Uncontainable Poems
Getting to Gardisky Lake by Paul Willis

As a poetry professor at Westmont College and former poet laureate of Santa Barbara, California, Paul Willis lives in one of the most gorgeous cities in the country. The poems in his latest book, Getting to Gardisky Lake, tease out the tension between delivering beauty as a vocation and living in a landscape that daily announces beauty’s unwillingness to be contained. He calls attention to a profoundly overlooked irony—that the poetry teacher, tasked with feeding poetry in easily digestible meals to young minds, is perhaps more aware than anyone that this task is futile. For a poet, teaching poetry is like lassoing the wind. So, the poems dodge back and forth between the classroom and the ragged mountains flanking the Santa Barbara campus, the teacher leading his students to water, then heading for high desert springs to drink a little himself. These springs are in the High Sierras, where “the Jeffrey pines / whistle as hard as a boy crossing a graveyard” and in the valleys of memory, where he discovers a forgotten classmate named Salvatore, who “disappeared into an unpainted house with walls / made of rain and blackberry vines.” The effect of these turns, from classroom to highway to forest to childhood, each poem both aromatic and concrete, is that of a winding journey through the backcountry, following a guide who keeps telling you to not to trust him. In “Introduction to Poetry” he asks, “What can I possibly put on the test?” The book itself is his answer. “For your exam, sleep in the rain forest / seven years, and when you awake, / trace the Amazon to its roots / in the fluted faces of the Andes.” Willis has awoken from this seven-year slumber, and has returned to town to tell his dreams. 
—Reviewed by Paul Anderson

Purchase your copy here.

The Passion Paintings of Jim Morphesis
Art Exhibition in Beverly Hills, California

Painter Jim Morphesis creates works suffused with passion. Not passion in the superficial sense of “enthusiasm,” but in something closer to the dramatic, scriptural meaning of the word. When you encounter his work you have to brace for some pain, for the suffering and sin and violence and awareness of mortality that characterize our human experience. Morphesis says he paints “flesh and bone,” which makes sense, because it is in the human body that suffering leaves its marks. Skulls, heart, torsos, the crucified body of Christ: all of these appear in his paintings. The very application of paint itself is fleshly—thick, built up as if over a long period of patient endurance. As in the Gospel, Morphesis knows that passion doesn’t mean mere passivity: true human passion, as Christ modeled it for us, involves an active leaning in to what the world brings us. Whether he is drawing on biblical narratives or classical myths, Morphesis works within the great tradition of Western art, interweaving his meanings so that form and content become one.

Now through February 14, The Garboushian Gallery in Beverly Hills, California, is currently exhibiting Jim Morphesis's Selected Works: 1974-2016. Spanning more than four decades, this exhibition highlights significant artwork representing various phases and styles from Morphesis' long career. Find more details and read about Morphesis's evolving work over the decades here.