“blue thunder bolts” is a stained glass window made by Alison Grace Koehler. It is painted with lines from a poem the glass artist pieced together after pulling fragments from Etel Adnan’s Time, translated by Sarah Riggs, (Nightboat Books, 2019).
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Statement of Homage
I had a copy of Etel Adnan’s book Time (translated by Sarah Riggs) with me during the first lockdown in Paris. I would read it at night after staring out my window, before trying to fall asleep. It was perfect company underneath solitary reflection and moonlight.
So many fragments, and fragments within themselves, carried insight and punch enough to take all my wind and breathe it back into my eyelashes.
I selected some of my favorite fragments which I wrote onto scraps of paper, then cut them into pieces resembling glass shards. I transformed them into a composition evocative of a stained glass window, that could be taking flight, or disseminating into oblivion.
Fragments from Etel Adnan’s Time written and arranged by Alison Grace Koehler.
I took one fragment from the section entitled “Friday, March 25th at 4 pm” and turned it into a window:
blue thunder bolts
argue over the solitude of every fragment of
Being, of every attempt to live
Etel Adnan
Etel Adnan is a poet, essayist, and visual artist. Born in Beirut in 1925, she currently lives in Sausalito, California, and makes frequent trips to Paris. Her work has received many literary awards, including most recently the Griffin Poetry Prize for Time, translated by Sarah Riggs, in 2020. She has a RAWI Lifetime Achievement Award from the Radius of Arab-American Writers. Her art has been exhibited around the world and can be found in prominent modern and contemporary collections including that of Centre Pompidou. In painting, she describes being interested in “the immediate beauty of color.”
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Alison Grace Koehler is a stained glass poet, originally from Chicago and currently living and working in Paris, France. Her windows and glass installations can be found in private and public spaces around the city, as permanent fixtures and in temporary exhibitions. She fuses stained glass with poetry in her windows, hangings, and glass portraits, as well as in video and performance art pieces. Her first collection of poems, entitled Stained Glass Poetry, has recently been published by Paris Heretics.
(Photo of Alison Grace Koehler by Sabine Dundure.)