Ragain-Damen Art Collaboration
Dedication for the Wick Poetry Corner installation of Jessica Damen’s Painting and celebration of the Maj Ragain Poetry Scholarship
Listen to Maj Ragain read "For My Mother, Beatrice Summers on Her 90th Birthday":
For My Mother Beatrice Summers on Her 90th Birthday
The first hard freeze comes tonight,
December 5, the evening of your 90th birthday. We have cut the last of the roses
and set them in little vases,
asking them to stay a while longer.
Never have they bloomed this late
into the season.
The hardiest of the dozens of roses
around our house is the Tamora,
a pale pink blossom that has refused to wilt in the frosts, break in the winds
or yield to blight.
Its fragrance is a celestial vanilla,
painted with honey-hammered ginger.
In another time, you might have been named Tamora.
You have stayed late with us.
The days grow short.
The snow will come soon.
You remain, as I have always known you,
in bloom in a world broken yet whole,
in bloom in the pale sunlight of late fall,
in bloom wherever you find yourself planted, my dear mother, my December rose.
— Maj Ragain
Jessica Damen’s Artist Statement
I recalled a memory. It was a sweltering evening at Vernon Lake, OH. I was Maj’s guest and had just a few hours before met Beatrice. Music was playing. Beatrice grabbed my hands and within seconds we were dancing to Lindy beats. Beatrice’s joy was infectious. We swayed rhythmically. Her radiance was brilliant. Later, Beatrice and Maj shared photos of his older brother. Decades before he had been killed in a car accident. Mother and son weren’t strangers to excruciating loss.
These textual, resilient roses are Beatrice’s strength and beauty dancing to an unheard beat. Those varied colored, darkened squares are the stuff of life threading through space. Separate yet overlapping, the squares gradually become lighter until each, reaches an almost indistinguishable hue.
Beginning in the summer of 2001 Maj and I began our long and loving collaboration. We seldom discussed our respective paintings or poems prior to engaging in our art. Instead, we sought for responses derived from our individual experiences. Painting responsively, I imagined myself in his scenes. Sometimes, I felt like a companion walking through his poetic passageways, emphatically expressing with paint, form and brushstroke, hidden emotions. At times, I diverged and re-envisioned his scene, lost in my memories spurred by his verse.
Please consider donating to the
- Maj Ragain Poetry Scholarship, which annually supports a KSU student to lead a community poetry workshop and organize a poetry reading at Last Exit Books or
- Tyler Lee Gaston Poetry Fund, which supports the Wick Poetry Corner on the 2nd floor in the University Library