Michelle Bloom has an uncanny way to combine meaningful and evocative words with even more meaningful and more evocative melodies. There is an irony in her ability to attain, in music, something approaching silence. – Scott Byrson, professor of English at Mary Saint Mary College
Special Announcement: Michelle Bloom and Lineage Dance present “Fields of Attention” on May 18th and 19th at 8:00 PM at The Lineage Performing Arts Center. I wrote a lot more about this two day event on my blog. Please join us for an evening of song and field after field after field.
Welcome to the official online experience for All Things Bloom — the ideas, the books, the voices behind the songs of Michelle Bloom. I often use an evocative pen and ink drawing of weeds on letterhead to make sure the reader knows there is nothing easy or ‘flowery’ about devoting one’s life to cultivating a relationship with spaciousness and solitude, the necessary work of creativity. The poet Mary Oliver writes this line in her poem The Sunflowers “the long work/ of turning their lives into a celebration/ is not easy. Come/”
Her invitation gets me every time. I open the door. I leave the house. Walking. Noticing. Engaging. Lingering. After a little while, I return. I sit down at a table. I pick up my guitar with one hand and a book in the other. But wait a moment! Stop the frame. Go back a second. Freeze! Take that little moment that happens right there, right now, and slow down time. The moment the eyes read left to right. The moment a vast interior vantage point widens within. The moment a certain voice begins to speak. The moment right before the book goes back on the shelf. What if this moment was a song? What if it could sing? What if this moment became a ‘we’ — a moment we could all be in together at the same time?
Welcome.
Photo by Chris Humphreys.
