Dinosaurs & Spoons by Nancy Sutor

Dinosaur Diorama is an outdoor site specific installation which includes single use plastic utensils, toy dinosaurs, fossils, prehistoric bones and evidence of the oil and gas industries.
From dinosaurs came petroleum, from petroleum came plastic, plastic is a problem, fossil fuels are a problem. Exploring the landscape we are living in today I only wish we could make plastic extinct!
This piece is part of ‘The Terrain Biennial, From the Earth: The Transmutation of Terra Firma.’ A worldwide project begun in 2011 by Sabina Ott now carried on by the non profit organization Tierra Exhibitions. The project brings contemporary art to the intimate terrain of the front yard.
Nina Mastrangelo curated this first Terrain Biennial in Santa Fe between the fence and the sidewalk on 600 block of Calle de Leon, on view day and night through Dec 1.
Other artists in the exhibition are Jerry Wellman, Sandra Wang and Christofer Brodsky, Lisa Freeman, Michael Shippling

Statement and Photographs by Nancy Sutor

I went out on a chilly day this week to see it. The City was doing some road work, and a guy in a safety helmet was enjoying the show and we had a quick chat about it.

This is the second year that Santa Fe has participated in the Terrain Biennial. 2019 information: https://terrainexhibitions.org

What Are You Reading?

From time to time I like to ask readers this question. I’ll blog your responses, and then I’ll be excited to have a long suggested reading list. Drop me a note at msagan1035@aol.com or post below, and I’ll most likely copy from there. Thank you! I need some good suggestions.

Bamboo

It’s always a treat to visit Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania with my friend Devon. This time there was ikebana and incredible bamboo installations by Akane Teshigahara, who is the head of a famous flower arranging school but also creates monumental sculptural works out of ephemeral plant material.

(Photographs from Longwood site).

This reminded me of another experience with bamboo. When we were in Japan two years ago there was a week when Isabel was on intense deadline, finishing the video to install in an old grain silo. She was working in lockdown. It was wet and cold, but I needed to get out of our residence in House 3 every day. My son-in-law Tim had come along as our “baggage handler” and support in everything. He’d go out early on a bicycle and shop for groceries, I’d write, but by afternoon I’d need entertainment. Every day we set off on food or by local train for a mini adventure. He had a cell phone ap that showed every Buddhist and Shinto shrine in the vicinity, and these were often a destination. A paper map showed a “stone” on a hill above the commercial road–probably Shinto. We set off to find it, despite being vague about its location.
We were soon climbing up a mountain road, the hillside terraced for cabbages and citrus trees. Yes, it was damp and hovered at about freezing, but Itoshima is basically a Mediterranean climate agriculturally, and fruit still hung in the misty weather. No Shinto stone, but we suddenly found ourselves in a vast bamboo forest, the stalks as high as huge trees, creating a deep wood. “Close your eyes and listen,” Tim said. That’s when I heard the forest creaking like a wooden schooner riding the waves.

Autumn…news from

I survived a three day period this October which marks the anniversaries of the death of two friends and of my first husband. Leaves fall. I move the herbs into the study and it warms up again. My grand-daughter is moving along in ways that can be described as very very close to crawling and pulls herself up to standing, mostly by using the nearest grown-up. Hickox Street has been widened as it turns into St. Francis, maybe in response to a terrible fatal accident last spring. I ate a glazed doughnut, and felt no regrets.
Then the car lights came on in the middle of the night. That really scared me!
Backstory–a recall, an adjustment to the brake lights, failure of that adjustment. Drained battery, engine light icons…trying to put it all together. Until at 2 am the driveway lit up red. I ran out and tried different things. Fortunately, but who knows why, the lights went off and I limped it to the dealer next day.
Now it is “fixed.” How many times have I tried to do the right thing, only to have it lead to something problematic and unexpected. Outside the laundromat a woman was crying in her green car. I told myself that if she was still crying when I came out I’d check on her. She wasn’t crying by then.
We realized the baby–like many of her relatives–has a bad case of FOMO–fear of missing out. She’ll fight sleep to stay where the action is. I personally don’t really have that any more. Autumn comes to me no matter what I do.

You Can Now Use 375,000 Images from the Met Museum for Free

Emile Pingat,
Ball gown (ca. 1864)

https://mymodernmet.com/metropolitan-museum-of-art-open-access

My Peeps in Poetry

Recently gave a reading of some of my favorite poets.

Here are three women of the Beats, New York School, San Francisco Renaissance…well, why label them. Just enjoy.

The Goddess Who Created This Passing World
By Alice Notley

The Goddess who created this passing world
Said Let there be lightbulbs & liquefaction
Life spilled out onto the street, colors whirled
Cars & the variously shod feet were born
And the past & future & I born too
Light as airmail paper away she flew
To Annapurna or Mt. McKinley
Or both but instantly
Clarified, composed, forever was I
Meant by her to recognize a painting
As beautiful or a movie stunning
And to adore the finitude of words
And understand as surfaces my dreams
Know the eye the organ of affection
And depths to be inflections
Of her voice & wrist & smile

***

Jerusalem Artichoke
By Janine Pommy Vega

I learned a hundred lessons
in the garden
dig
deeper was the first

the least little root
of Jerusalem artichoke
carries a sturdy new
plant into April

like the vaguest hope for
a friend
buried, like a sliver of moon
in the heart in spring

there are hundreds of sunchokes
take more than you need
give them to people you’ve
never seen

look for me
in the garden, laughing
and crying at once.

***

“The best thing about the past

is that it’s over’

when you die.

you wake up

from the dream

that’s your life.

Then you grow up

and get to be post human

in a past that keeps happening

ahead of you

Joanne Kyger

15 Years of Santa Fe Literary Review!

Julia Goldberg has done a beautiful write-up about the magazine’s history.

Miriam Sagan set up the Literary Review in the same model followed by literary and underground magazines across the country. She put together a staff and put out a call for “slush.”
“Slush is a rude word,” she tells SFR. “It means unsolicited. I don’t think there’s any way to train an editor in terms of running a literary magazine without a giant cattle call. You have no idea what the world is like. You don’t know what’s good and bad. You don’t know that famous people write terrible things and un-famous people write great things and people with great cover letters send you terrible things etc., etc., etc. I trained them. That’s what I know how to do: I know how to read slush.”

The Glore Psychiatric Museum, Missouri

This embroidery was done by a woman who didn’t speak. A funky looking roadside museum, with an unusual textile piece.

Photos from TripAdvisor. I’m tracking what I call “embroidery of survival” from the Hmong textile pieces about genocide to the Latin American wall hangings that remember the disappeared. This piece is individual, not communal. One article I read noticed the word “rape”appears more than once in the embroidered text.

Tahlequah by Serena Rodriguez

Tahlequah

the depth of a whale song
balances on the tip
of a mother’s despair
tour of grief swimming in
cold waters crashing
lifeless baby
black and white mask parting murky waters

for 17 days she pushes
slicing waves smuggling
thick air into wet lungs

for 17 days before mother
finally signals to ocean floor
that two is not enough

and with a tilt of her head
and a cry that reaches
beyond the oceans dark
graveyard, beyond the three
years of barren waters and
into my television screen—

I sip morning coffee
mug to mouth and

watch

waiting

blinking–

my daughter
arms spread wide
a sail soaring on
dry land, she dives in and out
swallowing air and her chest— it rises

and

falls

and

like the breath of a whale song

treading

silence.

Serena Rodriguez is writing her way through the undergraduate program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Serena is a Poetry Editor for Santa Fe Literary Review. She has been published in Santa Fe Literary Review, miriamswell.wordpress.com, prometheusdreaming.com and SFCC Accolades. You can
find more of her work at serenarodriguez.com

Yahrzeit

you’ve been dead
twenty-four years–
autumn again