Darryl Houston Smith
AUTHOR

Darryl Houston Smith

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THE OTHER SIDE OF THE COIN: AN ARTIST STATEMENT ​Literature has long looked to Massachusetts for its transcendent answers. For decades, Mary Oliver stood on the dunes of Provincetown, looking at the ocean and finding a reason to be "dazzled." She was the poet of light, of the grasshopper and the swan, teaching us that attention to the natural world could heal the wounds of a broken childhood. She was the "Heads" of the coin—the promise of redemption. ​I am the "Tails." ​If Mary Oliver was the poet of the escape, I am the poet of the endurance. ​Our origins are strikingly similar. We are both children of the Rust Belt reality—she from the hard soil of Ohio, I from the industrial granite of Lowell. We both emerged from what she called a "dark and broken house," the kind of domestic and societal fracture that demands an answer. ​But where she fled to the woods to invent a God she could trust, I stayed in the city to document the God who left. ​My work, anchored by the Morrison Trilogy, operates in the shadow of the mills rather than the light of the dunes. I do not ask the landscape to heal me; I ask it to testify. In the "Theology of the Empty Mill," I explore the silence that remains when the machinery stops and the capital flees. I do not see the dead swan as part of a holy cycle; I see it as a fossil of despair, frozen in the ice of the Merrimack. ​This is not pessimism; it is witnessing. ​To read Mary Oliver is to pray for the world to be better than it is. To read The Fraud of Eternity or The Winter Dyad is to confront the world exactly as it is. ​We are two sides of the same coin, forged in the same cold New England winter. She offers you the comfort of the goldenrod. I offer you the integrity of the brick.
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