Even the tiny sing. Elephants may make oil paintings, but dormant prairie seeds sing, and their songs create images, ultimately renewing Terry Hermsen's activist/poet's hope for healing our planet's ailing ecology. His encounter with Cadine Navarro's installation, It Sounds Like Love, reminds him that art can open doors to understanding, inviting solutions. We are taken into sacred spaces: gallery, classroom, home, the world in Tiny Songs' multi-genre pieces: haiku; epigraph-inspired essay-meditations and longer poems; images of floating ink paintings prompted by recordings of the seeds' songs, unique as each plant's essence; photographs of people responding; and young students' own inspired poems. The collection offers a conversation we never imagined. But Navarro did, and Hermsen absorbed the wonder, becoming a conduit of the singing-seeds journey.
Hermsen, Terry: - Terry Hermsen grew up in Illinois and Michigan. His poetry has always been tied to his life experiences. In 1976, at the age of 26, he and his first wife Carla rode their bicycles across the country--an experience which led to his first book, 36 Spokes: The Bicycle Poems (Bottom Dog Press's second volume in 1985). After that, he and his wife moved to Plymouth, Ohio, where they homesteaded for five years--and had a daughter named Isa. This experience led to his second book, Child Aloft in Ohio Theatre, ten years later in 1995. A move to Westerville, where they lived on the banks of Alum Creek, evolved into his third book, The River's Daughter, which was co-recipient of the Ohio Poet of the Year Award in 2009. His fourth book was A House for Last Year's Summer in 2017, greatly influenced by his time teaching in museums and his study of art education in his PhD work at Ohio State University.
132
He taught for the Ohio Arts Council for over 20 years, visiting schools across the state and conducted poetry night-hikes in over a dozen state parks. He taught literature and writing at Otterbein University from 2003 to 2017. Over the past six years, Terry has helped to found a group called ROAR: Regional Ohio Action for Resilience, looking for climate change action in central Ohio. His album of activist songs raising awareness about the climate crisis entitled Dance Floor at the Edge of Time, has been performed in six states.
Between 1997 and 1999, his second wife Leslie and he adopted two children from Guatemala, Noël and Noah. Currently he is translating the poetry of Chilean poet Christian Formoso, publishing Formoso's masterpiece The Most Beautiful Cemetery in Chile. From August of 2021 to May of 2023, he helped guide immersions in Cadine Navarro's art installation, It Sounds Like Love at the Frank Museum of Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio and at the Grange Insurance Audubon Center in Columbus, Ohio, an experience which led to this book.
Navarro, Cadine: - Cadine Navarro is a French-American artist currently living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is working at MIT to further her research into the sounds of seeds. Her work has been shown extensively around the world, including the Wexner Center for the Arts, Venice Biennale, Contour Biennale, Art Brussels, and Deitch Studios New York. Though her father is French and her mother comes from Cleveland, Ohio, they moved to Japan just before she was born. She lived there for her first 17 years before a major earthquake destroyed their home and much of their city, sending her family into exile. She has since lived on three continents and in over 55 homes. Very much a land-based artist, Cadine Navarro's practice cross-pollinates the fields of art, science, design, and spirituality to create spaces of encounter and direct experience involving all the senses. More information can be found at: www.cadinenavarro.com.
