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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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