier of close reading. For me, that took the form of reading the poems again and again before I painted and as I painted. In the process, I found images that caught my eye and often brought other images to mind. In painting, I followed as many as I could, knowing that one thing leads to another. When Jonas wrote of a blue dream paling in a flat land, I responded to a paling I knew in my bones from the Texas Panhandle and South Plains. And the long yellow grass in my mind’s eye was the tall grass of the prairie that stretches across the Flint Hills of Kansas and the Osage Hills of Oklahoma into the Texas Panhandle. Every time I turned over a red stone, I saw shale cliffs, thought of Wichita River mud, and heard red dirt music. And the trees with their tangled roots were made more vivid by the memory of their absence. I found myself reading “alder” and thinking “mesquite.” And that took me back to my father including a little bit of mesquite in the harp he made for Regina before he died. Mesquite is a tonewood. But that’s another story...

Part of my fascination with epiphany is how consistently it defies containment. It seems to me that the poems in this collection (and lyric poems more generally when they work) don’t contain epiphanic moments so much as they are such moments. And one beauty of moments like that when you dwell on them is that they take you places you have never been, places that surprise you.

As I write this, I don’t know what Regina will make of the book – but I look forward to it, as I look forward to seeing what the place becomes when you enter.

The studio is open. There is work to be done. Welcome.

Steven Schroeder
Chicago, February 2016

STEVEN SCHROEDER is a poet and visual artist who was born in Wichita Falls, grew up in the Texas Panhandle, studied at Valparaiso University and the University of Chicago, and spent many years moonlighting as a professor of philosophy and religious studies in Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, Wisconsin, Shenzhen, and Chicago (after a stint in community organizing and social work in Amarillo and Pampa). He has written, co-written, or edited thirty books (though some readers have concluded that it’s really thirty variations on a single book). Still fine tuning, he has a new collection of poems (the moon, not the finger, pointing) and a collection of interdisciplinary lectures (What’s Love Got To Do With It?), both published by Lamar University Literary Press in 2016. More at stevenschroeder.org