This poem is from the September 3, 2019 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired and sponsored by ng_moonmoth . It also fills the "xanadu (gray-green)" square in my 9-3-19 card for the Arts and Crafts Festival bingo. This poem belongs to the series Arts and Crafts America. "The Xanadu Flask" The Arts and Crafts Movement began in Britain and soon spread through Europe and North America. In Japan, it became Mingei, or the arts of the people. Collectors began to gather the lowly pots from the Edo and Meiji periods, once used by commoners and now rapidly disappearing as Japan urbanized. Some potters and other crafters fled Japan, repelled by the rise of militarism and imperial propaganda. One such group arrived in America, where they made ceramic dishware whose homey beauty and low cost appealed to the people who could no longer afford to shop in stores. The potters traveled around, making and selling ceramics wherever they wandered. Because they did not put their names on anything that they made, any one of them could sell all of it while the others kept working. The potters developed a distinctive gray-green glaze whose color came to characterize the Mingei movement in America. They called it xanadu, and it became as famous as China blue. Over time, more and more crafters -- some Japanese, others not -- started making the style. Its simple lines and natural motifs charmed city dwellers who missed the open countryside, and felt familiar to rural folks. Mingei seeped into the background of folk art in America. Eventually, the museums started to take notice of it and include it in displays of the ceramic arts. Tracing it back to its origins proved difficult since, after all, none of the itinerant potters had ever signed their work. However, one determined curator managed to track down a piece belonging to the descendants of an immigration clerk who'd been paid with a piece of it to let the potters into America. It was a large jar with a tall narrow lip, which featured a relief of carp climbing up a waterfall. The curator named it the Xanadu Flask and took it to the Smithsonian Museum, where it resides to this day. * * * Notes: The Arts and Crafts movement began in Britain, then spread through Europe and North America over roughly 1880-1920. It emerged in Japan in the 1920s under the name Mingei . This is the Xanadu Flask . China blue is a bright shade of cobalt glaze widely used on white pottery from China.