Happy Imperfection
My husband has been enjoying taking pottery classes with Tiffany Hilton, and I recently visited her studio for an open house to watch them spin clay into something useful and beautiful. I admired many cups, teapots, plates, and bowls on Tiffany’s shelves, like those in the photo below, but she humbly said, “I always see some little thing that I could have done differently that makes me want to make the next piece.”
Beauty is like that. It can almost always be different. We have to learn to see both what’s graceful in our work, and the way it could take another shape. We can learn to see the gap between what is and what could be and not be bothered by our choice, but move forward. Experiment some more.
In the introduction to Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems, Kim Stafford quotes his father as saying, “I would trade everything I have ever written for the next thing.” William Stafford wrote every day before dawn and published fifty books in his lifetime. In “You Reading This, Be Ready,” he wrote: “What can anyone give you greater than now, /starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?” His poems are beloved for what he saw, which might be so common that people can and did say, “I could write that.” And he encouraged everyone to write what they saw, too, which might always be changing. So we keep going, trying and beautifully failing to get it right.
And here’s Peter’s work from the evening: twelve bowls to be glazed, fired, then filled with soup to benefit the Amherst Survival Center.
For more Poetry Friday posts, please visit Laura Purdie Salas, at Writing the World for Kids.
