Event And Exhibition: William Di Canzio And Jo Ann Miles Miller

Wiiliam di Canzio — “I stopped to read a familiar poem displayed in large type on a poster in a shop window on Germantown Avenue: In Flanders fields the poppies blow between the crosses, row on row, that mark our place, and in the sky the larks, still bravely singing, fly scarce heard amid the guns below... It was mid-October, and the shop was housing a temporary exhibition of photographs of poppies. Inside, I found the poppies in the photos weren’t flowers: they were sculptures of the red paper poppies we associate with Veterans Day—Armistice Day. The poppies were enormous, ten feet tall, with petals of aluminum sheetrock, and yet engineered with such refinement that they moved on their stems with the wind, like the poppies in the poem—three hundred of them! The gallerist, Jo Ann Miles Miller, told me the photos were an archive of the work of her late husband, Gary G. Miller, called Papaver Rubrum Giganteum, first installed in the gardens of the Morris Arboretum in 2008. He’d been moved by the poppies, their symbolism of mourning for the Great War, “the war to end all wars,“ and by the poem as well. I told Jo Ann about my own work. I’d written a novel whose two young heroes serve in the British army in the Great War, one of them in Gallipoli, the other on the Western Front in France near Flanders. His name is Alec. At the very moment of the armistice, at 11AM on November 11, 1918, Alec witnesses the death of a brother-in-arms by his side in the trenches. I offered to hold a reading from my work in the gallery among the photos, to mourn and honor the dead, as Jo Ann’s husband had. Last year, I visited the American Cemetery in Normandy, sacred to those who died in the war that caused the Great War to be renamed World War I. They gave us paper poppies there. At home I tucked them into the pages of Alec. …If ye break the faith with us who die, we shall not sleep, though poppies grow in Flanders fields.” More Info below.