So here we are, under the cloud in the ceiling that contains the lights of the winter nebula and constellation, Orion, beloved by Charles Burchfield and other wise men, from Egyptian to Hopi, and Sumerian. This is the Spring, and it is our annual time at The Center to anchor to mission, to set our sights, and focus our values. In this planning process we look toward virtues of nature expressed by Burchfield and by the leadership of SUNY Buffalo State and the leadership of the Burchfield Penney Art Center who created this LEED certified Center, the first art museum in New York State and perhaps the nation.
For Charles Burchfield, the heaven’s stars were “the eye of God.” Charles Gwathemy, the great architect who designed our Center, created this room, this gathering place, as his “vanishing point”. He said it was recognizable from the bottom of the opening stairs, following the sight lines of the sawtooth railing to the “cloud” which holds warrior Orion.
Thus, we welcome Charles Wright, a manwho knows the stars and their heavens. We welcome him and his wife Holly, who knows light well as a distinguished photographer. We welcome them to Buffalo. He fits well here, for he has said, in his book of later poems, “Negative Blue”, that above Orion “God’s blue hand unfolds.”
Now, this is the first time a seated poet laureate of the United States, who is the consultant in poetry to the Librarian of Congress, has visited our Queen City on the Niagara Frontier.
We are pleased to make the Charles E. Burchfield Award to Charles Wright. There have been about 30 books by our Laureate, two of them nonfiction essays and three of them translations, and there have been awards for many, from the Pulitzer, to the National Book Award, to the Book Critics Award to Canada’s Griffin Poetry Prize.
Professor Wright comes to us from Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, via California, Italy and Montana in summers, but he has lived for a good long time in Charlottesville where he is emeritus and distinguished at the University of Virginia.
We thought last year about making an award in Burchfield’s name for artists who achieved significantly and who composed clearly about sustaining value, particularly as related to our land. The artists here – Wright and Burchfield - invite the viewer to join them in the act of creating, invite the viewer to enter into the silent space between the lines for just perhaps in there between the lines the spirit might be found: something greater than ourselves. “All my life,” said Wright, “I have listened for the dark speech of silence.” This from the title poem of his book, “Buffalo Yoga”.
Some call the work of the painter Charles and the poet Charles ambiguous, to say that their meanings are unsettled, when it is much to the contrary. Both artists have settled on generosity, opening up their own inquiry, their way of being in the world, lifelong. For Charles Wright, it has been half-a-century, since working at University of Iowa on a PhD in 1965 with Donald Justice and classmates Mark Strand and James Tate, and all during this time, his course has stayed true. “There are three things basically that I care about: language, landscape and the idea of God,” he said.
Here, then, under Orion, we call attention to the values of these three men called Charles, as in Wright, Burchfield and Gwathemy. Let them be reminders to help us find the way “Poems, said Wright, “are sacred texts…find one word and use it correctly – providing it is the right word/Is more than enough.” He also said: “I write poems to untie myself, to do penance and disappear, through the upper right hand corner of things, to say grace.”
Burchfield, too, committed watercolor his language, as a sacred medium, and he searched the Big Woods for that moment when winter turned to spring, for instance, and a greater truth could be called upon to emerge. Burchfield was confident to sustain this search lifelong: “No form of life, no aspect of nature, is unpleasant,” he wrote. “But on the contrary, beautiful.”
“Life should be lived from one moment to another – Living it that way, existence is full of precious instances, he continued.”
In the summer of 1935, July 19 it was, just five weeks before Charles Wright was born, Burchfield, at age 42, considered death. He was at the little grove then at the corner of Jamison and Three Rod Rd., and he said: “I lie here awhile under a tree, looking out over the wide flat expanse to the west where a storm was looming. I suddenly thought of dying, and to me then, the worst thing about death seemed to be the fact that I would have to leave the grass, and the shaggy tree trunk behind. Not to be able to reach out and touch them and feel their goodness seemed an intolerable hardship.”
So much for death.
Just the other day, Monday it was, on Garrison Keeler’s Writer’s Almanac, Wright’s poem “It’s Sweet to Be Remembered” was featured, on line and on public radio:
It is from his book, Sestets, from 2007. Here it is:
“No one’s remembered much longer than a rock
Is remembered beside the road
“If he’s lucky or
Some tune or harsh word
Uttered in childhood or back in the day
“Still how nice to imagine some kid someday
Picking that rock up and holding it in his hand,
Briefly, before he chucks it
Deep in the woods in a sunny spot in the tall grass.”
Thank you for that and for these good years of the art you make. We can imagine Burchfield saying, “beautiful”. So let’s lift one stone. Let’s hold that stone and find it “a sunny spot in tall grass”.
I’d like now to call upon the Secretary of our Board of Trustees, Shelley Drake, to join me as I tell one last story and make a gift to Professor Wright, in hopes that he will speak to us and read to us. Here is the story: It goes like this:
There once was a leaf that Charles Burchfield watched all winter from his window. It was a leaf standing straight up in the snow. It remained upright for the rest of the winter. Through storms, and we have them here, the leaf remained. Burchfield named it and painted it, The Steadfast Leaf, the Constant Leaf. So we give you a steadfast and constant leaf and hope that you will place it in a sunny spot. Mrs. Burchfield saved the leaf that gave her husband so much peace, and it is not part of the Burchfield Penney's Archive.