(Ellsworth Kelly, oil on canvas, 1960, Blanton Museum of Art)
Wendy Barker
This is it. All you need. Though nothing resembles anything you know. It’s neither star nor flower, this imperfect oval more like a fat yellow cigar floating in blue so dark and bright it couldn’t be any sky that’s ever filled your breath. And the bottom third of the canvas: pure green. You don’t have to do a thing. Can stop the churning of your desire to turn this high-flying ovoid into an ear of corn or a squashed halo. This is only about color: yellow, blue, green. But your mind is still recalling that the first two can make the third. Like sun and sky make grass. You keep trying to put names on these three shapes, though they have nothing to do with names. Yet you can’t leave, for in the high sky above this bright lawn, a widening sun is about to drop the egg of itself into your lap.
Light Pink Octagon (Richard Tuttle, 1967, canvas dyed with TINTEX, Blanton Museum of Art) Wendy Barker
Like nobody’s skin. Or skirt, blouse. Nobody’s flounce, neither ruffled nor scalloped, nobody’s ribboned
basket. Or bonnet, or roses. No carnations, no half-sliced roast beside the wineglass, no ruddy
cheek of a maid shouldering wheat, no dimpled buttocks of Venus or Bathsheba, no thundering
Jehovah-splintered sunset, no velvet-tassled curtain, no fizzy drink. Not like skin, no veins traversing
flesh, no one begging to be touched. I could move into this unadorned, open, plain-woven canvas,
a pastel simplicity, an unclouded fabric billowing rugged as a mainsail uncurled,
heading out to the wide ocean with the wind, this aerial cotton swath, unsplashed by any paint,
uncluttered by any pen or brush, this unframed shape—arresting as a full breath.
(The Georgia Review, 2008)
*Wendy Barker is poet-in-residence and a professor of English at UTSA. She is the author of Nothing Between Us: The Berkeley Years, a novel in prose poems (Del SolPress, 2009) and numerous collections of poetry, including Poems from Paradise (2005), Way of Whiteness (2000), Let the Ice Speak (1991), and Winter Chickens (1990), as well as three chapbooks, Eve Remembers (1996), Between Frames (2006), and Things of the Weather (2009).
An Announcement from UTSA Festschrift for Wendy Barker Call for Submissions
You are invited to respond to this call for submissions for a Festschrift volume celebrating the career of Wendy Barker. Wendy has taught for over thirty years, mostly in our community here in San Antonio. She is an award-winning poet, scholar, essayist, and she has been a mentor to numerous writers who now live, work, and teach all over the country. She introduced the creative writing curriculum at UTSA, and she continues to work to help our program grow and flourish. All submissions should include name, mailing and email addresses. Digital files should be submitted to:
Wendybarkerfestschrift.submishmash.com All submissions due : May 1, 2012
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