ArtistsAbout this book
Wassily Kandinsky said that artists must reach into their own souls for inner truths, and so lead others to higher spiritual levels. He didn’t say that artists had to become famous, or even to earn their living from art.
In these poems I use only first names, but I am not trying to hide the identities of the artists that I write about. Of the artists I have met, who are less famous than they could be, I have remembered Leonard Lopp, who kept a studio above Flathead Lake in Montana; Jim Scott, a San Francisco artist; Brice Bowman, who once kept a studio in San Francisco but is now an experimental filmmaker working in Los Angeles; Geri Digiorno, who founded the Petaluma Poetry Walk and was poet laureate of Sonoma County (2006-2007); and Katherine Kahrs, whose dance photography is at the Museum of Performance + Design in San Francisco.
I painted the image on the cover in 1969 or 1970.
Links and shortcuts
In any page, you can click on or touch links to jump around in this book.
- Each entry in the contents links to the poem.
- The title for a poem links back to the contents, highlighting the entry for the poem.
- Words in the headers and footers link to the index, the contents, a listing of books by the author, to this page, and to the previous and next poems in the book.
You may find the following keyboard equivalents to be convenient. Here I use the symbol ⌥ for the option key on Mac/OS or the alt key on Windows, ⇧ for the shift key, and ⏎ for the return (enter) key. Arrow keys are ◄ (left), ► (right), ▲ (up), and ▼ (down).
| Context | Keys | Jump to / Behavior |
|---|---|---|
| cover | ⌥ ◄ | Books by Tom Sharp |
| ⌥ ▲ | About Tom Sharp | |
| ⌥ ► | about this book (this page) | |
| ⌥ ▼ | contents | |
| ⇧ ⌥ ▼ | contents | |
| contents | ⇧ ⌥ ▲ | cover |
| ⌥ ▼ | select the next item in the contents | |
| ⌥ ▲ | select the previous item in the contents | |
| ⌥ ► | open the selected page | |
| ⌥ ⏎ | open the selected page | |
| poem | ⇧ ⌥ ▲ | contents |
| ⌥ ◄ | contents | |
| ⌥ ▲ | select the previous poem, or, from the top poem, open the previous page | |
| ⌥ ▼ | select the next poem, or, from the bottom poem, open the next page |
The poet
Tom Sharp is a Native American of Aleut heritage, a member of Seldovia Village Tribe. He is the author of numerous books, including Spectacles: A Sampler of Poems and Prose, Taurean Horn Press (ISBN 0-931552-10-9), a novel, Hans and the Clock (ISBN 979-8580172484), The book of science, SciFi (ISBN 979-8694935210), Things People Do (ISBN 979-8687425568), The book of beliefs (ISBN 979-8683553593), The I Ching (ISBN 979-8573510620), Images (ISBN 979-8577560515), Aleut Artifacts (ISBN 979-8575608998), Aleut Words (ISBN 979-8582103394), and First Nations (ISBN 979-8682924769).
You may email tom/AT/liztomsharp/DOT/-c-o-m-/ to share comments on this work.
