2011 Governor's Arts Awards

The Language of Art

The world reveals itself in leaf fall and story, unfolds its limbs
across canvas or screen, all we know spoken in the language of art.
How else to see the expanse of dark upon dark that brings forth
an infinity of stars? How else to feel the quick lifting of the chest,
arms opening wide? How else to hear birdsong or falling sleet?
Art maps the continual pulse of the wind in the reddening branches,
the stories of impossible loss and forgiveness articulating the heart's
flaws and yearnings, the rising call of one voice winding around another
to break us open in love. This is the song of time's mechanics and mystery:
the understanding in our bones, the layers of history held in rock,
the weather unfurling across the shimmering tilt of changing land.
The painting's finger lines of fire tracing slope and expanse show us
slope and expanse. The end of the novel proves how each moment
is composed of signs and wonders. The nested stories of ancestors
and those not yet born call through motion or sound from the
other side of the horizon. All who come to the fire of this language
make visible the visible world. How can we not open wide
the closed places in time, budget or intent to speak this language
of heron and chorus? How can we not return, how can we not begin
again and continue, how can we not come home to the words of days
so that we can hear what the world asks of us, and how we will answer?

-- Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg
Poet Laureate of Kansas
www.CarynMirriamGoldberg.com

2011 Governor's Arts Awards

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Poem: The Language of Art
For the 2011 Kansas Governor's Arts Awards, poem by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Poet Laureate of Kansas

Recipient Biographies

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