Sometimes a person gets more than his share of talent, and David Wiley is a person like that. I first mentioned David Wiley to Scene4 readers in 2004, as an inspirational preface-writer and journal-keeper (see here). In October , readers of Scene4 "met" David Wiley as the author of the story, "The Devil Tree," and in November, as a poet. I have a particular interest in artists who work in more than one medium, and in this context, I've been astonished by Wiley's work for over twenty years—knowing him first as a painter, and then as a poet. I am pleased to introduce you to these two gifts of his together: here is an Appreciation I wrote about his work, followed by a selection of his paintings and then of his poems.
Poet
Wiley the shaman-poet is not the shaman in a trance; rather, Wiley is fully awake, clambering to be more awake still, and to touch, to connect: Kansas, Wyoming, Paris, Africa, Mexico; the Trojans, the Toltecs, TV, pinball. Wiley the seer-poet is not Rimbaud the seer-poet entering torments of madness to reach the unknown; instead, Wiley enters mysteries, miracles and an exotic merriment to make a conscientious inventory at the far-reaches of everything that can be known, to record raw experience shaped but not mitigated by refined thought. Artaud signaled to us through the flames; Wiley calls us to our own surprising world, full of gleaming and dusty domes, strange and familiar animals, lush and languishing landscapes. Wiley's poetry has the extended line of the ancient incantation, the sensual speech rhythms of Whitman, the intrepid rhythms of the car engine the Beats took to the road.
Painter
The ink drawings: deceptively random squiggle-mazes and arabesques from which emerge celestial or outlandish beings and locales, the improvisational line informed by long investigation. The paintings: hardly flowers, figures and dwellings at all, but their essences, their forms outlined by a black line like litmus that reacts to life energy. These being-objects are oxygenated not by breath, but by color. The absence of any apparent brush stroke gives the eerie impression that the areas of delectable, ringing color have arrived directly from within the artist, without recourse to mere brush. The shiny surface Wiley has developed tells us the atmosphere these inhabit is not our own.
Painter-Poet
David Wiley stands firmly in the tradition of artists who work in two or more media. Painter Wassily Kandinsky wrote that all arts stem from the same root, and that his remarkable poetry was simply "a change of instrument": "—the palette put aside and in its place the typewriter." This change suggests the synesthete's ability to experience correspondences between the different senses ("All scents and sounds and colors meet as one." – Correspondences, Baudelaire). Kandinsky was himself truly synesthetic; Wiley at least works as if he is one. When I read Wiley's poetry or see his paintings, I feel as if I might become synesthetic, too.
Lissa Tyler Renaud
View of Village with Clock Tower
The Enigma of Contemplation
Nature Girl
The New Mascot
Anthropophagus Hornyfooted Goatsbeard
Fruit and Bird
An Artist's Instruction to Himself
Let nothing that seems to be remain if it isn't what it really is. Shade all the white parts, columns and sidewalks, ledges and lintels, the dancer's eyes after blinking.
Darken leaves of bushes, balcony, tether rings and poles; lighten space under the door, green in the water. Open the sky a little more so the sun can freely maneuver.
Raise the angel's wings higher, lengthen the bridge; blend the seams in the flat places. Whatever must be done do it now before the light vanishes.
Four American Haikus
The sun opens a pine cone and out tumbles the dark seed blinking.
On the mountain the snow grows thin as the stream grows fat.
Ten thousand leaves fall and I only have two eyes.
At the bottom of the pond minnows hide from something ninety-three million miles away.
River Crossing
The trail plays hide & seek with the sound of the rushing water. Every green door opens with a light touch. Every room is filled with sunbeams. Here is the river, the bridge made of tree material, sinewy like a tight muscle pulling continents together. Over the river lies a history of animals. Half way across I feel hypnotized: the roar of the water, the swaying of the bridge, the brilliance of the sun, my dry mouth. Let there be fish in the pools!
You Were My Epiphany
I think the body knows that its own enlightenment takes form and substance at the moment the mind dissolves into flesh
at the instant the winds from the vast interiors of the soul spring forth to open the countless apertures of the skin and sing with a million voices caressfully blended into the colors of thought without thought
a million ears listening to the echoes of a lifetime filled with dreams of yeses.
You were an unlikely vision a book thrown into the fire and all the words rising to paradise together
I saw you perform I was your accomplice
I saw that light at the center of the heart where blood is mixed with essences known only in the language of our fingers
That light in your eyes when we melted into BEING still illuminates my sadness.
I remember how you began to unfold like the vague designs imagined in the black emptiness at the beginning of time
how they began at last to explain themselves the why and the how the paths perfectly taken the odysseys of sun and moon the birth of a whale
how everything appears and disappears how the sky and the ocean are old lovers forever looking at eachother in eachother's mirrors
and how your smile erased a thousand years of war of death and pain plague and famine
how all of history was a preparation for that moment when two spirits fused a universe ended and another one was born
how the music we made was a true form of magic as powerful as a nova as peaceful as the deep sleep of a forest
how we tried to continue floating forever on a stream to an unknown sea lying naked under the sun on a raft made of touches while the whole of nature silently watched
our mind's tongues testing and probing awash with the various flavors of life.
The Language of Color
Only when the Darwinian greenery began to unfold in the basements of God's institutions, tossing off the little seeds that used to stick in the bulbous craws of the blue goats in my dreams, only then were there also blossoms posing as eyes posing as noses posing as tongues, waiting for the machinery to stop.
When the light began to dance underwater and the glaucous fingers of time uncurled, muttering in the sunpowered babble known to hummingbirds known to the fine skeletal antennae of cobalt fish (the pale shadows of mermaids) known to herds of anemones glowing with an inner light impossible to reproduce, then the wheels began to spin, our grandfathers waved their personal flags in the dark, petals unfurled in the rhythmic heat, and sparks of color became the true food of the soul.
Cover Photo: "Wiley at Reyna's," Alamos, Mexico. Winter 2006. Photo by Robin Hiersche
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