Comments about the forthcoming book:

Ocarinas For a Song: An Ocarina Maker’s Guide to Craft, Life and the Unknown

(If you would like to receive notice of when the book is published, please send your name and address to anita@AnitasOcarinas.com )

“In this wise and beautiful autobiographical reflection, Anita Feng offers a roadmap for those who wish to find the transcendent in ordinary life. Prize-winning poet, potter, and life-long student of Zen, Feng recounts the world of a child, young woman, student, lover, wife, single mother, re-married suburban mother, teacher and independent businesswoman, all through the prism of her twenty-five years of making and selling ocarinas. This is a wonderful, lyric understanding of a woman’s life, part-reminiscence, part instruction, part philosophy and part pure poetry. It is a book to read and savor, a jewel to share and discuss with friends.”

-- Susan Onthank Mates, prize-winning author of The Good Doctor

Excerpts from Ocarinas For a Song:

ãAnita N. Feng, 2002

Photos by Katrina Noble

One mid-winter evening on the day before a mediocre craft show in a modest university town, I pulled into a cheap motel to register for the last craft show that I would ever do. Gray, crusty snow lay heaped against the concrete north wall of the motel lobby. The motel’s flickering neon sign broadcast cheap rates over a deserted intersection, issuing a high-pitched, covert whine into the gloom. The soda machine on the second floor glared, gurgled and rumbled in its ice. As I walked to the entrance, a single car slurred past. A cat rubbed its back against the dumpster in the parking lot.

The night clerk asked, "Are you here for the Wholesale Fruit Marketers Convention or what?" She shifted her baby to one side in order to fill out my reservation form and popped the gum in her mouth. The baby tugged at the bleached ends of her hair.

"No, I'm here for the Ware Fair, over at the University."

She brightened and smiled, looking at me for the first time, "Wow, that's cool! What kind of craft do you do?"

I paused, took a breath. “I’m a potter."

"Cool! Way cool! What kind of pots?"

" I make musical instruments out of clay.”

“Oh! That’s really interesting. You must have a lot of fun.”

A sudden tiredness hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks. How many times have I heard that wistful admiration of a life of craft, that envy laced with resentment?

“Well, it’s just my job,” I said, smiling. “You know. It has its good parts and bad parts. What a cute baby you have there!” I reached through the small Plexiglas window to feel the baby's delightfully soft toes, and added, “Like mothering, somebody's got to do it. Right?”

As it happened, this last craft event was upstaged by a three-day squall. Still, I tried, as always, to put the public at ease. In my little 10 X 10 foot space, I joked with the sparse audience, music is the gift that will change your life -- you can do it, it will give you something to do in the rain. The rain doesn't affect the sound. You can throw these in the dishwasher. They are lead-free, I called out, as the few people passed by, nodded, smiling. Non-toxic! You can take an ocarina out to sea, I said to myself after they had gone, and play for the seals. You can pack it into a small space, nestled in the toe of an odd sock and take it away from all you have ever known. It will follow you anywhere. It will mimic your worst habits. It will give voice to your unspoken fears. It will call out to the natural world and bring in the birds, the deer, the long meandering wind, even lost daughters. You can even make one yourself.

All of this was true, in fact. I’ve tried it myself.

As the craft event evolved, I played a thirty-second slice of "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" on a bright blue necklace ocarina. At the same time I tapped into the fair-goers’ chorus of voices, the multicolored ground bass. I played the moment. The fair was my sound chamber.

Not a virtuoso, not a ham, I just played what people knew.

I played a popular tune about love until the air resonated.

A small audience gathered, and asked, “What is that sound?” “Is that all coming from that little thing around your neck?” “What is it? Can you play that again for me?”

Then along came the potential customer who asked, as so many have before, "Okay. So what's an ocarina anyway?"

“The ocarina is a type of flute -- it is easy to play -- it's wonderful -- it comes with a fingering chart and songbook -- would you like to try one?”

My somewhat automated response, inevitable for having repeated it so many thousands of times, fell far short of all that could have been said.

In order to express the ocarina’s full range -- that resonates far beyond its one and a half octaves, that carries further than our known human history, that plays on nuances more subtle than chromatics and microtones – I would need to speak at length.

And so I have written out a reply, complete with histories, photos, fables, craftspeople’s choruses and demonstrations of the art. As in poetry, where the particular sheds light on the widest truth, we will go through the steps on how to make an ocarina, my favorite odd little musical instrument. Perhaps this process will provide a few humble guidelines on how to make something out of clay, out of yourself, or at the very least, how to coach a song out of thin air.

And as you read, if you find too many dead words, off-key remarks or anything, whether it be fact, fable or fiction, that does not ring true, please let me know. Revision, fine-tunings and clarity of tone are my life’s work. It should sound good.

~

Introduction to the Ocarina

The ocarina is a globular flute, so old that it is native to every culture on earth. Being globular, it has no sharp edges (other than the sound hole), no borders -- in other words, no lines of demarcation.

The ocarina is a vessel flute.

Its sound travels by air currents through every age.

Originating in China some six or seven thousand years ago, the ocarina was carved from bone -- barrel shaped, about 2 inches high with several fingerholes. Later it was made from clay and used as a Confucian ritual instrument. From there the ocarina was carried to Korea, and then Japan where it was made from stone.

In Pre-Columbian civilizations of Central and South America, ocarinas were made from black, burnished clay that had been shaped into the swift, fluid forms of birds and animals. They were played by tribal people, each tribe having their own particular tuning for the ocarinas. When a melody was heard in the distance, the listener could recognize from which tribe the players came, and reply with a tune in the key of their own community. No one's music was solitary; even if played by itself, it carried an intrinsic history of one's people, the particular smell and feel of one's people along with the yearnings of one's own heart.

Ocarinas from pre-dynastic Egypt were thought to be magical objects.

Modern day Nintendo video game enthusiasts who’ve played the popular “Ocarina of Time” have discovered that the ocarina has magic powers. A young boy and his mother came to my studio to pick out an ocarina. Just before they left, as the boy held tight to his blue alto traditional ocarina, he asked, "Do they really have magical powers like in the game? I mean, can it take you to another level, that you can't get to any other way?"

"Yes," I replied, "It's really true."

I heard once, that in one desolate region of South America, shepherds played ocarinas to pass the time. But because the sound was so haunting, so deep and sorrowful, it provoked some of the shepherds to kill themselves. Their sheep got carried away by the minor keys. Their goats wandered off the edges of cliffs. The community leaders voted to ban the instrument for its dangerous influence. The ocarina has not been played in that part of the world since.

In the Sepik area of New Guinea they have a ritual ocarina made from coconut which is taboo to women.

On Marjorca, the ocarina was traditionally made in the form of a man on horseback. Nowadays, the man rides a motor scooter. The mouthpiece is in the tailpipe.

In some parts of Africa it was called the ebumi, made from the hollow berries of the ebumi tree.

The ocarina has been made from gourds, cardboard, plastic, fruit shells, glass, bees’ wax, pewter, playdough, deer and guanaco skulls (their eye and nose cavities filled with pitch). But most often, they are made from clay.

Giuseppe Donati of Budrio, Italy, invented the ten-hole style in 1853 and christened it “ocarina” which means “little goose”. It was full of holes: one for every finger, and then another for fine tuning, and another two for the first and second chromatics. Some of the ocarinas were brightly glazed, holes numbered and circled in gold.

In short order, molded ten-holed ocarinas became mass-produced, modernized, set in concert pitch, arranged in tidy families ranging in size from sopranino to bass.

Ocarina ensembles evolved and spread throughout Europe.

Black earthenware ocarinas were issued to every fourth American service man during WWI in order to boost morale in the front lines of the inconceivable.

The quality of the instrument deteriorated soon after. Industrial methods of construction hastened its decline. But the ocarina was cheap, and available to everyone. During WWII, ocarinas were issued to soldiers who carried them in their rucksacks into the European arena. These particular ocarinas were made from Bakelite -- an early form of plastic.[i]

On my display case I keep a old songbook as well as an antique ocarina on the counter. The songbook is titled “Music is Fun With This Gretsch Ocarina Book”, written for men in service, printed in 1940. To get used to the tablature they had several easy tunes to learn. One of the first is called "Marching Men". Written in 4/4 time, the song is one line long and consists of a range of one note. The hapless tune begins with A which is repeated three times followed by a rest. The next measure is the same. The third measure is one note, one rest, one note, one rest. Then there is nothing but rest. The last measure is a repeat of the first. Three little tunes later is one called, "Watch Your Step".

In the 1960's interest in the ocarina revived with the appearance of the 4-holed, cross-fingered pendant style developed by John Taylor of England.

In all cases, the ocarina has maintained its mysteries. Ocarinas are among the oldest of musical instruments in the world, and yet, even today, there is only a shred of understanding as to how they work. All through history, scientists probed the subtleties of wind instruments, the origins of sound and what controls its tonal qualities. But the job has been very hard. The flow of air moving through the still cavity of a wind instrument is unpredictable, producing various kinds of jets, eddies and waves reminiscent of the swirls of smoke issued from a cigarette.

How exactly they form the complex vibrations heard as pleasing tones is a stubborn mystery. Parts of these waves have been modeled mathematically but even so, the physical difference between fair and excellent instruments has remained obscure.[ii]

Perhaps it is just that mystery that drew me to make the ocarina. It is made of nothing special, nothing more than clay. There are no moving parts, no foreign bodies, no screws, pads, reeds, or hinges. Just the clay and I, in it together.

As the ocarina is played, the breath blown into the fired clay warms the hands, the hands warm the melody, the melody stirs the heart, and then the heart plays by itself.

[1] The bulk of the ethnomusicological history of the ocarina comes from Sibyl Marcuse, A Survey of Musical Instruments (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), which provides the most interesting and complete review of the ocarina that I have ever seen.

[1] William J. Broad: "Ancient Instruments Yielding Secrets of Their Music", New York Times, 1/19/99, D1.

INTERNAL STRATEGIES

- a poetry book by Anita N. Feng

From Back of the Book:

In a daring first book that challenges contemporary poetic practice and pieties, Anita Feng speaks in a voice completely different from her own, submerging her gender, race, and nationality in these powerful and sensitive poems. In Internal Strategies, she tells the story of her husband, Xiao Ge Feng, who was born at the outset of communist rule in Beijing, China, and who grew up on succeeding waves of patriotic fervor, disillusionment, disaster, and inner strength. These poems, in Ms. Feng's convincing rendering of Xiao Ge's voice, follow the course of his life from severe childhood illness to forced labor in Manchuria, through factory work and his efforts to educate himself, to his immigration to the United States for study at a university where he met and married the author. Against the backdrop of China's ancient customs and recent political history, Internal Strategies goes beyond a narrative of one man's struggles into serious issues of cultural and personal identity. Anita Feng's poems pose such essential questions as "what are the perimeters of experience" and "to whom does history belong," even as they brilliantly transcend the topical events out of which they arise, combining fact and lyric imagery to animate a single life and an entire world.

A native of Detroit, Anita Feng now lives in Issaquah, Washington, where she is a ceramic artist. She earned her B.A. in English and her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Brown University. Among her awards are the Pablo Neruda Prize and an NEA Fellowship.

Akron Series in Poetry

ISBN 1-884836-14-3

The University of Akron Press

Reviews and Commentary

From Sam Hamill

This is the poetry of necessity, drawn from a searing yet gentle vision of human tragedy and nobility. Anita Feng's poems articulate quiet courage, humility, subtlety and authentic grace in a seamless book, the voice calm and wise as the proverbial ch'an master who, nose-to-nose with the tiger, does not blink. I shall cherish her gift for many years.

From J. Shreve - Choice:

The poems begin with his young mother giving birth to a 'colorless foldedthing.' Soon the Great Leap Forward leaves 'food/ and drink behind.' . . . In third grade, Xiao Ge wants to be a hero like Dong Chun Rei, who died in the guerrilla effort against Chiang Kai-shek. After sixth grade he educates himself 'on the sly' from black-market textbooks while working in a factory. Then comes 'reeducation' in freezing Manchuria, flight to America, and, much later,a visit to Beijing, where passengers on a bus are 'transfixed as one/ on my wife's Jewish nose' and the 'magic trick' of his half-Chinese child with the curly hair. This is a convincing and artistic attempt to capture in poem-vignettes the postliberation experience from the Chinese point of view. General readers.

From Rachel Gupta - American Book Review:

Readers are introduced in Internal Strategies to a poetry notable not only for its imaginative subtlety and reach, but also for its music. Feng's lines achieve unfailing poise and taut lyric beauty. . . . There is not a weak line in this book. . . . The poems in this volume combine to offer an intricate story about seeing and claiming for our own the uncertain yet exalting possibilities of life which are present in every moment. Anita Feng's precisely focused visionary poetry gives uncommon pleasure, repays serious thought, and merits a large audience.

Some poems from the collection:

For the Moon

Truly, the sun and moon wish to be light,

But the floating clouds cover them.

-- Huai-nan-tzu, Book Eleven

As a child, she lights a candle in the closet

and sets out an arrangement

of porcelain fish. She wants to be a fly,

entering along the filaments in the wings, taking air

for a board to lie upon.

As a child, she rises with expectation, her mouth

full of vowels and sweets;

she sighs for them as she has them.

She wants to have wings, so she spills

her milk on the floor of the closet and rises to me

crying in milk.

As a child, she retreats into a cove, pushing a small boat

with her toe. All the world is what she is far from,

the fish nets hauling nothing but fish.

Perhaps she is full, and has eaten the fish herself,

imagining the easy life of a white crane in the sky.

I Thank You

Do you know

that as light thins in late afternoon

it is you I thank, the you that

sits here as well, listening closely

to a Viennese waltz.

I feel the soles

of my feet, and violins that rise

with a body of instruments

all on loan;

much as a coin tossed

has yet to feel weight, as suddenly as leaves

are just leaves, I am

in the deft wind, in the midst of gravity.

And because it is bad luck

to name what we love, I thank you

for nothing in particular; gold minds dug

out of sleepless nights,

for being fool enough from the start

to safeguard rare days, I dare say which.

To Keep Us Listening Forever

The land turns up a corrugated iron face lathered in fog.

We come between revolution and the cold.

Now comes our time.

Green takes on an alias, and listening,

we imagine using ideas

in order to live beyond our means.

Our shelter

falls out of the trees

as leaves backslide, mumbling into pools.

Wind draws out a landscape to a thread.

But rather than miss dreaming

we will lean against the horizon and shove. There is only

a blue shred of it left, a deep breath

wherein we name children and invoke heroes.

Down the last visible hole of light,

the sun pans for gold, settling for amethyst, then coal.

Never mind. An alibi for dawn

will keep us listening for those who know

how to defer the cost, at any cost.

The Love Poems of an Emperor’s Concubine

She writes a line of verse, “I am old...,” and lifts the brush;

overwhelming twilight dissolves in water,

her presence diffused by a swift railing arched

over a pool in black ink.

The smallest sound of her brush

is only the night singing along a worn path. In one direction,

yo her lord, in another to her children’s mouths open in sleep.

Ink dries on the edge of her stone.

She sees the night pierced through by morning.

She breathes in the pavilion and considers the landscape

with a whip of her sleeve as her hand pushes free.

Slow is elegant.

In the softness inside a gesture, she sips tea.

As one of the oldest, she knows to extend herself

Beyond changes in domestic climate, to the watchfulness

Of her breath, to the particular grace of a metaphor.

Spirit money for the dead flies into trade.

With longing, children are let out in the courtyard

on strings of coins

and the draft of a lover’s dialogue.

Every word comes to what can’t be spared.

She scarcely moves while searching

for the rhyme that is discrete and ripples out.

She watches a magpie as it hops

along the bamboo slats of a rail, marking

her portion of the emperor’s wealth, her version

of the deed to be written out entirely in verse.

The price of the book is $13.00 + $3.00 shipping and handling. Make the check payable to Anita Feng. Visa and Master card are accepted.

To order the book, contact:

Anita Feng, 300 SW Forest Dr, Issaquah, WA 98027

phone: (425) 557-8764; email: anita@AnitasOcarinas.com