Grad School: Week 19

To be of use
by Marge Piercy

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

Next week is back to school for me and back to work for many others. I don't have too much to describe this week. We drove from Maine to Nebraska in two days and are slowly acclimating. We heard this interview with Maurice Sendak on the radio, somewhere in Western Iowa. It is a beautiful twenty minutes about life, growing older, and beauty. Happy New Year.

Grad School: Week 18

"Maine's long and cold winters may help keep our State's population low, but our harsh climate also accounts for what is unique and valuable about our land and our people."
-Tom Allen

There was nothing harsh about this morning on Little John Island, nor can I claim to be a Mainer. For anyone who has visited, though, the state has a way of grabbing you and today was a good example. Cooper explored why the holes he was digging in the sand continued to fill with water, while i came about as close to a perched Bald Eagle as one can get. What does this have to do with graduate school? Nothing really. But it is still week 18.

Both my wife's mother and her partner are artists, a painter and furniture builder, and Robert Newton helped me to construct some large masonite slump forms to drive back to Nebraska for work in the studio. What these large arcs will produce is a bit of a question but i like the scale. Dare to dream a little bigger.
The weather today is all snow, quiet a change in just one day, but has put me in the mind of all the contradictions there are in life and art, relationships and living spaces, our emotional and physical lives, in nature and the animal world. Is this time of year about redemption? The winter's slow end as the days get longer, three minutes at a time? The Writer's Almanac today had a quote by Robert Bly, who has seem miles of snow fall to the ground and i'll end with his thoughts:

"I was very surprised to find out, as my poems pick up more and more of the past of human beings, the ancient culture, more and more of the grief and the suffering of human beings -- the poems become funnier! I don't understand that, but I love it. I feel that there's some way that as the mind gets more mature, in the midst of a lot of grief, it's able to dance a little!"

Let's Dance.

Grad School: Week 17

"Art hurts. Art urges voyages-and it is easier to stay at home."
-Gwendolyn Brooks

The semester is over and I am writing this from Maine, where there is nothing but trees, ocean, and sweet endless rest. Things finished up well, with all the papers, presentations, meetings, and critiques done and wrapped up. I have heard the first semester of graduate school described as the depths of despair, but I did not find it that way. It was challenging, and at times nerve-racking, but I liked it. I liked it very much. When it ended, I made a quick run out East to my second home, Maine. Here, things are very different from the rest of the United States:

My father,Elliott Sober, a lifetime academic, believes graduate school is a 12 month a year endeavor and I agree with him. So while on break, I am letting ideas percolate and trying to keep the sketch book handy. Back in Nebraska, the studio is clean and ready for me when i return. I'll sign off with a video sent to me by my mother-in-law, Carol Bass, that is worth watching through until the end. Thanks for reading and if you have not, sign up to follow this blog on the right side of the screen. Membership has its privileges.

Grad School: Week 16

"The way you made it, that's the way it will be."
-Gillian Welch

In order to be a good potter I think you got to be just as ornery as the dickens. If you ain't, and ain't as cantankerous as they come. someone is going to come and change you and you're going to be turnin' out stuff that inside you don't want to make.
- Zedith Teague, potter, North Carolina

The question from most pottery students is: "why?" Why did the glaze do this? Why did my handle fall off? Why does my plate look like a taco? Why is no one buying my prize piece? Why are my ideas not being realized in my finished piece? A resounding chorus of Why's? This choir of questions gets less technical with experience and the answers become more difficult to find. A favorite teacher of mine would always pronounce with her southern twang, "Well that's the way you made it." And this answer remains the most basic and truthful response to questions of content, S-cracks, and everything else. Think about the way you made it. The answer is there.



Week 16 is the final week of the first semester and culminates in a committee review to look over the entirety of your work made during that time. It is composed of the clay faculty plus one or two other professors. Questions are asked. Some are answerable, others not. I like to give some serious thought to if i know the answer to the question posed before i start talking. "I don't know yet," is an acceptable answer, at least in this first year.

Besides pots, I worked on a series of tiles in low-fire clay, medical in nature. A second body of work. A work in progress to be more specific. I don't know where these are headed exactly but i have ideas, and the time to fail and re-try. In the meantime, it is winter break and there will be a lot of time to think about the least likely way to screw up my ideas. The way i make them, as always, is the way they will be.

Grad School: Week 15

Worry is not competence, but we make do with the former since the latter may reside only in our imaginations -- or in summer, when it's not really needed.

-Richard Russo, on Autumn in Maine

I had a successful firing of the salt-kiln this week and have worked out a few of the bugs. This time i sprayed in 5 lbs. of salt in solution rather than dumping in 2.5 lbs. Also, i stalled the kiln out at around cone 7 in order to prolong the firing. Those burners are super powered. I could have wrapped things up at ten in the morning if I wanted to. Someone told me at some point that "pots like prolonged exposure to high temperatures." The same person also told me to, "end the firing on a hot note." I had to ask what the hell this meant and he said that the kiln gets turned off at its hottest temperature. Makes sense.


It takes some time to develop a good relationship with a kiln. A trusting, reciprocal, and healthy relationship. You have to learn its likes and dislikes, what makes it temperamental, when to push it and when to let it do its own thing. Only then can you get the thing dialed in. Sound like a lot of emotions to put into a bunch of bricks and some natural gas burners? You bet it is. It's not the most intimate relationship in my life, obviously, but i do think about the kiln when we are not together.
It takes some time to get "dialed in" with a new kiln and i made good progress to that end this week. Five of these Yunomis will get shipped to AKAR this week, it is that time of year again. This Friday is my first Committee Review where i present the best work of the semester.
Then there are papers and presentations, a pottery sale, cleaning, and i am off for Christmas. Am i gaining competency or learning to worry more here in grad school, as Richard Russo puts it? Probably both. I am starting to learn about what art comes from the subconscious and what gets made from the conscious mind. Week 15 is over, that is for sure a definite.

This last round reminded me why I love salt-fired pots, despite the labor and long firing process. They were the first decent pots i have made here that look the way i like. That this only took two firing is good. At Northern Clay Center, it took me a year to get that kiln to behave.

Towards the end of this week, i was trying to remember how many firings that have ended with me lying on a studio table late at night, waiting for the temperature to please go up enough so i can go home a lay down on a bed. Let's just say i believe in a long and aggressive pre-heat. Thanks for reading and to those potters firing for the pre-christmas rush, i wish you and your kilns many happy days, not nights, together.