In New York City this morning, I sat in front of my computer thinking about art and communication: words, images, gestures, lyrics, voices, and even Twitter phrases. Rhythm and language, image and text. The ways artists I know use combinations of these to communicate.

Painter and photographer Yale Epstein does this with his calligraphic paintings. In this body of work, Yale invents unique symbols, layering spontaneous language over color and line. When people see these paintings, the comments are often: “Did he do all this by hand?” “Is this a real language?” I found a quote by Yale on the internet site of Boston gallerist Diana Levine:

“I trust imagination and intuition and am fascinated with process. The art I do always involves an interaction between the evolving work and myself. It is conversation that is at times quiet and civil, at other times a screaming match.”

Yale is a generous artist, always willing to answer questions and offer encouragement. He’s traveled extensively and studied the shape of written language in many parts of the world. When I look at Yale’s paintings, the conversation he has with himself while working translates into visual communication, even though his written language is an unspoken one. That communication reminds me to go back to my own writing and photography and listen to what they have to tell me. Check out his website at www.yaleepstein.com.

When recent snow storms began icing the city’s sidewalks and dominating the conversations of New Yorkers, I decided to write seasonal haiku and immediately post the poems on my Twitter feed. I thought I’d invented a snow-sport that didn’t require ski gear. But today I opened the New York Times and found that the City Room had the same idea, asking readers to send in snow-inspired haiku for publication. Underneath a photo of sledders in Central Park, today’s paper printed three New Yorkers’ haiku. I’ll post several of mine here—some in original twitter-from, a couple slightly edited. It’s a fun project. Try it!

*   Powdery snow falls / From a Village fire escape / Ivy climbs inside   *

*   On Fifth Avenue / Mink stole over sleeveless shell / Ice skirts edge of curb   *

*   Blankets of snow wrap / Cars parked along Bedford Street / Upstairs, he calls home   *

*   A hibiscus bloom / resting on my window pane / woke the neighborhood   *

*   On West Side Highway / the Frank Gehry building curves / glass becomes sea-frost   *

*   Near the farm table / warm hearth sparks luminous fire / friends measure snowfall   *

On the top floor of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, Andy Warhol’s “stillies” roll on large television monitors, filling an expansive gallery with silent black and white footage of some of Warhol’s Factory stars. The text at the entrance to the show, where a lone vintage film projector clicks rhythmically, says:

“In the summer of 1963 Warhol began making portraits with film. Using his first movie camera—a silent 16mm Bolex—he filmed Sleep, featuring John Giorno in various shots that together amount to almost five and a half hours of inaction.”

When I was in Seattle last summer, I saw the Warhol show at the Seattle Art Museum—the focus there was on the photo booth series and other prints. The MoMA show is about film—no soup cans, no Marilyn.  At MoMA today, Edie Sedgwick and Lou Reed gazed out of different monitors on either side of a doorway to the screening room showing a movie-theater-scaled Kiss. I stood back, looked past their faces to a screen beyond, and participated in Warhol’s voyeurism. I watched Kiss while Sedgwick and Reed “watched” me. On the wall behind me, Allen Ginsberg sat and barely blinked until the film ended in a bright flash.

The Factory years coincide with Patti Smith’s timeline in her memoir Just Kids. The MoMA show and Smith’s book document a culture committed to experimentation and the influence that experimentation had on the history of New York City’s art scene. I recommend both.

Just outside of Woodstock on the winding road to Willow, Elena Zang and her partner Alan Hoffman have an art gallery and grounds worthy of any landscape painter’s attention. There’s a sculpture garden and a flowing stream. In summer a vegetable garden anchors the edge of the gallery, and in winter birds gather and nibble seeds and breadcrumbs from the snow. Nori the dog greets at the door. Elena and Alan display their pottery, fired just up the hill, in the same gallery where they show the work of Mary Frank, Joan Snyder, Judy Pfaff, Donald Elder, and other abstract painters and mixed media artists.

During this season’s first big snow storm, Elena invited me to lunch. We sat at her dining table talking and looking out at the snow, the bluejays and cardinals, and the wind tossing pine branches. Everything about the day illustrated that some people find work they love. Today, on another snow day while at lunch in a Greenwich Village cafe, I glanced out the window, watched New Yorkers pass on slushy sidewalks, and wondered about vocation. After ordering a crepe and an espresso, I said hello to an architect, made small talk with a waiter whose family I’ve met briefly, and tried not to listen to two people holding a business meeting right behind me. And I remembered Elena and Alan’s gallery and the painters they represent there. People doing work, finding vocation, finding their way. Often beautifully.

Years ago, I was living in New York City full time and really needed a change, so I signed up for a summer writing and meditation workshop in Taos, New Mexico. From Albuquerque, I rented a car and drove north. While crossing the mesa just before Taos, I prepared myself for the way the southwestern landscape would instantly work some kind of magic, loosening up the habitual routines and worries of a nature-craving, hurried New Yorker. Suddenly, I’d feel relaxed, wise, and intuitively know how to go back to Manhattan and find a great apartment. I hate to admit it, but I’m only exaggerating a little.

I had been to Taos before and was familiar with the story of the Mabel Dodge Luhan House where the workshop was held. Mable Dodge, a former New York City socialite, escaped Manhattan and helped bring artists and writers to the southwest. The adobe house she built, and used to shelter and entertain those artists, still sits beside pueblo land and beneath what many consider to be a sacred mountain. The week we wrote there, heat and draught threatened the land, fires burned, and when it finally rained, there was celebration.

New Year’s Eve has never been meant that much to me. Today, though, I suddenly remembered Taos. Writing, reading, dancing with other writers in the desert rain. The combination of history, landscape, meditation, and writing did shake up and change some of my old New York habits. I’m not headed to the desert any time soon, but I’m enjoying writing about ways I’ve celebrated opportunities to start over and try something new. Happy New Year everybody. Have fun!

And Happy Birthday Patti Smith.

From my studio in New York City, I look out onto bland buildings arranged like toy blocks on a board game. I’ve had better views. (And I’ve had worse. But that’s another post.) When I lived downtown, my windows opened up to panoramic Manhattan skyline and the glamour of unobstructed North. The Empire State Building, The Chrysler Building, even some flashing neon from Times Square. Although I can now see pieces of the river, and sunsets are money shots here, I have to use my imagination to soften a stark daytime landscape.

A few minutes ago, looking out at this scene, I envisioned the painter Jenny Nelson’s work. Jenny paints in a spare white but sunny studio near Woodstock, NY. I imagine Jenny taking Hudson River cliffs and transforming them into blocks of stacked color, making a crazy quilt landscape with her trademark blue-green palette, and then sketching boulder shapes and crayon textured markings. It’s an example of how art stays with me, adding layers to everyday experience, and a little imaginary fun to some really boring architecture.

I’ve been back from North Carolina for a couple of days, and I haven’t thought about writing anything for this post—until five minutes ago. Whenever I’m down south, I compare the imaginary life I could have had if I’d stayed to the real life I have now in New York. This probably isn’t a productive use of my time, but I always do it. There are so many things I miss about where I grew up. There’s a type of humor there that I don’t find in the northeast, a laugh-at-yourself sensibility that catches me off guard at first, but then I remember where I am, and I exhale and lighten up a little. And once I’m back in New York, I feel the difference. I need to find a way to make a space in the middle of a crowded life.

Although I’ve always loved poetry, about a decade ago, I started reading poems in a different way. I created a poetry practice that helped me access a type of space that I’d lost. I don’t know if I’d need poetry, or use it as much as I do, if I had stayed down south. Maybe I would, but I can’t imagine I’d feel the same urgency to enter the poet’s mind and language and rhythm. Poems have eased big-city loneliness and helped me move through change and loss. I read Stanley Kunitz’s “The Layers” over and over after my grandfather died when I couldn’t go south often enough to help my grandmother. Right now, Naomi Shihab Nye’s work keeps coming to mind. This weekend, I’ll pick up a book of her poems and find out where it leads me.

I usually write about art or photography or writers who inspire me, but tonight I have to do a post about a monster truck. After the long drive from New York yesterday, I’m still tired and a little groggy–sort of delirious. So when I saw a red truck today in front of the Greensboro Coliseum that you would literally need a ladder to get into, I couldn’t believe it. Suddenly I thought of so many questions. Does the owner carry a ladder in the back? Does he or she use a rope—and climb it like we did in elementary school gym class—to get to the driver’s seat? Is there a purpose for the outrageous distance between the wheels and the body of this vehicle?

Even though I’m exhausted, I just had to write something for this blog because it’s Thursday, and that’s when I post. I thought I might write about how I love Southern women’s humor and strength, or how they’re already saying Merry Christmas down here at the shopping centers, or how I try to retain some of what I learned growing up. But it’s late, and all I can think about is how anybody could possibly drive that monster truck.

Happy Thanksgiving! I’m in upstate New York today, looking out the window at a mountain range that includes Meads Mountain, Indian Head and Overlook. It’s overcast, so the purple light that often shades the mountains during winter looks blue-gray, and the sky sits low and heavy against the pine trees.

I was going to do a really quick Thursday post, basically just Happy Thanksgiving, until I opened my email and found a link to a blog sponsored by NYC’s Asian American Writer’s Workshop. In the Open City blog, writers cover three NYC neighborhoods, documenting what they witness and writing about change as it relates to the history of those neighborhoods. In the email, the novelist Deanna Fei says:

“Sometimes I think that the writer’s task is as simple as this: Look closer. Pause. Look closer still. And let what you see surprise you. But, as most of us know, amid the buzz of daily life in the city, that’s often the hardest thing to do.”

That’s a good quote. This Thanksgiving, and everyday, I hope we all get a change to rest a little, recharge, and then pause and look at whatever city or country life surrounds us. Happy Thanksgiving.

Last night Patti Smith won the National Book Award for Just Kids at a ceremony in NYC attended by many people using Twitter to send messages instantly to the rest of us who were sitting at home. I followed the evening’s tweets leading up to the announcement of the nonfiction winner like I used to follow basketball on the radio when I was a kid. I really wanted Patti Smith to win. And she did.

The tweets said she was gracious and lovely and cried when she accepted the award. When I’ve spoken to her very briefly she was kind and (I’m not making this up) seemed to radiate warmth. Her art isn’t always easy. When I’ve heard her read, a tougher survivor comes through. Lyrically she takes risks, and her performances leave no doubt about where she stands politically. And all of that is what makes her continuously interesting. She’s someone I have watched and admired for many years. Congratulations Patti.