The Poetry of Deserted Places

photo: Dean Cadle Creek Bed Road 25 THE POETRY OF DESERTED PLACES Not far from the main-travelled roads of Southern Appalachia are to be found small hollows—a few miles in length—once the habitation of a considerable human population . But now the winding paths they used, the sled roads, the creek-bed thoroughfares , are all lost in an overgrowth of weeds, briars, and second growth timber. The rail and paling fences surrounding slanted fields, garden patches, pastures, sprawl and gap and disappear in the slack kingdom of neglect and decay. Perhaps the small homeseats of round log, hewed log, or boxed construction ( some even with the pretentiousness of weatherboard and paint), all so touching in the rightness of tiieir picturesque setting and crude artistry—perhaps, for a while at least, they stood cocked in anticipation of a soon returning. But more and more through the processes of a mysterious natural art, by time in the offices of decay, die whimsicalities of weather—with the loosening of a board here, the rusting of a nail there, the softening of an underpinning—the mood changed to resignation ( resignation is the mood of decay ). They became both tfiing and symbol, both expression and thing expressed, their own true metaphor—the poetry of deserted places, the art of the abandoned. They call to mind the theme of abandonment in Robert Frost's poem, The WoodPile ." During a long winter walk, the speaker in the poem discovers an abandoned cord of wood—once carefully measured, cut, and stacked—but for long now given over to the forces of neglect and decay. Probing for reasons, he concludes that only one who "lives by turning to fresh tasks" could so forget his labour and purpose as to leave the results to waste and uselessness. This is only partly true of the Southern Highlanders who left their hollows over the years to seek the good life elsewhere. The movements in and out of Southern Appalachia are not historical or social events to be summarized briefly and easily. Many left for greater economic opportunity ; some mainly for personal fulfillment. Others were members of "The American Picaresque" and kept moving on. Some were forced out. It is these last, the least successful, those having most difficulty adjusting to modernism, who have been most chronicled in recent times. Not much has been said of thqsc who made it either in conventional or original ways. It is the purpose of this, and perhaps subsequent, sketches to tell of achievers. They could be interesting also. Raymond Bamhart is such a one—one who left to seek personal fulfillment and achieved in original ways. 26 '** '•23 '· **&* \* 27 THE AimST Raymond Bamhart was born in West Virginia and grew up mainly in Pennsylvania. He returned to West Virginia and majored in art at Marshall University. At Ohio State University he earned die degree of Master of Fine Arts and taught as an assistant there for a year before moving to the University of Kentucky for 32 years of creative and productive teaching and work in die Department of Art. He studied further under Moholy-Nagy at the Chicago Bauhaus, Joseph Albers of Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and Jose Gutierrez at the Politécnico Instituto Nacional in Mexico. He taught drawing, painting, wood sculpture, and basic design-a course of his own devising . He developed into a painter of merit and a designer of furniture. In 1958 during the last decade of his teaching career-after years of evolving sensitivity to color, texture, form, and of gathering expressive materials for basic design -Raymond Bamhart fashioned his own unique mode of expression, the relief construction, made unique and original by his selection and arrangement of materials. Found materials-gleaned from the discarded rubble of civilization and nature with the marks of time and change upon them, evidence of submission-resistance to the basic and elemental forces, sun, wind, fire, water, weather, decay-became constructions , poetic metaphors of existence, syntheses of disparate and cast-off materials retrieved from the feather-edge of oblivion and returned to significance by having a place in a new order. The viewer is made aware of the themes of...