This week's Poet of the People is Janet Kozachek. Shortly before COVID I hosted an ekphrastic poetry event at the Arts Center in Kershaw County, Camden, SC; Janet has had a lot to do with introducing me to many opportunities to host poetry events in Camden, Orangeburg and Hampton County. She is a dynamic advocate of the creative arts and a talented poet, writer, and visual artist. I look forward to participating in whatever event she creates next.
-Al Black
Janet Kozachek has led a long and eclectic career as a writer and visual artist, pursuing work and advanced study in Europe, China, and New York. She was the first American to matriculate in the Beijing Central Art Academy (CAFA), where she studied painting, poetry, and calligraphy. Ms. Kozachek moved to the Netherlands with her husband Nathaniel Wallace, to teach with the University of Maryland overseas division for two years. Returning to the United States she became a graduate student at Parsons School of Design.
During graduate work at Parsons in New York, Kozachek studied painting and drawing with Larry Rivers, Paul Resika, Leland Bell, and John Heliker, and poetry with J.D. McClatchy. It was this brush with McClatchy, then editor of the Yale Review and author of Painters and Poets, that first inculcated the idea for Kozachek that painting and poetry could emanate from the same creative source in western as well as in eastern art.
In South Carolina, Kozachek embarked on a long peripatetic career as an artist in residence and sometimes adjunct professor teaching Chinese art and Mosaic making throughout the state under the auspices of the South Carolina State Arts Commission. Kozachek founded and became the first president of the Society of American Mosaic Artists in 1999. She wrote for, and co-edited, the society’s quarterly publication, Groutline, and co-authored the catalogue for the first international exhibition of mosaics in the United States. She also actively wrote for Evening Reader Magazine, publishing essays on art and social issues. She is the author of four books of poetry.
Song of the Sinuses
(On the occasion of the discovery that researchers playing ancient ceramic musical instruments would sometimes hear a note that others could not because it was generated from resonance inside their sinuses)
The archaeologist,
with his vinyl gloves
and his plastic straw,
played the ancient globular flute,
last touched a millennium ago
by Shaman’s lips.
Six whole notes
climbed up a scale
as the pressure of modern air
yielded sound.
For the record there were six notes.
The archaeologist heard seven.
Investigators played that tape
again and again
– in search of that seventh note.
that they were certain that they heard.
What was that seventh unrecorded final note
that could not be bound
yet rang persistently in their heads?
It was a singular sinus sensation!
The lonely note was for
the hearing of the solitary.
It was a spiritual resonance
of an internal sound
echoing in the caverns of their skulls.
Not every note must be noted.
Not every thought must be voiced.
Not every sound need be heard by others.
Not every action must be known,
nor every meaning ascertained.
Not every desire must be met.
There must be quiet in the world
to leave a space for internal music.
Listen.
News Cycle
( After a Drawing by Laurie Lipton)
Another school shooting
the jaded eyes and numbed mind
observe on the rectangular
porthole to the outside world
Another invasion
I watch the troops float onscreen
above my painted toes
Another disaster
A family sleeps on borrowed blankets
outside the rubble
of what was once their home.
I scan them while reclining
in my own bed
in my air-conditioned room.
Another war
feeds my evening news cycle
I watch it through
the hazy steam
that emanates from my
museum shop coffee cup
decorated with scenes from
Picasso’s Guernica
aesthetically wrapped snugly
around the glazed form.
Purchased for just
$9.99 at the museum shop.
Another famine
plays out across my television
Mothers cradle emaciated infants
My cat cries out
wanting to be fed
I pause to feed her
and switch the channel
I am told
that brain surgery is performed
with just local anesthetics
to get below a scalp’s surface
with sedatives to blunt awareness
of what is inserted or extracted
from the matter of mind
Brains don’t feel pain
Patient patients
close their eyes then
and don’t panic
at what they see or hear
Another massacre?
Too many in a day now
to be counted
With the precision of a scalpel
the news cycle enters
through an anaesthetized cloud
of indifference
blunted by frequency
numbed by distance
cushioned with a thick cotton blanket
blocking out the fear
that the news
some day
will find me
Celestial Beings and Lesser Gods
(Zaparozhia and Melania Perik)
Objects upon a white cloth
lay as offerings to people passing by
in the torpor of late afternoon shadows.
A solitary apple, a tempting trinket,
sit as the trappings of yearning
for a warm bed and respite from hunger.
A mass of woman sits
swaddled in a woven coat
and a thinking hat.
She nods her head downwards,
as hypnogogic hallucinations
fly within and without the hollows of trees.
Celestial beings and lesser gods,
half human and half chicken,
turn right side up and upside down
in their flight between somnolence and wakefulness.
They have been conjured.
They cavort among the boughs,
and then are exorcized
from haunted limbs.
Crow
Crow watches you
with eyes you cannot see,
black on black against the setting sun,
waiting in quiet silhouette upon a branch.
Crow seeks you
in benevolent predation,
to feed upon your sorrows,
and swallow your regrets.
Crow finds you
alone among the living,
lost within memories of departed souls
who call and call your name.
Crow grasps you
in her claws folded
tight around your waist,
her black beak cool against your face.
Crow knows you
when you cross the bridge
into that great void
and come back home again.