Local Writer Puts Words to Paintings
Westmont professor and Santa Barbara author Marilyn Chandler McEntyre has recently released the third of three volumes of poems on the work of Dutch artists, Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Van Gogh. “In Quiet Light,” “Drawn to the Light,” and “The Color of Light,” offer readers reflections on their paintings.
She will be reading and signing her books Monday, Nov. 19, 5:30 p.m., at the Santa Barbara Public Library, 40 East Anapamu Street, and Saturday, Dec. 8, from 2-4 p.m. at Barnes & Noble, 829 State Street.
McEntyre, professor of English, tells students that art offers an invitation.
“I hope readers will accept the invitation both the paintings and the poems extend to pause, look longer and imagine, to allow themselves to be touched, to rediscover the power of color, to experiment with ways of seeing,” she says.
McEntyre says the idea for the books came in the middle of a dreary winter afternoon in Princeton, N.J., when she found herself moved by a print of Vermeer’s “The Lacemaker.”
“I felt addressed by the painting,” she says. “It seemed to articulate a quality of quiet and grace and attentiveness that seemed to me, in that moment, an invitation to contemplation.”
When McEntyre began writing the poem for the painting, she says she was taken to a similar place of quiet concentration. She continued to seek out the Dutch painters during travels to museums in the Netherlands and the U.S., and to respond to them with poems.
“There is no substitute for seeing them in person,” she says. “The quality of light in Vermeer’s “Mistress and Maid,” for instance, was so striking, it caught my eye from across a very large room in the Frick Museum almost as soon as I crossed the threshold.”
But when it comes time to write, McEntyre returns to her own quiet space. “The poetry has all been done at home,” she says, “where I have the leisure to chew my pencil and drink tea.”
“I’ve always felt that writing is essentially contemplative work," she says. "And I think the writer's job is to steward the gift of language. These poems brought word and image together for me in a new way.”
McEntyre’s other work includes another volume of poetry, “The Light at the Edge.” She edited a poetry anthology, Where Icarus Falls and a volume of essays, Word Tastings. She is a contributing editor to Literature and Medicine, and a frequent contributor to Weavings.
She graduated from Pomona College, earned a master’s degree at UC Davis and a doctorate at Princeton University. She taught at Mills College, Princeton Theological Seminary and the College of New Jersey before coming to Westmont in 1996.