Harrisburg, PA 56°F
In Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (now playing at Midtown Cinema) Owen Wilson plays a writer pining for the Paris mythologized by Hemingway and Fitzgerald. After a hallucinatory trip, Wilson concludes he must abandon this envy, find his own city and make his own art.
Maria James-Thiaw is a poet, widely published with an intimidating performance record and a voraciously engaging personality. This is a joy to encounter in anyone but is an especially valuable quality in artists. When we met while I was working at the late Camp Hill Borders, I knew within the first few minutes of our meeting that she was a writer: she is articulate, entertaining, and supremely infectious communicator. She is also program champion of the Associates in Communications program at Central Penn College, the career-oriented, baccalaureate, residential college in Summerdale.
As manufacturing of CDs, DVDs and books is reduced to easily reproducible data, the industries that supported the commodification of art fail to remain big. The positive impact this has on the environment has a similarly depressing, albeit Janus-faced, impact on art as an industry. Jobs vanish or decrease in relevance at every level of production, but creative goods no longer need to be fed through a large machine to become accessible to an audience. This, of course, leaves young artists and those passionate about the arts at an aimless loss about where and how to focus their energy.
Maria’s professional background in public relations posits her in a unique and important place as a writer. Since 2004 she’s been teaching at Central Penn, and she received her MFA in Poetry from Goddard College in 2009. She is freshly returned from a residency in Auvillar, France, sponsored by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. When I met to talk with her about being a writer in Harrisburg—crucially, one whose vocation is writing, and sees it like the work that it is, and has a professional background in public relations—I brought up the grim example lately set by Penn State and the dissolution of their MFA program, the only in-state opportunity Pennsylvania students had to study writing with full funding. After I worked through a grim rant about writing in Pennsylvania, particularly here, Maria countered my doom-spell: Harrisburg is home to Nathaniel Gadsden’s Writers Wordshop, which meets Fridays from 7 to 9 at 1416 Cumberland Street and has so since 1977; and since 1999, the Almost Uptown Poetry Cartel has resided all over the capital area and currently meets Thursdays from 7 to 9 at the Midtown Cinema, so there is no excuse for missing one for the other. Both groups emphasize spoken word, Maria’s specialty. To designate a specialty about someone so talented should hint at the degree to which Maria is amazing at what she does. She read me one of her latest poems, “Mirror,” about investigating the Black Arts Movement and the overwhelming implications that come from having a legacy. The impulse for writers to want to be considered writers, as opposed to Latin writers or gay writers or Pennsylvania writers, is natural, but like anything else, that tension should be generative and not stifling. Stifling is easy; exploring is not.
Maria’s poetry is sharp and unflinching, and she did not shy away from any topic I broached in our conversation, including the business of business communications. Writing does not make money—whether or not this is a fact, this is the message that schools send students who want to make it as writers. There are now tools to enable others to access one’s work like never before. But in order to get any use out of tools like Facebook, Youtube, Kickstarter, Podcasts, Paypal, Etsy, publicity and marketing must be de-demonized for young artists who are, if they have any post-secondary schooling on the subject, raised in a rarified atmosphere where literature and art is invoked and studied reverently, and the means by which those artists achieved success (if they did at all in their lifetime) are crucially absent. They need models like Maria who are fearless, proud and shrewd. She pointed out that marketing one’s art can rouse in the minds of local aspiring writers the unpleasant image of a particular writer—whose name I refuse to invoke—who accosts and harasses others and does not stop until her victim purchases her book and leaves. Public Relations lifers, as Maria observed, “really drink the koolaid” of whatever entity employs them, sometimes to an extent that alienates others when an ad-free website is one notch below a wire-free skyline on the serenity-meter. Without such people, though—professionals like Maria know this, great companies know this—people would not know about services that could benefit them, like the Wordshop or the Uptown Poetry Cartel, about which I knew nothing.
So allow me to do some PR for Maria: the poems from her manuscript, Souls Grown Deep, are worth committing to memory and hip-sway in the manner of the most infectious Nina Simone song (which is “Sinner Man,” for the record—all ten minutes of it). Her 2006 spoken word album FREEverse is available as a CD and to download from CD Baby. She reads brilliantly and often, most recently at the Midtown Scholar. I am spoiled to have seen her act out the inspiration for the following poem, but her work knows just how to appeal to one’s imagination. There is no better advertisement for her than her words, and I leave you with a poem from her residency in Auvillar:
La Fleur
By Maria James-Thiaw
Ce n’est pas qu’il était beau
avec son visage bien âgé
et son très Europeane tète bouclée.
Il n’avait rien de cowboy,
rien de capitaliste en Armani
pas de George Clooney.
He wasn’t pretty, nor could pecks
be seen under his too respectable
brown-tweed jacket,
and yet in that moment,
he had lassoed the imagination of
every woman in the outdoor café.
It was the way he leaned back in his
plastic chair without questioning
its strength to hold him,
closed his eyes, planted his face
in a thriving blossom
drew in air from his core, and took it all in.
He sniffed with his entire body,
swirling his head so the petals could caress his skin.
He wanted to wear this scent.
It was as if it were the first scent he’d ever smelled,
or the last he ever would;
As if the scent itself stopped time.
He wrapped it around his head like a turban,
let it dance in his nostrils;
Lapping it up, he was a kitten in milk.
His mind caressed it as if it were fleshy and soft.
He let it envelop him
until the plant itself moaned and quaked in ecstasy.
And I, with a cold blocking my nose,
was merely an envious voyeur,
but my friend, a Rose herself, tired of the feeling
of being stopped up by life’s tragedies and demands
marched over to that plant without hesitation,
her words swirling in the dust her feet had left behind,
I must smell that flower! She demanded. J'aurai ce qu'il a !
Kari Larsen is a writer and on the internet, and those things have been thus far mutually exclusive. You can follow her at her blog Cold Rubies.
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