Winter & Spring 2020
Michael Bazzett, Jehanne Dubrow, Gemma Gorga, Amaud Jamaul Johnson, Danusha Laméris, Stanley Plumly, Octavio Quintanilla, Alberto RÃos, Arra L. Ross, Taije Silverman, Nance Van Winckel, & more
Michael Bazzett, Jehanne Dubrow, Gemma Gorga, Amaud Jamaul Johnson, Danusha Laméris, Stanley Plumly, Octavio Quintanilla, Alberto RÃos, Arra L. Ross, Taije Silverman, Nance Van Winckel, & more
Stanley Plumly has been a mentor and friend of mine since 1988 when I took his Form and Theory class at the University of Maryland. Lummi Island is the most northeasterly of the San Juan archipelago. Located near Bellingham, Washington, it is served by a small ferry that makes the six minute crossing about once an hour. It is just two hours from Seattle, and one and a half hours from Vancouver, BC. The Lummi Nation are a tribe of the Coast Salish. The tribe primarily resides on and around the Lummi Indian Reservation. The Lummi were forcibly moved to reservation lands after the signing of the Point Elliott Treaty in 1855.
Stanley Plumly looks, with a poet’s eye and across the sublime landscape of northern Italy, at a certain day from early in the 21st century. That afternoon we’d finished up early, at about two-fifteen, and decided, since it was a particularly pristine day, to make the long descent to town. Maybe to get coffee, shop, whatever. We were fifteen minutes getting ready, and it would take fifteen minutes more to reach the exit gate. We were in lucky residence at the Villa Serbelloni, centerpiece of the Rockefeller fifty acre holdings spread out on the high hillside overlooking the village of Bellagio on one side and the meeting place of Lakes Como and Lecco on the other. The villa and its grounds and gardens are a sight to behold, located among some of the most beautiful mountain scenery in the world, the Pre-Alps, as they’re called, which serve as green and granite precursors to the real Alps, the great gray mountains whose ghostly, snowy forms loom almost invisibly. Much of this height and majesty are grounded …
In the not-too-distant future those to whom it matters may look back at some point in the 1990s, when the networking of the Internet really started to take off, and wonder if at that moment the actual writing of thorough and styled and even personal letters, as a medium of one reflective silence speaking to another reflective silence (roughly Rilke’s definition of poetry), ended.