The pleasure of making teapots with ample bellies, well fitting spouts, apt handles, deep seated lids. Lovely. The concave press to construct a tea strainer against the resistance of a leather hard body. Over the course of nearly 20 years as a potter, I've never had any desire to create teapots before.
I decide I'll ask poet friends and acquaintances to collaborate, and share with me tea poems they've written or known, words I can apply to the surfaces of pots and cups and tea trays. It's my cynical tendencies--the tea party movement and, as I read tea's history, the imperialist Opium Wars, for example, i.e., palpable fear and degradation, that inspire me initially to take on this series. Yet, now that I'm in, it's the simple and surprising beauty of the process that I want to allow.
Surface 1: Tea with Wallace Stevens
I decide I'll ask poet friends and acquaintances to collaborate, and share with me tea poems they've written or known, words I can apply to the surfaces of pots and cups and tea trays. It's my cynical tendencies--the tea party movement and, as I read tea's history, the imperialist Opium Wars, for example, i.e., palpable fear and degradation, that inspire me initially to take on this series. Yet, now that I'm in, it's the simple and surprising beauty of the process that I want to allow.
Surface 1: Tea with Wallace Stevens