|one practice

“One Practice” imagines a potter at the wheel, performing a task that is completely familiar yet, due to the nature of making, always new: despite any number of previous efforts; despite knowledge, skill, experience or devotion; the final result can never be completely predetermined. A pot can fall apart on the wheel. A stress in the clay can crack or warp as it dries or, as a pot expands and contracts in the kiln, it can break. So it is with making poems.

The poem is one of a series exploring the artistic process and is inspired by the work of British potter Edmund de Waal, the source of the poem’s epigraph. When asked about the relation between his roles as ceramist and writer, de Waal replied: “…the things I have to do get closer and closer as I get older — the making and the books — but it’s one practice. …And they are both trying to find places of loss…find out what is recoverable.” As a poet who is also passionate about visual art, I understand the desire to find a form through which one’s passions can reconcile themselves or, at least, co-exist.

“One Practice” is not about de Waal or his work so much as it is about this convergence he describes, of making a material object and making language, and the inherent risk of disaster. The poem is also about the maker and the thing made — a relationship that, whatever the outcome, cannot be broken.