New VRB materials are up on various pages. (Just click on the top menu & you’re there.) Most POSTS (below) are skippable–or skim-able for VRB material. Apologies if/when/where my words get in the way. Finding & feeling such work, my enthusiasm often spills over into comments & background not necessary for appreciation of the work itself.
Some pages are clearly works-in-progress; others contain experimental tours de force, composed with a finely tuned ear, eye, hand, heart & brush. There’s a lot more not up than up, including copies of finished works she made for & gave to others. (Drop a note if you’ve got special interests.)
If one aim here is to share more of her work with friends not otherwise aware of its range (which no one was, even Yours Crudely), another is to make new friends for it & her, who may love & admire the work & its maker in their own ways, not necessarily as we do. One of the strange features of certain arts is how examples can be so expressive & independent of their time at once, thus establishing such an intimate link with their makers in ways that transcend ordinary time, even while embodying it.
I’m not sure there’s a name for Virginia’s kind of artist. Her first art was response to life, its outer forms in nature, inner forms in savored experience–which included music, poetry, dance, painting, complementary ways of enhancing experience in which impression & expression become one. The sciences were part of her repertoire from the start, too, learning not just the names, but particulars of form & feeling. Her parents were naturalists, her father a noted ornithologist who also helped rehabilitate some of the injured, by which she became a friend of crows, especially Crocus, who even showed up at our wedding (a story told somewhere on the site).
Virginia never called herself an artist, a musician, or even a poet, just went on making art, music &, especially, poetry throughout as part of a fully lived life–often just tucked away & just now being discovered; sometimes a copy of what she’d made & passed along to particular people (lucky recipients). A few of these publicly identified as poets (e.g., Elizabeth Lamb, Harriet Kofalk) recognized her gifts, but none knew their full extent, either range or volume.
This was not at all from hiding, however. She didn’t realize extent, range & volume either, because she wasn’t thinking in those terms herself, or shaping experience to the. She wasn’t making “a body of work,” any more than trying to make a name for herself, let alone a career. Besides the career of life itself, she had a career–& it was teaching. The creative, inner work emerged from the life experienced, & relationships, the openness to sharing, period.
She didn’t leave a neatly tied little bundle of life’s work like Emily Dickinson, for example. She did leave bundles, however, in folders, boxes, drawers, little notebooks, scribbles on pads, and certain special collections in a few sketch books. A number of finished groups are done in her own hand, with drawings, sometimes found copied from originals made for particular people. Other are messier, some finished except for a clear hand; some showing up more fragmented in folders labelled “in progress…” or “to work on…”
Just as each of her short ‘snap-poems’ are distinct moments, each of the longer pieces is its own adventure–an exploration of experience, from senses & the doors of perception to mysteries of heart, form & music. A natural scientist, her work draws from where observation, relationship & experiment meet.
She didn’t talk about things like poetry, least of all her own; she simply practiced its essence, including experiments played out on the edge of the possible, as if to test just what could be done in words in motion through lines (as in All Downhill from here, for example).
She took each poem–hers or anyone else’s–just as she approached each person, as a genuine original. When her poems are put together, the power of her own uniquely quiet & reflective voice starts to become ever more evident.
Individual pieces are going up, therefore, with an added excitement from the sense of a larger discovery-in-progress, one only becoming clear cumulatively. It may take more complete transcription & uploading, plus entirely re-considered organization of the materials, for the impact the work-as-a-whole deserves.
Even so, the first steps include finding, transcribing & uploading. As with any walk in beauty, the spirit of the whole emerges step by step, through the particulars….
[Though not listed under Recent Posts, “Hello, friends” & “Forever young,” the two earliest, can be found at the bottom of the Post-page scroll, or by clicking July 2019 & Sept. 2019, respectively, under Archives. –June 15, 2020]
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