How To Live After The Hyphen or How and Why to Make Art After The Hyphen

First look up what a hyphen means.  I had to.  

Sometime while reading a book a mixing of language phrases a way of being that you have lived but never articulated, the words causing your heart to ache in your chest.  This paragraph, written by Robert Hass in his book, What Light Can Do speaking of a poem by Emily Dickinson does it;  “So in this poem about a mood that everyone in America is medicating themselves for right now, she’s talking only about only being alive with this painful sense of absence, but a divine sense of it, or a least it seems to me a sense of absence, or at least a sense of an intuition whose namelessness is its quality, so much its quality that it hurts.  Let me just say the whole poem to you now:”

And then he quotes the poem below.  I find his explanation of how the poem makes him aware more poetic than the poem itself.  Or maybe, because he himself is a poet, that he knows that only a true poet will understand the significant meaning of the poem and so feels compelled to explain it to us, us lesser than, which would deeply sadden us since he would know the beauty and we only a description of.  Such is great art and art making for me.  (this includes a wonderfully realized hand made cup because sculpture is often to great a burden to bear.  It also requires that you live near "the Landscape listens")

There’s a certain Slant of light,

Winter Afternoons—

That oppresses, like the Heft

Of Cathedrals Tunes—

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us—

We can find no scar,

But internal difference

Where the Meanings, are—

None may teach it—Any—

‘Tis the Seal Despair—

An imperial affliction

Sent us of the Air—

When it comes, the Landscape listens—

shadows—hold their breath—

When it goes, ‘tis like the Distance

On the look of Death—

This must be how Moses felt looking over at the Promised Land or how Adam felt when he looked back at Eden.  It also lives up to the promise of the books title, What Light Can Do—

 

“I am the light of the world.” And then to us, “you are the light of the world.”  Why art for me is so critically—sincerely—scared. 

The landscape that listens the most for me