Obituary: M. C. Richards

HER LAST poems spoke of "backpacking in the hearafter" and "blooming into invisability". A champion of creativity in all of its forms, M. C. Richards was a poet, potter, painter, innovative educationist, and from 1984 a resident co-worker at Camphill Village in Kimberton Hills, Pennsylvania - a community with adults with special needs based on biodynamic agriculture and social therapy. She taught a course there on "The Renewal of Art through Agriculture", and also maintained a studio and worked in ceramics.

Her books include the widely praised Centering: in pottery, poetry and the person (1964), The Crossing Point (1973), Toward Wholeness: Rudolf Steiner education in America (1980), Imagine Inventing Yellow: new and selected poems (1991), Opening Our Moral Eye: essays, talks and poems, embracing creativity and community (1996) as well as chapbooks and pamphlets on education. Her writing probes the connection between creativity and human endeavour.

She was born in 1916, in Weiser, Idaho, and educated at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, and the University of California at Berkeley. She taught English at the Central Washington College of Education and the University of Chicago, but in 1945 became a faculty member of the notoriously experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina. There she taught writing, translated plays, danced and studied pottery, and met and worked with Merce Cunningham and John Cage. She was also founder of the Black Mountain Review, and had a hand in some of the most innovative educational initiatives this century. Her essay "The Public School and the Education of the Whole Person" is an underground classic. She became a widely sought instructor, and in 1967 taught at Goldsmiths' College, London, as American Visiting Professor.

In Richards's work there is something of the anarchy of Antonin Artaud, whose The Theater and Its Double she was the first to translate into English (for the Grove Press, in 1958), something of Steiner's "form is the corpse of process", something of the Quaker's patience and the Orient's faith in the unseen, something of Lorca's "duende".

She said that the "earthly miracle is matter". In our moments of deepest human awareness, the barriers between things crumble, concepts fall away, and we are left with the astounding relatedness of pure phenomena. Her pots and paintings escape the trap of the merely "beautiful", as it is ordained by the barons of culture. They take a new direction: sassy and hip, they are also full of that blasphemy in the world of the professional artist - tenderness.

Almost all of her works have come about as a "response". Her "Six Grandfathers of the Flaming Rainbow Teepee" and "Four Virgins of the Elk Dance" were in response to her reading of the 1932 American Indian classic Black Elk Speaks, John Neihardt's "life story of a holy man of the Oglala Sioux". She made other works in response to her studies of metamorphosis, Indian dances, seasonal and cosmic celebrations, the seven "I AMs" of the Bible, air currents and dreams. In 1995 the volcanoes of Hawaii inspired a series of "Fire Flowers" and "Cinder Cones", bisque-fired and boldly painted with acrylic - another blasphemy. They are stunning works that exemplify the immediacy and passion that animate her forms.

Her poems are also often a response: "Yesterday I was shucking corn / for supper. . ." or the more inward, "HELP ME I murmur. . ." opening to the poem "Morning Prayer". Always acute, and often disarmingly plain, they ride the paradox of the profanely spiritual, staking out sacred geographies. Enter the home of someone who has a first edition copy of Centering or The Crossing Point and you will find them worn, dog-eared, underlined and marked. Her books were intended to be, and are, companions.

The mytho-poetic orientation of all of Richards's endeavours echoes art's origin in magic. Her poems and paintings and pots court the shamanic, beckoning the invisible into incarnate space. Her concerns go well beyond the narrow pursuit of excellence to embrace larger questions of craft, community, agriculture, and the Being/s of the earth.

I came to the work of M.C. Richards as a young woman who had already studied ceramics. Disillusioned at yet another arena in which cleverness was confused with creativity and competition ruled, I left the world of the studio potter almost immediately upon completing my studies. The mother of two young children, I moved with my husband to northern California and shortly afterwards, disheartened by the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, to Canada.

At a party celebrating our departure from Los Angeles, a friend put a copy of Richards's Centering into my hands. I read it during a long snowbound winter in Quebec and the enthusiasm that had originally drawn me to work with clay and to write poetry began to return. When in 1974, while teaching clay at a Waldorf School in California, I received a brochure announcing Richards's workshop at Rudolf Steiner Institute, I signed on.

For the next 25 years, M.C. was in turn my instructor, mentor, patron, muse, companion and beloved friend. I believe that her orientation to the authenticity of creative source will, in time, be recognised as revolutionary - it is Taoist, modern, postmodern, experimental, structuralist, de-structuralist, funky and antique, all in one. Already tuned to the beyond, it is free.

M. C. Richards was a splendid creature, writes Lyle Bonge, given to great bouts of laughter, funny little dances, and ridiculous rhetorical speeches to her cocker spaniel, Blackie.

She played endlessly with language. Once, we were arranging for her and her husband Bill Levi to visit me in Biloxi. There seemed to be endless dithering about when and how to go and I finally shouted, "Stand not upon the order of your going, but go quickly!" Instantly she replied with another Shakespearean quote and we were off into a rush of splendid craziness, speaking in quotations wherever possible, stitching them together with Elizabethan syntax, analysing it and correcting ourselves, baffling her husband with our goofiness.

In the early Fifties she began to work with clay - she embraced it, squeezed it, caressed it. The shapes were lush, voluptuous, subtly textured. She loved what she was doing, whether she was translating Artaud, making pots or writing poetry like, "Imagine inventing yellow / or moving for the first time in a cherry curve." What she said of potting applied to every thing she did:

The important guiding image for me through the years: to take time, making the contact deep and personal, low-key, attuned, listening to the breathing of the form, to understand what the clay is saying.

When, in 1989, she began to paint, it was as though she had been doing it for years. Until her final illness she was extremely active, travelling from Camphill Village to teach all over the country.

In June she wrote, saying,

Now I am quiet, slow, a bit unstable, and in good spirits. I like this new planet I am on, this new way of being. I have enjoyed coming to know the mystery and special joys of REST. Inhabiting myself as BEING, experiencing being . . . I AM with my natural taste for paradox and the fusion of opposites; perhaps it is not surprising that I find this new way so interesting and pleasurable.

Mary Caroline Richards, poet, potter, educationist, painter: born Weiser, Idaho 13 July 1916; married 1943 Vernon Young (marriage dissolved), secondly 1945 Bill Levi (marriage dissolved); died Kimberton Hills, Pennsylvania 10 September 1999.