Felicia Van Bork Archives

Sprezzatura is a Renaissance term/style: nonchalant, natural, apparently careless though, in fact, the opposite—a pose in a sense, an attitude, a rhetorical stance.

Alan Michael Parker is a poet-novelist, that is, he began his career as a poet, has published five volumes of poetry, an impressive and expanding opus. The last book Elephants & Butterflies is, as it should be, perhaps his best, confident, urban, urbane, knowing, acerbic, witty, quick, cutting and surprising. Parker has a way of talking about God and TV dreck in the same moment. He has made sprezzatura his own.

Dear God who made me act
in whose gaze I am rerun
now I lay me down

Alan is an old friend and colleague from dg’s stint as the McGee Professor of Writing at Davidson College in North Carolina. He had the good taste to marry a Canadian, the painter Felicia van Bork. He is a prolific poet and a novelist, a poet-novelist, a wry, energetic presence with a gift for teaching and satire.

Sprezzatura with Two Rabbits

By Alan Michael Parker

Talking to the two rabbits in the herb garden, I could be Gerald Stern,
the way he talks to everything, my god,
and really Gerald Stern is always singing to everything,
and everything is singing back.

I tell the rabbit on the left her name is Plato,
and the rabbit on the right she’ll have to wait for a name
because so many names are just a necessarily lesser quality
of an original thing. I call both rabbits “she.”

I describe to the rabbits Gerald Stern’s childhood in Pittsburgh,
his Greek roses and his Borscht Belt beauty and his poem about Auden;
predictably, the rabbits don’t seem to care about my story,
jittery and motionless in their agitation, while the stiller I have to stand

to keep my audience, the more some muscle in my left arm
starts to twitch like a bad rhyme,
or like a captive princess kicking over the table
in a fable when the witch wants rabbit stew.

But since I killed so many rabbits in a poem in 1996
with a shotgun—my best weapon then, before I learned to
write about my family—I feel too guilty in advance
to kill and skin and cook and eat

a rabbit named Plato or her pal.
Writing poems makes me hungry for what I can’t have, sometimes,
which I think Plato probably knew about poetry, but I need to Google it.
FGI, I tell myself all the time, Fucking Google It.

But now one of the rabbits is named Plato and the other’s Gerald Stern,
a combo I’m surprised by, although I suspect that
this poem suspected so all along, and named both rabbits
“she” only as a ruse. Hop away, hop, hop,

hop away free, you bunnies: go back to the greatness
of the garden, your fur dusted with sage and thyme, your lives
opening into a warren filled by the mind of God,
with carrot tops, twenty-seven brothers and sisters, and endless sex;

free of the human need to name, or our crude ambitions
to see whatever light we hope to see,
and hop up and down as we shout the light! the light!
before we’re gobbled up by mystery.

—Alan Michael Parker

Felicia van Bork is a Toronto artist now living in Davidson, North Carolina, with her husband, the poet-novelist Alan Michael Parker. DG met both Felicia and Alan when dg was the McGee Professor of Writing at Davidson College in the spring of 2005, a semester memorable for friendship, conviviality, the brilliance of the students, and for sitting in Zoran Kuzmanovich’s kitchen drinking flavoured vodka. It was always an amazing experience going to the Parker-van Bork house for the proliferation of art work which hung from the walls in every room. In those days, Felicia worked mostly in encaustic, whereas now she has veered off into print-making, especially monotypes as represented below. To dg, what is amazing about these prints is the tension between the apparent immensity of the space inside the frame and the actual dimensions of the works. Felicia somehow implies vast spaces and grandeur in the shapes she creates. Also places—silent marine depths. And life forms, and dramatic, swooping gestures. There is little representation here, but implication is all. She limns a world pregnant with immensity and motion. When dg wrote to her about the new work, Felicia responded:

It’s true. Encaustic is awesome, but things change. A couple of years ago, I was in Provincetown, in the MFA program at the Fine Arts Work Center. I was making nice paintings. Then I took a three-hour monotype workshop in the printmaking studio and – and – that was that. I bought the biggest piece of plexi that would fit on the huge American French Tool press and started making prints like “Deep Music in Deep Water.” In fused encaustic, it’s difficult to make graphic lines, hard edges and gradients, but in monotype printmaking, those pictorial elements are part of the basic tool set. And because prints are worked in reverse and with the unpredictable action of pressure on ink, my addiction to chance is still being fed. Unexpected things happen all the time, and I get surprises every time I peel the paper away from the plate. A single print may go through the press more than ten times, so there are lots of opportunities for the Divine to have a go along with me.

I do edge-to-edge printing, meaning I don’t leave a border of unprinted paper around my images. When the plate is inked and the ink has been manipulated, I have the freedom to place the paper on the ink as the image demands, without worrying about registering the image perfectly in relation to the edges of the plate. And because inked plexi is more or less transparent, I can see how the ink marks on the plate will be positioned on the image in progress.

—Felicia van Bork