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AHN INTERVIEW:
Artist Charles Hobson
"Poems have the capacity to connect to others when written with honesty and when dealing with personal truths. I found the poems that I used on the heart all connected to each other in a variety of ways and then connected the heart to the reader who might come upon them." - Charles Hobson
Charles Hobson
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Charles Hobson is a San Francisco-based artist who has been working for over twenty years with printmaking and artists books. As part of the Hearts in San Francisco project, he recently created a huge heart sculpture which incorporated poems by kids from the Poets in the Schools program. Danny Hobson interviewed him about this whimsical project which created such a perfect visual metaphor of poetry's ability to open the heart.
Danny Hobson: Tell me about the Hearts in San Francisco project.
Charles Hobson: Hearts in San Francisco was originated by a group of volunteers to support San Francisco General Hospital. The idea was to place 130 large (six feet tall!) hearts around the city. The heart motif came from the Tony Bennett song, "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," and the project was partly inspired by similar fundraising art projects in other cities such as "Cows in Chicago." Major sponsors supported the creation of the heart shapes, and the artists donated their creativity to decorate the hearts. Later the hearts were auctioned off after having been on display throughout the city for six months. The project raised more than a million dollars for the hospital.
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The heart in various stages: the raw fiberglass shape, the completed
artwork, and ready for transport to the SF Public Library
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Danny: Tell me about the evolution of your heart and how it expanded to include young poets.
Charles Hobson: I was asked to do a heart by Michael Osborn, the creative director of the project. I said yes without really any idea of what I would do or what I was getting into. I typically work with etchings and other printmaking media, and I teach about handmade artist's books at the San Francisco Art Institute. I was naturally looking for words that might go with the heart, and I noticed a poem that was up on the wall in my studio that had been written by a 6th grader named Meaghan Crowley. It reads:
Hate is a little man
Banging on my heart
and love is the heart
Swallowing up the little man.
The poem had been sent to me by a poet friend, Kathy Evans, who teaches in the Poets in the Schools program. I asked her to help me find some other poems that carried the same simple and elegant notions about the heart and love, and gradually I came to the approach of affixing the poems on opened books attached to the heart.
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Kids find their poems on the heart at
the "Vernissage in the Garage"
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Danny: What were some of the most heart warming moments for you in the creation of this sculpture?
Charles: I worked on my heart in my garage in San Francisco and when it was finished, I invited all the young poets to a "Vernissage in the Garage." Vernissage is a french word to describe a kind of coming-out celebration or preview of a newly completed art work. And so I had many of the young poets come and see their poems on the heart. I got to see the excitement in their faces as they saw their work having a such a broad, public life.
Danny: Where is the heart located now?
Charles: The heart was initially installed in the Main Library of the San Francisco Public Library and was seen by thousands of people over the several months it was there. In October, my heart sculpture was sold for over $6000 to a Silicon Valley financial manager, and I guess he has it in his living room.
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Danny: Tell me about the handmade artist book you created around this project.
Charles: Reading the poems on the heart was a unique experience and one of the aspects I like most was the diversity of the poems. I thought there ought to be book which could collect the poems, and so I used the images of the books on the heart with the poems printed on them to make up the text pages of a small book I made called Poems from the Heart.
Danny: In this project and many of your other artist book projects, you are inspired by poetry. What do you think it is about poetry that so opens the heart?
Charles: Poems have the capacity to connect to others when written with honesty and when dealing with personal truths. I found the poems that I used on the heart all connected to each other in a variety of ways and then connected the heart to the reader who might come upon them.
Danny: Do you believe art can heal? Has it healed your personally?
Charles: Yes, of course. Using one's creativity can transform and heal. My path has had a few medical adventures and dealing with those illnesses has given me numerous creative insights.
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The heart installed in the SF Public Library
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Danny:What advice do you have for other artists wishing to engage a larger community with their work?
Charles: Look around. Keep your eyes open. Listen to the needs that are out there.
See how your talents mesh with someone or something else going on in the world.
To learn more about Charles Hobson, please visit his web site at www.charleshobson.com or email him at cmhobson@aol.com.
To learn more about the Hearts in San Francisco Project, please visit www.heartsinsf.com.
To learn more about the Poets in the Schools, click here.
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FEATURED BOOK
Ten Poems to Open Your Heart
By Roger Housden
 "Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry." - Mary Oliver, quoted in Ten Poems to Open Your Heart
Ten Poems to Open Your Heart offers ten wonderful poems about love by poets including Mary Oliver, Rumi, Sharon Olds, Pablo Neruda, and Robert Bly. But this is not simply an anthology. Each poem is accompanied by a short chapter of text offering Roger Housden's insights into the poem. Written in very clear, accessible language and often using personal anecdotes, Housden's writing creates a bridge that allows these inspiring poems to enter our hearts more deeply. Below is an excerpt from the Epilogue:
"It is not easy to keep your heart open in the face of the trials of being human. Life can so often be difficult, disappointing: our dreams are so easily broken. How precious, then, those shafts of sunlight that sometimes break through our daily preoccupations, our anxieties, and reveal the beauty that was there all along.
Neither beauty nor love -- for the eyes that see beauty are the eyes of love -- need the absence of pain or suffering to exist. This I believe is the enduring message of the poets in this bookÉEven in the midst of our suffering, love can bloom."
This 143-page hardback book was published in 2003 by Harmony Books and sells for $16. To order a copy through Amazon, please click here.
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FEATURED BOOK
Top of My Lungs: Poems and Paintings and the essay "How Poetry Saved My Life"
By Natalie Goldberg
 "Before poetry I was lost. Now loss had a smell, a color, a texture. A fast train could split its side. I held lost childhood, lost shoe, lost moment. They belonged to me and I was foundÉ." - Natalie Goldberg
Natalie Goldberg is perhaps most well known for her best-selling book about writing prose called Writing Down the Bones, but her roots in writing lie in poetry. In this book, she returns to those roots, offering us inspiration in the form of her poems, paintings and an introductory essay, "How Poetry Saved My Life." Below is an excerpt from that essay:
"ÉWhen I began to write prose, poetry was my foundation. It taught me the care and profundity of each word. It demanded that I not be glib, that my whole body stand behind what I said. Poetry glimmered between the branches of sentences, the one thing in our greedy society that has not been gobbled up and sold in the marketplace. Always at my back, it kept me honest and served as an incorruptible reminder.
I dedicated myself to something bigger than myself and was handed over to beings seen and unseen, mountains and space, dead ghosts, grocery stores, night owls, snow, whistles, the divine in the center of the dumb. I came to love my life, its ragged edges, big hours, and lonesome paths. I learned that one equals two, three, then four blue apples, seven pears, until all comes back to itself again. All one intimate, aching poem. All of us. That's what poetry taught me and how it saved my life."
This 93-page book is a delightful object with its colorful well-reproduced pictures. Published by Overlook Press in 2002, the hardback version sells for $23.95. Click here to order through Amazon.com
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FEATURED LINK
California Poets in the Schools
www.cpits.org
 California Poets in the Schools is committed to helping students throughout California recognize and celebrate their own creativity, intuition and intellectual curiosity through the creative writing proces. They are also committed to providing students with a multicultural community of trained, published poets who bring their experience and love for their craft into the classroom.
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FEATURED LINK
National Association of Poetry Therapy
www.poetrytherapy.org
 For the past 24 years, NAPT members have forged a community of healers and lovers of words and language. Their members include writers, therapists, counselors, health professionals, educators and artists. They use all forms of literature and the language arts, and are united by their love of the word and their passion for enhancing the lives of others and themselves. NAPT is a membership association. They produce an annual conference and the next one will be in May 2005 in Missouri. They also produce two periodicals, Museletter and the Journal of Poetry Therapy.
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READERS RESPOND
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