A Conversation on Art & Spirituality
December 2022. I join Susie Kaufman on her blog, “seventy something,” to discuss my art and its underpinnings:
Art & Spirituality
2022 Drawn from Within
Solo show at The Oxbow Gallery
2019 In-Dwelling at Oxbow Gallery
Solo exhibit at The Oxbow Gallery, Northampton, MA, November 2019, included gallery talk on 11/17/19.
2018
Exhibit: Diving In: Water, the Unconscious, and Creative Process, The Sanford Gallery at Zea Mays Printmaking Studios, Northampton, MA. October 2018
Exhibit: Through a Feminine Lens, The Connector Gallery at Kimball Farms, Lenox, MA. October-November 2018
Exhibit: Berkshires x 4: Dai Ban, Charles Schweigert, Rosemary Starace, and Elmer Orobio, The Connector Gallery at Kimball Farms, Lenox, MA. December 2018-January 2019
Exhibit: The Illuminated Broadside, curated by Julio Granda, The Connector Gallery at Kimball Farms, Lenox, MA. August-September 2018 (featuring my poem “Fifty Grackles” on a broadside from Elephant Tree House Press.)
2017
Ovunque Siamo
My dresses and a statement in the form of a poem appear in Volume 1, Issue 2 of this journal that features Italian-American creative writing and art.
Italian Americana
Cultural and Historical Review
My poem Undone appeared in Volume XXXV, Number 2, Summer 2017.
Views from the Deep World at BCC
My show, Views from the Deep World, is on display at the Koussevitzsky Gallery at Berkshire Community College in Pittsfield, MA,
March 13 through April 6, 2017. Gallery Hours M-F, 9-5.
2016
Announcing the publication of Unseen Avenue by Argotist Ebooks, May 2016. Available here for viewing and free download.
“In her wildly inventive Unseen Avenue, Rosemary Starace has achieved that which might seem nearly impossible—making the experience of reading a digital text seem tactile and intimate. Exploring the creative process through a re-imagining of Julia Cameron’s ‘The Artist’s Way,’ Starace has threaded a lantern on a rope down into the places that only this peculiar combination of mediums can reach. You feel as if you’re standing in front of a canvas, or alone in a room with a book made of real paper you can feel in your hands: grooves, edges and all. With humor, intelligence and evident pleasure, she has made a work that cannily requires intense engagement and allows moments of cool remove in turn. My own favorite passage:
it’s best to just admit / that / daily / abandoning / “I can’t be / “I can’t pursue / “I can’t / This form of grandiosity / Who can concentrate on / love / with this / worrying
I will read this beautiful book over and over again.”
–Carolyn Guinzio, author of Spine
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Taking part in the panel, A Language for the Unknown, at the 2016 Massachusetts Poetry Festival with Ellen Goldstein (moderator) and Heather Hughes. May 1, 1 pm, Hawthorne Hotel, Salem, MA.
Panel description: Careful observation, precise language, and a fascination with what poet and science writer Alison Hawthorne Deming calls “the unknown” are some of the commonalities between poetry and science. This panel examines the ways in which the two disciplines inform and inspire each other. How can astronomy, geology, or biology illuminate a relationship or expose human truth in poetry? How does a fact become a metaphor when it crosses the science/poetry border? How do curiosity and imagination play out in both arenas? Using their own poetry as well as examples from other poets and scientists, Heather Hughes, Rosemary Starace, and Ellen Goldstein discuss how science figures in their search for poetic meaning and “the unknown.”
2014-15
Annunciation: Sixteen Contemporary Poets Consider Mary
Very pleased to be included in this beautiful anthology published in November 2015 by Phoenicia Press in Montreal, illustrated and edited by Beth Adams.
“A beautiful book that’s more human and personal than religious, in which the enigmatic and universal figure of Mary helps us find common ground.”
Includes poetry by Ivy Alvarez, Rachel Barenblat, Jeanne Marie Beaumont, Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Chana Bloch, Leila Chatti, Luisa A. Igloria, Mohja Kahf, Vivian Lewin, Vinicius de Moraes (Natalie d’Arbeloff, trans.), Roderick Robinson, Nic Sebastian, Claudia Serea, Purvi Shah, Rosemary Starace, and Marly Youmans
Other activities
- I took part in the reading/panel Mediterranean Voices: Ancient Echoes, Modern Lives at the 2015 Massachusetts Poetry Festival in Salem, MA, USA and again at the Amherst Poetry Festival in Amherst, MA
- The poem Waif appears in issue 14 of Antiphon Poetry Magazine and an audio version appears on the Antiphon blog.
- The Smooth-Flowing, Cursive Forms of Childhood was republished in the 2014 retrospective issue of The Mind’s Eye, the humanities magazine of Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. The poem first appeared in The Mind’s Eye in 1999.
- Six poems and a photograph appear in the November 2014 issue of Truck, on the theme of death and loss.
- Three hybrid poem/images and a brief essay on the form appeared in the anthology Splitting the Genre: An Intersection of Poetry & Visual Art from Six Arrow Press. Titles of pieces: Artists have found it useful, If you love blue velvet, and Who are you kidding? (Rotten).
- The poems, I Found I Had Neglected Thirst and Kind Thoughts appeared in Writing Fire, an anthology of women writers from the Berkshire, USA region.
Lots of News
Six “hybrid” poem-drawings appear in the March 2014 issue of Yew Journal, and others in the book Splitting the Genre: An intersection of poetry and art (Six Arrow Press 2014). Links to come.
Several of my Boat paintings were featured in the December 2013 issue of Yew. Scroll down
The poems The Astoria Line and The Shortest Distance appear in 3 Elements Review.
Animals in the City, qarrtsiluni
My poem Wild animals, come to the porch appears, with accompanying recording, in the newest issue of qarrtsiluni.
Wind and Rain
“You dream you are smoothed by an evening of rain.” Enter an elemental landscape that celebrates love, wildness, and all that wind and rain conjure. Poet Rosemary Starace and singer-songwriter JoAnne Spies trade art forms and collaborate with each other and the elements in this interactive theatrical performance. Guitar, dulcimer, drums, melodicas, accordions, rattles, and chimes will accompany original and familiar pieces spoken, chanted, and sung.
Part of The Berkshire Festival of Women Writers.Wednesday, March 27, 2013
The Lichtenstein Center for the Arts
Pittsfield, MA 01201
7 p.m. Suggested Donation: $5CD Nelson says, “JoAnne Spies puts the purr in performance art.” Sounding the River
Rosemary Starace’s poetry is “very much like the blues, full of lacrimae rerum....Hearing it, I feel a weight lifting in my chest that I didn’t know was there.” —Dave Bonta, Via Negativa
