Two First Pots
It’s always the next pieces I finish that are going to be the best. I spend so much time thinking this way (and often it’s true), that I rarely look back to consider the significance of the first pots I finished. I don’t have many, and don’t remember many, now. Two pots spring to mind, though, and probably I remember both by the words I put on their surfaces. One is still on a high shelf in my studio; the other only exists in memory.
When I was beginning as a potter, I drove an old two-door sedan and my son, who was three, rode in the back seat in his car seat. We spent a lot of time driving. I was fortunate to know a wonderful potter in Dixon, New Mexico, named Pete, who was endlessly patient and generous. My son and I would drive up to visit when I had a few pots to glaze and fire; I had no kiln, let alone knowing the first thing about stoneware glazes.
I used to get gas in Espanola, the town nearest our house. For a while there were posters on the gas pumps advertising the Techron brand of gasoline, featuring VW Bug-like cars with faces expressing delight. Quien Quiere Techron? one poster asked, and a group of cars, as if in a classroom, raised a wheel eagerly. Or a door. One day when I was trimming I took a set of metal letters meant for leatherwork and stamped Quien Quiere Techron? onto the shoulder of a ball-shaped bottle I had thrown. I remember the piece: insistently round (proving I could throw something round), with a little stand-up neck like a turtleneck shirt. Quien Quiere Techron? the bottle said, when I had finished footing it and set it aside to dry.
Pete let me put the piece in his kiln, but when it emerged he asked, “Why did you write that on the side?” “Um…I don’t really know,” I said. I acted as though I understood it had been a dumb thing to do, and part of me agreed that it was; Pete’s work was quiet, subtle, Leach-like, and I admired it. I wanted to be able to make pots as he did, throwing board after board of bowls. Part of me wanted to, anyway. Another part secretly liked the bottle, with its thick black glaze that settled perfectly into the letters, and knew that I stamped them onto the bottle in a gesture of defiance. I didn’t want to make regular pots. I didn’t want to follow rules, even if they came from A Potter’s Book (Pete had given me a copy). I wanted to make pots, but not necessarily the kind people liked.
Perhaps I had a better reason, too: it was just fun. Pressing the letters, watching a phrase that was stuck in my head appear in clay before me, watching the clay record my thought the way it recorded the touch of my hand—this was the thing about clay that was most fascinating. It was like hearing your own voice on a tape recorder, or discovering animal tracks in the mud at the edge of the river. Clay kept everything. It was completely faithful.
More faithful than I. In a second act of defiance, I broke the bottle with a hammer, as I did with much of my early work when it began to pile up. I should have kept it; I should have kept everything. Ironically, the other early piece that sticks in my memory -the one I still have - is one that I wouldn’t keep now, unloading it from the kiln. It is a bowl, wide and open, white, with blue writing on the outside. On this piece, I carved the words with a loop tool. Around and around the bowl, starting just below the lip and circling to the foot, I put the Wallace Stevens poem The Pleasures of Merely Circulating:
The garden flew round with the angel,
The angel flew round with the clouds,
And the clouds flew round and the clouds flew round
And the clouds flew round with the clouds.
Is there any secret in skulls,
The cattle skulls in the woods?
Do the drummers in black hoods
Rumble anything out of their drums?
Mrs. Anderson’s Swedish baby
Might well have been German or Spanish
Yet that things go round and again go round
Has rather a classical sound.
Carving letters is a less direct way of putting them in clay than impressing them. Little bits of material are removed; motion is recorded, not shape. The poem isn’t that easy to read on the bowl, though I still think the pattern of letters is interesting. Maybe that’s what I had in mind. As with the bottle, it was the act of adding letters to clay that counted, rather than how they would look in the end. The poem seemed to be just about pots and I was so delighted when I read it that I wanted to give it a place, a physical dimension. I wanted to enjoy it one letter at a time.
The bowl emerged from the kiln with an ‘S’ crack. I kept it anyway, and the fact that I did is just as much a part of the bowl, now, as the poem is. It marks a place in my journey as a potter: still at the beginning, able to love a piece with so blatant a beginner’s flaw. A little glue kept salad dressing from dripping onto the table top, and for a few years this bowl was stacked with others in the kitchens of various apartments where I lived. The bowl records the time when I made pots but wasn’t a potter, and when I made such a small number of pieces that I found something good in each of them. The title of Stevens’s poem gains another connotation, looking back, for I have lost some of that pleasure now, working more quickly and prodigiously; I am no longer content merely to circulate in the art I have chosen.
Theo Helmstadter
Chimayo New Mexico, 2007