The Pittsburgh Poetry Society will be launching the most recent installment of their biennial anthology, The Potters’ Wheel, on September 10th at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh – Southside as part of Carnegie-Southside and Pittsburgh Poetry Society’s Summer Poetry Series.
To mark the occasion, Pittsburgh Poetry Society’s Fred Peterson and Anne Picone interviewed Pittsburgh Poetry Society’s oldest member, Lucienne Wald! Littsburgh is thrilled to help celebrate both Wald and The Potters’ Wheel (which will be available for sale at the book launch on September 10th!).
From the time she was a child growing up in the St. Louis, Missouri suburb of Webster Grove, Lucienne Wald knew that art would be an integral part of her life. She just didn’t know that so many areas of art would come into play as she passed from her birth in 1922 to her current artistic endeavors at age 93. She is still involved in poetry and photography with the Pittsburgh Poetry Society and The Madwomen in the Attic.
Upon graduation from high school, her father had told her tales of growing up in Manhattan in a building that was on the site of what was to become The Empire State Building. He insisted “You can sew and you can draw, so study dress design at Washington University.”
“I didn’t want that. I wanted to be an actress,” Lucienne told Fred Peterson and Anne Picone during an interview following a recent Pittsburgh Poetry Society meeting. Her father won out. She redesigned dresses on pages in women’s magazines for two years, gleaning some ideas from her favorite actresses from the pages of movie magazines.
No career came out of this as America was soon at war and Lucienne was needed in Curtiss-Wright’s St. Louis aircraft plant. She said she was no “Rosie the riveter” but did contribute to the wartime efforts as a draftsman (there were no “draftspersons” or “draftswomen” during wartime).
After the war she made her way to New York City where she lived with an aunt on 83rd Street and studied at an Actors Studio studying the Stanislavsky method. Lucienne’s older sister was a ballerina with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and, at one performance of “Aleko”, the Metropolitan Opera’s ballet was short a fish. Lucienne was given a fish costume and made her very brief appearance in an art form foreign to her.
For a period of time, Lucienne was a member of the Art Students’ League which occupied her daytime hours. At night she was a typist for Blue Cross. She later attended Bellevue Hospital School of Nursing and worked as a nurse for a year.
She and her aunt were walking a neighbor’s dog on Riverside Drive sometime in the late 1940s when she met Niel Wald, the man she would marry and share her life with for the next 65 years. Niel was to become a world-reknown hemotologist who was noted for his work in the study of the effects of radiation on survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His work took the couple to Japan to live from 1954-1957 where their two sons David and Phillip were born.
View Through the Window
A Japanese restroom is known
as the face of the household.
According to the Washington Post
In Kita Kyushu there is a
60 million dollar museum
devoted to high-tech,
derriere-washing
tushie-warming toilets and bidets.
In the 1950’s I was in Hiroshima,
pregnant, and frequently in need of
a lavatory while shopping.
“O-benjo kudasai,” I asked
and was escorted to a small room
attached to the rear of the shop.
While straddling a trough to relieve
myself, I would gaze in wonderment
out the window at miniature gardens;
stone lanterns surrounded by moss,
a small pagoda set in white raked sand,
paths of variegated pebbles weaving
around red maples and bonsai juniper
pines, a rustic wooden bench covered
by a canopy of weeping willows.
Often, a pond, alive with golden carp,
Bubbled under an arched bridge.
Simple setting for Zen meditation.
From 1957 to 1958, Dr. Wald was head biologist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory after which he joined The University of Pittsburgh as professor of radiation health. Lucienne, always anxious to learn, studied anthropology at Pitt and received a Master’s Degree in Special Education. At this time she began painting with The Associated Artists of Pittsburgh. She was active in various genres of art until 1986 when her younger son Phillip died. She says that after his death she could not bring herself to paint. After a period of time she bought a computer and wrote a short story which led to her getting involved with the Pittsburgh Poetry Society and participated in many workshops with The Madwomen in the Attic.
Her older son David gave her a photography computer program that she uses to create photo compositions (a far cry from her dress-design course after high school). She has put these skills to work to design the covers for Pittsburgh Poetry Society biennial anthology, The Potters’ Wheel.
The latest edition of The Potters’ Wheel will be launched at a reading September 10, 2016 at 1:00pm-3:00pm at the Carnegie Library Southside, 2205 East Carson Street, Pittsburgh PA as part of Carnegie-Southside/PPS Summer Poetry Series. The reading is free and open to the public with lemonade and cookies for all.
Knock on Wood
At ninety-two my widowed sister
danced the hootchy-kootchy.
A minor stroke caused her to limp.
Undaunted, she stretched,
bent, rotated, lifted. It was then
she fell and broke her hip.
Our brother, eighty-three,
Composed a psalm – dedicated
To his two wives, present and ex,
Both deceased at seventy-seven.
Now brother, following a stroke,
Can’t remember where he put his socks.
I’m eighty-five and sold a painting
Of myself, bare-breasted,
Ogled by my husband, eighty-two,
Featuring his voluptuous back.
The PPS members reading from The Potters’ Wheel will include Lucienne Wald, Sally Davis, Nancy Esther James, Shelia Carter Jones, Christine Pasinski, Anne Picone, Christine Aikens Wolfe, and Judy Yogman.
Readers will be able to pick up a 250 page copy of The Potters’ Wheel containing poems from 19 of PPS members for $24.95.
At 93, Lucienne, recently widowed, is putting together a chapbook of her poetry and hopes to finish a novel she has been working on for quite a few years. After that, I am sure, she will have other great projects coming our way. She can surely do more that “draw and sew”!
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