Making a mural from a line by Lucille Clifton
Some lines hold tight for all time. They stay with you, grow with you, live with you. Lucille Clifton’s “i continue to continue” is one such line for me. It makes me think of my friend Tree saying that the true unit of consumption of poetry is the line. Not the book, not even the poem necessarily. But the line.
That’s why you can pick up a book and read until a few words suddenly resonate, then put it down and forget about the book entirely. Because it was the line you needed. Her example that day long ago in my chilly cabin living room was Stanley Kunitz’s “How shall the heart be reconciled / to its feast of losses?” (from “The Layers”).
How indeed! The way I try is by making. Of course most often I make prints from words that sink deeply into the hurt, hard parts of me. Once in awhile I get an inexplicable urge to see the line really big, which is what happened with “i continue…” I discovered it in the poem “i am not done yet,” five years ago in a friend’s studio who was working on a retrospective show and often pulls titles for her fine art works from poems. I loved it so I made a notecard of that poem, and the permission process resulted in a broadside as well. What a delight to work with Lucille’s words!
I’m an amateur woodworker at best but I do love to paint, especially big things (I was a house painter in another life, to this day I’m more comfortable in the Ben Moore store than an art store). Originally I planned to install it on the side of a shipping container across the street from my old shop in Kingston, right in the middle of town and easy for all to see, locals and ferry passersby equally.
Having not much else to do those days, a giant project I wasn’t sure I could pull off seemed like just the thing to go about. Little did I know it would take me three years to complete, during which time I also had two ankle surgeries, got a puppy, met the love of my life, and made a giant move across the water. Not to mention many prints and trips. All the while the mural was in progress, I lived with it in my living room.
At the time, I wrote: “I am here to report that laying out a 40ft line of poetry in a 20ft room is not for the faint of heart! But wow I learned a lot and the structure of the letters continued to reveal such beautiful relationships that I had to go back, and do better, as I learned... and now I have a solid structure to work from, that can hold the necessary deep breaths and sure-to-come inconsistencies of my hand painting…not perfect, but wow am I pleased.” You can view a time-lapse of the beginning stages here!
The words permeated my life in a daily way that cannot now be extricated. They sank in deeper and deeper as I painted slowly, with many deep breaths, throwing myself ahead of myself, down the line, looking just past where the brush is to where it was going (get a painting peek in-process).
The letters were designed by my friend Matthew Carter, who delighted in seeing them take grand shape albeit much more slowly than I ever anticipated. Working with letterforms large-scale in a different medium sheds all kinds of interesting light on their lines and the spaces between them.
And in the end, wasn’t that the point? Isn’t it still? Continuing. Process over product. Learning to be, learning to see, sharing what I’ve learned. The mural is 40ft long by 4ft high, built in five 4x8ft sections which currently grace the walls of my press room — they are quite impressive standing up on end and while you can’t read it, still lovely to live with. It’s been installed once, at ABA’s Winter Institute conference for booksellers when it was here in Seattle two years back (the shipping container long since moved). Nathalie op de Beeck wrote a lovely article about it for Publisher’s Weekly.
I’ve wondered lots about where the “i continue” mural could be installed permanently. I’d love for it to be in a public space. I made it for the outdoors with high-grade exterior paint. I love having it around so it’s not been a high priority to find a home for it… until now! As I’m moving my shop soon, this mural really needs a place to go. Got any ideas?
About Lucille Clifton
Lucille Clifton was born in 1936 in DePew, New York, and studied at Howard University. She was discovered as a poet by Langston Hughes who published Clifton's poetry in his highly influential anthology, The Poetry of the Negro (1970). Clifton was awarded the prestigious Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2007. You can read more about her life and work at her Poetry Foundation page here.
Links
Listen to me read the full poem from Lucille Clifton during Poetry Lunch S1E12
