Poet Bio: Sally Cook

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Paintings by Sally Cook.

Sally Cook is both a poet and a painter residing in upstate New York. In addition to the Society of Classical Poets, her poems have also appeared in Blue Unicorn, First Things, Chronicles, The Formalist Portal, Light Quarterly, National Review, Pennsylvania Review, TRINACRIA, and other electronic and print journals. A six-time nominee for a Pushcart award, in 2007 Cook was featured poet in The Raintown Review. She has received several awards from the World Order of Narrative and Formalist Poets, and her Best American Poetry Challenge-winning poem “As the Underworld Turns” was published in Pool.

Read an interview with Sally Cook here.

Read Sally Cook’s poetry here.

Visit a virtual gallery of her paintings here.

Below is an autobiographical essay by Sally Cook.

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Gypsy at the Carnival of Life

by Sally Cook

I am a very private person, and ordinarily would never reveal myself in a published text to the many pickers and peckers always eager to tear things apart. Still, circumstance has worked its ways to persuade me to write something about my unique double career as a painter and poet, in the hope that it might help some other blind-sided being.

Sally Cook

It must be obvious to any person on a sane track that good and bad exist in varying degrees; that children have more potential than is ever used; and that those who influence them do not always have their best interests at heart. And yet the same-old-same-old in child rearing keeps on and on. Why? Parental power, most likely.

Both my mother Berenice and her arch-rival, my concert pianist paternal grandmother Maud, worked together to give me two gifts. My grandmother (who insisted on being called “Aunt Maud,” so as to avoid being reminded of her age) wanted me to appreciate music; my mother wanted me to appreciate language. They labored at this—that is, when they could take time off from quarrelling over my Byronic father and his brother to go after me with all the good will in the world, in order to shape my character and intelligence.

Starting at the age of four, I had eight years of training as a pianist. It was stressful, but there was a lot to learn. My synaesthesia was stroked as I learned to appreciate the song of a beautiful phrase, and began to think of notes as syllables, and of each musical tone as a color. Berenice and Maud showed me the piano from the inside out—sounding board, pedals, trills; the depth of largo and sharpness of pizzicato. I learned that one might practice endlessly, but never just sit down and idly play. That was cheap, showoff, bar-room stuff, reserved for drunks or those hacks who had to perform for a living.

Together these two women made it impossible for me to achieve the calm middle-class life other girls dreamed of, and were guaranteed. But that was just fine with me. I would send my boats afloat in a far more interesting direction.

I didn’t realize it, but Berenice and Maud had just enlisted my intelligence in the war on my own ignorance. Through the clever use of poetry, my mother had nudged me into asking myself such questions as What care I for my house and land? What care I for my money? Though she soldiered on with domestic chores, at heart my mother was a raggle-taggle gypsy, and I was honored that she was my teacher. The poetic questions she lobbed at me were infinitely more interesting than any simplistic tale from Dick and Jane. Maud, however, had the big guns, by virtue of her professional career. On holidays, when other children received candy and bright plastic toys, I got something else.

For years I watched with dread as a worn, faded envelope wended itself my way. I’m not sure, but I may well have prayed that no other children would ever hear about Maud’s gift, which never failed to arrive, plunking itself down on my drawing table just when I wasn’t looking. On each occasion, the odd, misshapen envelope would inevitably contain a WORD, both phonetically and correctly spelled, and carefully defined and embedded in a seemingly harmless little story designed to pierce one’s consciousness like a steel-tipped arrow, a missive that would stick in the brain forever. I had thought Maud loved me for my hand positioning and sweet demeanor, but now this? I was expected to learn the new word completely, and be ready to answer questions about it. The whole thing was like receiving a vaguely threatening letter from an attorney.

In time I learned love had little to do with it, and anyway it was a given that children had nothing relevant to say. We were there to listen, learn, and that was it. It was all up to me; I could ignore these well-worn embarrassing missives and go lick an ice cream cone, but I knew who was in charge, and would soon be looking me straight in the eye with a certain amount of high disdain, and the question Did you get my letter, dear?

This was a Spartan sort of love, requiring that you defend your point of view on anything grammatical. I recall many head-to-head shouting matches with Maud, who was born to the Pennsylvania Mountain twang, but who taught herself to speak with an impeccable Boston accent. Anyone who could do that was not about to be contradicted. She knew the value of such speech, and I was not allowed to fluff it off. Feelings had nothing to do with it, and thoughts of throwing a tantrum would bring down something much worse from out of the Heavens. Better to give in—and at the same time, perhaps learn something.

Most times my mother and Maud were fairly well satisfied with me, and all was well at Tall Trees, our house. Yes, houses had names then. Maud’s was called Fairview Heights; ours Tall Trees, which I thought excessively redundant. Already a budding critic, I knew anyone could see trees were all over the place!

Once I began to write, curiously, musical notes morphed into words, and all other attributes of musical expression became verbal. This wasn’t a new thing. It was another form of synaesthesia kicking in, and intensifying. Confusing as synaesthesia naturally is, it must have been pure hell for a four-year-old. And yet I was beginning to write.

I recall only one entry in my red leatherette journal, written at the age of seven. It went as follows: Maud’s house burned down today. She saved a bottle of heavy cream. Uncle Gib died. Nothing much else happened. I am ashamed to say I thought this the height of satire and admired it in secret for years.

I didn’t write anything much at first, but about the same time my interest in art bloomed, and I began to illustrate my math and history papers with Corinthian columns, climbing vines, sailing ships, figures in togas, and busts wearing laurel wreaths. A budding classicist!

In a desperate effort to appear more conventional in my father’s eyes, by the sixth grade I took on the more mundane practice of drawing airplanes and the occasional horse, as did other children. I had no idea what he wanted, and cast about trying to please a man who would not be pleased. And all the while I had the example of my perfect sister, who could not be bettered. It seemed my father saw everything in scriptural or ecclesiastical terms: he was Jehovah, my sister a saintly Rachel, while I was Mary Magdalene. This hierarchy went right down to the Devil’s Paintbrushes in our lawn, which were always ranked below the other weeds. My father was, after all, a religious man. And although he knew things, he would not share any of them with me.

In my early teens I fell in love with skunks. This beast was the perfect symbol for how I viewed my low social position. Here was a small, neat animal of compact design, harmless and shy, and yet everyone hated it. I went all out on this, amassing skunk pictures, a skunk sweater, and a huge collection of china skunks. I also wanted a pet skunk, which when de-skunked is like an exotic cat. My parents were horrified—a wild animal among the doilies? It was The Rape of the Sabines all over again!

But when my mother scraped together enough money to send me to Saturday art classes, and my skunk painting was chosen to represent the school in an ad, skunks gained a certain status. However, mine was gaily painted in fuchsia and chartreuse, and synaesthesia was in the ascendancy. It was becoming The Year of the Skunk. Arrayed in fantastic colors of blinding purple-pink and acid green, that skunk looked like a big luscious flower. And there were people who liked it! Now I knew it was alright to paint a skunk in colors never seen in nature, without God coming down to chastise me.

Unfortunately, even after my graduation from high school my father was still not happy with the way I was turning out. I was still shy and reserved, and I may have had (in his eyes) the wrong boyfriends. So, in a rush of righteous displeasure, he sold our house to send me to a girls’ school for a year. Now the entire family hated me!

I don’t think my father ever realized what he had done, for I was immediately plunged into a world I didn’t know existed—the very one he was trying to keep me from.

I arrived there in a red hat with a feather in it. Everyone had been instructed to bring hats, long gowns, and white gloves for reception lines. I felt alone in a place where everyone seemed either drunk or depressed, and where winters were long. But there were some ways to have fun. The moment we were released to our rooms to study, the halls came alive with an atmosphere akin to a Bombay market at high noon. In one room you could get a haircut, manicure, and a cheap bottle of wine. Others sold slightly used evening gowns, or silk kimonos. Homemade cookies from doting but unwitting mothers were traded off for liquor and term papers. Depending on whose mother was the best baker, one to three bottles per box was the norm.

Breaking and entering became the thing to do. I fell in with a group who considered making art to be more daring than getting drunk (which in a real sense it is). Every night under cover of dark we would slink off to the art building, target the coal chute window which was regularly left open, slide down, race up three flights to the studio, paint furiously till dawn, and then sneak back into the dorms. You might think we went to paint innocuous landscapes, but you’d be wrong. We painted ghostly houses, gnarled trees, great boulders, crashing waves. Later, when I applied for an art school scholarship, these paintings formed the core of a portfolio which paid for three academic years.

There was always the chance of being caught, but since no one wanted to be in that girls’ school anyway, who cared? In the end it was a good investment that eventually paid for my scholarship. We were enrolled in the school as a punishment, so parents had no say about it at all. On returning home, I understood my father well enough to act the good girl and, in answer to his question as to whether I wanted to go back, I demurely said “Yes,” knowing his reply would be “Well, you CAN’T!”

This confirmed for me that our struggle was nothing about education, and everything about punishment. Like it or not, I WOULD BE normal, or close to his idea of it. But he did allow me to continue studying. When I finished art school after three years, having won the drawing prize, I burned my T-square and mechanical drawings in the back yard, and danced around the fire. But all in all, I was better off for the art school experience, which left me with a certain amount of discipline.

I love the unexpected and paradox in all that I do. Sometimes I might want red to recede and blue to come forward, or a table to slant upwards yet contain a heavy bowl of fruit that, defying gravity, refuses to slide off. Endless depths of sky please me, especially if they can be viewed as a flat patchwork quilt of pattern and color. In my paintings people stand on firm ground, yet they appear to float, swimming through their surroundings. A single crouching cat stalking a decorative, hapless bird can stand for all conflict. Paradox sparks all life and art, and makes us take a second look.

By deliberately exploring the unknown of my own individuality, I found an approach that in reality chose me. Because of this, my work is always on the slant and cannot be categorized. My discoveries in poetry and painting relate to each other through song, symbol, and synthesis. Sometimes a painting inspires a poem or, as they say, vice versa. From the age of four my feet had been set on this complex path.

Whether in painting or writing, I follow the old traditions, reinterpreted. I’ve found this approach always produces exciting, thought-provoking, and ultimately beautiful results. The incoherence expressed by most modern art authorities is a statement of incompetence, and is also a calculated technique designed to confuse, dishearten, and defeat budding artists.

For me, developing an idea may take years. Other times it is complete within minutes. Naturally I keep notes on things observed, and maintain quite a collection of old photos and seed catalogues for reference. I paint on canvas—every frame is built and decorated for the individual painting, to provide a way for gracefully arriving at, and then exiting the idea. Though I may sometimes make a thumbnail drawing, the completed idea is always drawn directly on the canvas, sometimes on a colored ground. On a relatively smooth surface I use acrylic paint which, although not as sensuous a medium as oil, makes possible the use of many glazes and underpaintings which would never be practical today with slow-drying oils.

Positively influenced as I have been by artists of the early Renaissance (Giotto, the Brueghels, and Piero Della Francesca), my canvases are not over-large, and I believe the subtle use of glazing and brilliant, dreamlike color enhances my ideas. I paint the form and spirit of the things I know: animals, people, fruit, foliage, houses, vases, myself. The fantasy comes out in the point of view from which they are painted, and in that particular ambiance with which each is surrounded. I love the accumulation of many small rich details, as in syllables that make up words. My paintings relate to, and are a continuation, in another discipline, of my poetry. I am not a “folk” painter, since I have been professionally trained and educated. Instead, for my ideas I return to those early Renaissance painters whose beautiful and stately work, concerned as it is with detail and fantasy, was left behind in the wake of later schools. I have returned to that crossroads to shape my approach to contemporary life. If the results express my thoughts, I can ask nothing more. Lasting art does not exist in a lavender fog. It is never indeterminate. It is sharp, incisive, and bears the mark of truth.

I do plead guilty to applying for occasional jobs in the academic world, but only when I was desperate for work. It seemed that during a typical three-hour interview various people kept explaining how things work, and yet I left not knowing one thing about it, especially what they wanted of me. Like the concept of open classrooms, no one could say how it operated, if it succeeded, or even what the end goal of it all was. These interviews were like listening to Milton in Swahili—just a hurricane of verbiage and incompetence. So I’m glad I have avoided academia and its crippling lack of clarity.

I have always believed in experimentation, provided one realizes that one is dealing with experiments. Dangerous stuff! You might be trying to make a harmless rondeau or paint an insignificant little seascape, but by adding just the wrong ingredient end up with dynamite and blow the whole thing sky-high. Inevitably, experiments come to a bad end. If you have been playing around with them for too long, it becomes your responsibility to know when to stop.

On graduating from art school I began a gypsy sort of life, painting and sitting in on classes. I fell in with my natural companions, another group of disreputable types. One was Peter Busa, a painter whose main occupation seemed to be doing unlikely things. He kept urging his better students to go to New York and join in a group that had formed in galleries around Tenth Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Go to Tenth Street! This is the time! he would shout.

His enthusiasm was catching, and three of us went. Two were native New Yorkers and were only going home. But then there was me—that wayward girl from Angola, New York and she wanted to go too. So before I actually knew what I was doing, I found myself smack in a jumble of grimy old houses, living with three other people in a loft on the Bowery. Yes, the Bowery, a few doors from where Stephen Foster died, and a long way from Angola.

We all went down to Tenth Street. I had expected a community of ideas, each one being furiously pursued and defended, so it was quite a shock to find instead a gaggle of callow painters who (it seemed to me) would agree to anything short of a major crime, and slavishly operate under the most stringent rules, just to get from Tenth to the big-time galleries on Fifty-Seventh Street. These painters had long since been copying the chosen few, hoping to “make it” and get rich. Their conversation, opinions, and dress were closely guarded, and the infinitesimal differences in their styles carefully monitored by each other. Despite their bohemianism, these Tenth Street artists were tedious conformists.

This was why no one on Tenth Street would actually discuss the ideas inherent in Abstract Expressionism. The concept of brain-arm-hand-brush-canvas was certainly worth investigating—brain through arm to hand, then surface–yet they chose the easy way, hero-worshiping the esteemed Jackson Pollock. What would he have done next if he hadn’t taken himself out in a drunken blaze of glory? This romantic myth consumed them, but they would not have deigned to discuss the idea of it with me for anything, unless I was under the tutelage of some currently prominent artist being lauded in the art columns of well-known newspapers.

With these artists, cynicism was rampant upon a field of self-interest. Occasionally, in a bar, some guy would ask me Why do you paint to the edge of the canvas, or Why do you use so much color? The answer to both questions being Because it’s there. That is precisely the way it was among these people, and it never improved. I had seen the possibilities of Abstract Impressionism, but noted the impossibility of developing it when unthinking painters didn’t think it necessary to reflect and discuss its direction.

Lacking the stimulus of group interest, all I could do was make my paintings the best the could be and let them speak for themselves. But they could not be heard above the fray of narcissism and arrogance that roiled Tenth Street. Shortly, I packed up my stuff and returned to upstate New York.

Returning to the comparative peace of Buffalo, I found I was developing more of an interest in the clarity of symbols and their meaning. My new idea was to develop a symbolic language which might be read by anyone who chose to do so. I would do this by using horizon lines, color, large and small spaces and geometric shapes, along with limited tones to express ideas, objects, and emotions.

In New York I had seen and learned many things. I could speak visually well enough to describe a personality, a plant, a cityscape. I started with the simplest geometric shapes, adding to these the appropriate shades of color. Thus, a group of leafy shapes in bright sunlight and appropriate colors could hold a group of tones and values which might make a representation of a petaled flower or group of fruits surrounded by additional more muted background leaves. This could also be done with human emotions or thought processes. Tensions between these major and minor contrasts made the abstract paintings more clear, creating another dimension in my later more presentational works.

It worked so well in fact that I began to paint abstract portraits. My idea of portraiture had never gone away. It was only waiting for the right set of circumstances. Off to the side I was still drawing and painting people, and writing poems about personalities both human and animal—a flower, a tree, a body of water, a stone.

This was another quite successful experiment, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. What was I waiting for? Something called Magical Realism. Many years before my incursion into abstraction, I had drawn and painted curious human objects which often lacked limbs, eyes, or other expected attributes. Now I was shown a bookful of empty landscapes, three-legged chairs, banquets in deserts, floating people—all the things I had previously thought of as normal. It may be I never thought of them at all—they just existed in that vortex of objects and beings which composed my creative process.

This entire process began with a high concentration on words. Everything about words—their relationships and derivations—contributes to their use in poetry. Soon musical tones, notes, and chords were blowing through my own particular styles of painting and poetry. All I had to do now was to paint and write!

To sum up, I must give credit to the unconventional teaching methods of my mother and grandmother, and even the determination of my father to make me into something I was not, which gave me a concept against which to test myself. But even more, during my early years he had provided a beautiful environment where I might grow. Even the sparest surroundings of Tenth Street, and the paucity of thought there, acted as sandpaper to refine my perceptions.

And books have not failed me. Inside strong though faded covers they wait. Sometimes for years, always ready to restore and refresh. They prompt bright and gleaming thoughts to light me above the swamps of dullness and incompetency.

Who dares to say there are no permanent things?

And why would anyone want there not to be?

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