March 2022

Introduction

 

Dear The Art Section Readers,

 

I cannot help but think about Ukraine.

 

How do we stop and read, and create and have optimism?

 

The best Facebook post I have seen in a long time is by the poet Ilya Kaminsky on February 28, 2022:

 

Ilya Kaminsky: “Me, writing to a friend in Ukraine: how can I help, please let me know. I really want to help.

 

He writes back: Putins come and go. If you want to help, send us some poems and essays. We are putting together a literary magazine.

​

And, that is in the middle of war. Imagine.”

 

This, of course, is why we do what we do.

 

For this issue of TAS, Daniele Frison, a Venetian filmmaker, presents and writes about his new short film Luna Park. While set in the present, it is a beautiful moment of nostalgia for the past. Frison writes of the hope for a “time after the storm” and, in less than three minutes, fills our memories with color and movement that inspire hope about how we must go on.

 

Anthropologist Daryl White wrote his text about coffee over a period of five years. Coffee is his madeleine, taking the reader on a Proustian journey inspired by its aroma and meditating on it from both personal and anthropological perspectives.

 

Looking back at past issues of TAS yields many texts that refer to coffee, such as these from 2012.

 

In one of his poems on artists, Marc Strauss writes:

 

an empty plate, an empty bowl, a white porcelain coffee cup 

set down perfectly and nothing inside and when I walked out 

that day the sun full and yellow on the fields ….

 

Colombian artist Angelica Maria Zorilla’s drawings are on used coffee filters and tea bags. In her letter on Té/Tea, she writes, “Sipping a liquid that encircle my thoughts with warmth, and while suppressing them save me, let me continue to be. It’s an action to be taken seriously, with hands and desire, day by day and everyday, in the mornings, just in the middle, late in the afternoons, at night, with full or warning moon, white and slender, yearning to be fulfilled.”

 

In this issue, Afaa Michael Weaver dialogues with Nicolette Reim and graciously reads five of his poems for TAS. I found these lines from his poem “The Hipness of Hips” helpful in thinking about moving forward even as we look back.

 

Oh hip, you were always the coolest way

to say so and so was hip, and so and so had

hips that were cool enough to sway back

and forth between what it took to make

a living and then to live, to dance, to live. 

 

 

Sending hope for peace,

Deanna

Deanna Sirlin

Editor-in-Chief

The Art Section

​

​

​