Tlingit and Iñupiaq poet Ishmael Hope with his first collection of poetry “The Courtesans of Flounder Hill”. (Photo by Scott Burton/KTOO)
Ishmael Hope may be best known for his storytelling, but he is also a poet. His first book of poetry titled “Courtesans of Flounder Hill” will be released this Sunday.
The 69-page book was published by the Ishmael Reed Publishing Company—Ishmael Reed, the renowned African-American writer from whom Ishmael Hope got his name, and who published his mother’s writing 30 years ago.
Hope says writing poetry is unlike theater and his other arts. “I have more control, and in a lot of ways you don’t want to control it though,” he says with a laugh. “But I have more of a say on what I can do with it.”
As for his process, Hope says, “Every now and then you’re just taken with this thought, and it’s your body and your whole experience is connecting to something powerfully and then you just have to write. When that moment comes, that’s often where the most intense kind of poetry can come out of.”
Speaking to the underlying theme of the collection, Hope paraphrases his friend Robert Bringhurst.
“The powerful Haida artists and the renaissance painters, they had a narrative tradition that they followed, but it wasn’t just that. They had the talent to put in the shock of the real. And so that’s what I try and tune myself into: multiple traditions, and then, there’s just the raw experience of being alive–and somehow, it should have that flavor in there.”
The book release party will be 4 p.m. Sunday at Kindred Post, where the book will also be carried. Hope will be joined by Christy NaMee Eriksen and Nora Dauenhauer who will also read.
Listen to Hope recite “Spread My Ashes on Khaa Tú Kaxhsakee Héen” in its entirety, here:
“Spread My Ashes on Khaa Tú Kaxhsakee Héen”
Spread my ashes
on the River That Unravels Your Thoughts,
Peaceful River,
the moment where grief is released,
and heavy stones are lifted,
and the spirits show their faces.
Spread my ashes
on Khaa Tú Kaxhsakee Héen,
the river of my dear ancestor,
Aak’wtaatseen, the man who came home
with knowledge of the Salmon People,
who lived to be a hundred years old,
who died with his spirits him up
in a trance.
Spread my ashes
on a Peaceful River.
I want to return to my ancestors.
I want people to sing songs
and watch the sandhill cranes fly over them,
and paddle in canoes made by master carvers,
and tell jokes, and call on the old power,
as my ashes soak into the water.
Spread my ashes into the water.
I want to be placed into the heart of my people,
and the rest of me to be left unaccounted for
in the sea.
When I am gone,
I want to talk to those who come after me,
in our ancestral language.
I want to visit them in their dreams.
I want to tell them what we stood for.
I want to keep an unbroken line of storytellers,
orators, weavers, beaders, carvers, and Elders.
I want to dance at large ceremonies,
where all my ancestors gather
and give speeches about returning our love,
again and again, to our descendants.
Spread my ashes on Khaa Tú Kaxhsakee Héen.
I don’t fear my death, whenever it will come.
It is because my mother and father and grandparents,
and the old spirits speak to my blood,
whenever I think of them.
They speak of invisible food,
eaten whenever hearts kiss,
whenever the spirits are heard,
whenever the other side
lets go of their grief after hearing
the speech of an Elder.
Spread my ashes when I die.
Maybe I can live a little bit
like those endless, beautiful days
when I am gone, and travel freely,
through all the worlds.
Every now and then, between failures,
that’s how it is.
Aáa. That’s how it is.
It’s finally here! The December First Friday Gallery Walk is usually the biggest of the year. Front Street will be closed to cars but open to art walkers.
“Twin Lakes Outflow” by Jim Fowler
That means it’s time to hit the streets, socialize, eat some crackers and cheese, drink wine out of little plastic cups, and stock up on artful holiday gifts. For this month’s preview let’s imagine you begin at Coppa near the Federal Building. Jim Fowler will be showing a dozen acrylic landscape paintings.
“I just appreciate people coming to take a look. It’s kind of a solitary activity with little feedback from other people so this is kind of my chance to have people see the work and talk to them about it,” says Fowler.
From Coppa, an art walker could mosey here to KTOO to see board paintings and fabric panels from the Zimbabwe Artists Project, then over to the JACC to see Avery Skaggs’ show of ceramics, collagraphy prints, and acrylic paintings.
As you near downtown, stop in to hear music from Teri Tibbett and Bob Bloom at Coho’s. Once you’re in the city, check in at Elise Tomlinson’s Suite 5 Studio on Seward Street. Tomlinson
“Wetlands” by Elise Tomlinson
“Some of them are straight landscapes and others have women figures incorporated into them or local plant life, flowers, that kind of thing. The pieces I’ll be showing for gallery walk are a whole bunch of older works, and then newer pieces that I’ve done this month that are small traditional landscapes. They’re all in my style, which is bright, colorful, stylized, outlines, that kind of thing,” Tomlinson says.
From there, you could head up to the Canvas’ show of acrylic works by REACH artists, or up to the Juneau City Museum to see Constance Baltuck’s show of acrylic, nature-inspired abstracts, or maybe down to Front Street to see Pat Race’s show “Whalemont” at Alaska Robotics, or over to Jineít at the Sealaska building to see Wayne Price and Donald Gregory who will be carving on-site, or over to Annie Kaill’s for Karen Beason and M.K. MacNaughton’s show. On A Juneau Afternoon this week MacNaughton said her show is all about color.
“Shelter” by MK MacNaughton
“I like to paint in oil on canvas so I started collecting images and painting in the fall when it was raining-raining, gray-gray and I’ve always loved the Juneau fall because the orange is so brilliant. I run a lot on the Dan Moller trail and up above the Crow Hill condos and the meadow there, it would be the grayest day, and I’d get up there and it was orange, burning orange. I kind of had a love affair with the orange muskeg this fall. I call this my orange muskeg series.”
After Annie Kaill’s you could head over to Trickster Company, where Rico Worl will show new skis featuring his formline design work, or back to Hearthside Books, where Peter Metcalfe and Kathy Ruddy will be signing their new book “A Dangerous Idea” about the Alaska Native Brotherhood and the struggle for indigenous rights. Then over to Kindred Post for the interactive photo booth and music by Acapella, or the Juneau Artists Gallery, or up to Vanity, or, well — again, there are too many to mention. Please use our online, mobile friendly art guide to navigate the rest of your walk.
Kealoha will participate in Friday night’s monthly poetry slam at 6 p.m. at the Silverbow, a 1 p.m. poetry presentation workshop at the Juneau Arts & Culture Center on Saturday, and will be the featured performer at the JACC at 7 p.m. Saturday.
Marianne Manning’s paintings are on display at the Juneau Douglas City Museum. (Photo courtesy Marianne Manning)
It’s First Friday and art appreciators will be hitting the sidewalks this evening to socialize and check out new shows.
Historically, December First Friday is the biggest art walk of the year, but this November is no slouch. This is no surprise to Marianne Manning who is showing at the Juneau-Douglas City Museum and says this is the time of the year to make art.
“There’s nothing like painting on wet, rainy days to go into your studio,” she says. “You can kind of see why Southeast Alaska has always had amazing artists.”
Manning, who paints oil and pastel landscapes and portraits, is sharing the night with cartoonist Tony “TOE” Newman, and the “Downtown Sights” crew whose work features a variety of mediums capturing Juneau’s core. Just down the hill, ceramic artist Brandon Howard is showing at the Canvas. Howard says his love for ceramics came from utility.
“I like getting to build things and make things for use, to solve problems,” Howard says. “It was my way of making the things that I eat from, the things I drink from, storage containers — making them the way I wanted them to be.”
If you’re coming in from the Mendenhall Valley or Douglas, you might want to stop at the JACC and see the collaborative poetry and calligraphy work of Gordon Harrison and Sara Isto. Isto says their coming together was serendipitous.
“After I retired I wrote two nonfiction books and then I was ready to work with something shorted and maybe a little more creative,” she says. “A couple of years ago I started writing poetry and then Gordon picked up some of the pieces and used them for practice, and here we are.”
Cats and Kites will perform at Kindred Post on First Friday. (Photo by Padraig New)
If you’re inbound from Thane, you could begin your night at the Red Dog Saloon with Brian Weed’s photography of historic Juneau area mines. His passion for his subject began when he was a kid. He says his dad would bring him to work and set him loose.
“In the summertime he would bring me to Douglas and drop me off and say ‘Be back by 3:30 and that’s when I’m leaving,'” Weed says. “I would run around Sandy Beach and go way out there and explore the mine tunnels, kind a stray off the trail, and see the old mine ruins, and run as fast as I could to be back in the parking lot by 3:30.”
As you get into town you can see Tony Harbanuk’s photography at the Juneau Artist Gallery, or go make art by participating in Kindred Post’s “Mealtime Antics” photo booth and hear Cats and Kites, or see Barbara Lavallee and Alice Tersteeg’s work at Annie Kaill’s, or comic artist Dylan Meconis at Alaska Robotics, or Elise Tomlinson’s oil paintings at Suite 105, or Mary VanderJack’s work at the Rookery.
