Here I Throw Down My Heart

Preface. Dancing in the Flaming World: A View of Alma Thomas

vii The cover image, Blue and Brown Still Life, is a painting by Alma Thomas, one of the preeminent abstract expressionist painters of the twentieth century. An African American woman of diminutive stature, her art often gave us a larger than life expansion of details drawn from nature and her surroundings. In over five decades, Thomas’s work evolved from expressionistic paintings, such as Blue and Brown Still Life, to minimalist colorfield paintings inspired by the New York School and Thomas’s own interactions with the Little Paris Studio and, finally, to abstract expressionism, as exhibited in her 1970 painting Snoopy Sees a Sunrise. Although she had several major exhibits, including one at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City in 1972 and at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. in 1972, Thomas continued to work out of the kitchen and living room of her house, balancing huge unfinished canvases on her knees and the table or the back of the sofa. When the Thomas family moved to Washington, D.C., from Columbus, Georgia, her parents told the children to remove their shoes and knock off the Georgia sand so they could begin their new life. They put down roots, including those for the holly tree that would nourish her work throughout her life. In the vernacular of modern day discussions, Thomas would be considered “a late bloomer,” a label she would have, no doubt, dismissed. “Creative art is for all time and is therefore independent of time,” she said.1 Thomas began her career after studying math and architectural drawing and, as a teacher, inspiring 1 Sharon F. Patton, African-American Art, Oxford History of Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 220. Preface Dancing in the Flaming World: A View of Alma Thomas viii young children to explore the arts. In 1924, she became the first African American student to earn a bachelor’s degree in fine arts, but it was not until she retired in 1960, after thirty-five years of teaching, that Thomas could begin to focus entirely on her own art. Blue and Brown Still Life seems so fitting for the poems contained in Here I Throw Down My Heart, particularly given where I was in 1958 (in Germany trying desperately to be a world-wise college student) and where I am now (a somewhat world-weary poet and professor emeritus, turning finally to my artistic endeavors full time). In many ways, my life parallels that of Alma Thomas. Seven years ago, I retired after thirtyfive years from the University of Washington faculty, where I was the first African American female to be promoted to full professor. Like Thomas and so many other African American artists, I learned how to operate simultaneously outside and inside familiar cultural boundaries of race, class, and gender. For Thomas, this duality was implicit rather than explicit in her paintings. Her 1963 painting Watusi (Hard Edge), named after a Chubby Checker song, was inspired by the shapes and colors of Matisse’s painting The Snail. I often told my creative writing students to look at the familiar in an unfamiliar way. “Use a mirror, the reflection in a crystal, or a piece of beveled glass to see with your inner eye,” I would tell them. “Change your perspective as if you are seeing what’s around you for the first time.” Thomas leaned into a similar esthetic: “I would wade in the brook and when it rained you could hear music. I would fall to the grass and look at the poplar trees and the lovely yellow leaves would whistle.”2 Critics spoke of Thomas’ use of color as evoking both order and emotion: “colorific canvasses characterized by short, jag2 Alma W. Thomas, with the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Alma W. Thomas: A Retrospective of the Paintings (Rohnert Park: Pomegranate Communications, 1998), 14. ix ged brushstrokes in which she imparted joy, love, and beauty.”3 In a recent Penn State Africana Research Center interview, I commented on my sense of poetic language in a similar fashion : “Words are illusive stuff. They are the clay of writing, the muscle, the orchestra of sounds and palettes of colors. . . . Each word is like a crystal, faceted to reveal its various shades and tones of meaning.” In many ways, this mirrors Thomas’s comments regarding the inspiration she took from the holly tree outside her window...