fbpx
Browsing Tag

poetry

creativity introversion writing

Making space to speak

July 29, 2012

The balance between partnerships and creativity, between being together and being alone, between doing/being and reflecting on the doing and being, is often a fine line. Like many people, I have sought to manage and maintain the balance. It is often easier to create when you have space and solitude; but relationships, family, work and friends are all so important.

Tillie Olsen’s, ‘Silences‘ published in 1978, is about the conditions for creating art, and the circumstances that inhibit and foster the development of writing and other art forms. She examines what works for creativity; the circumstances that she analyses include gender, race and economic situation. A product of its time, ‘Silences’ identifies the high number of women, for example, who have not married or had children and created works of art. Certainly the personal and social situations we create, choose and find ourselves in are an influence in what we create and the conditions in which it is created.

I wrote about this some time ago in a poem that still holds true for me about the balance between relationships and creativity:

Half a Man

If I had even half a man now
could I write the night,
out into its waiting wings
to penetrate delight.

If I had a part of one
who tried to gather all,
I’d run because his promise
is not wiser than the call.

If I had a whole man
who could teach me to receive,
I’d write between the space he gave
and love with sudden ease.

Sometimes , the space itself, when we do find it, can be almost too much, overwhelming in its vacancy to fill. The feeling of all that open space in which to create, once we have organised it or when it is just there due to circumstance, can in itself be intimidating as May Sarton writes in ‘Journal of a Solitude‘:

The ambience here is order and beauty. That is what frightens me when I am first alone again. I feel inadequate. I have made an open place, a place for meditation. What if I cannot find myself inside it? (p12)

I love the approach of Australian writer, Kate Grenville, to capturing every inspiration and opportunity to create. As she documents in ‘Searching for the Secret River‘, Kate uses a series of mantras to keep herself writing: ‘never have a blank page,’ ‘don’t wait for the mood’, ‘fix it up later’ and ‘don’t wait for time to write’. She further writes:

I learned to work in whatever slivers of time the day might give me – one of my favourite scenes in ‘Joan Makes History‘ was written in the car waiting to pick up Tom from a birthday party, on the only paper I could find, the inside of a flattened Panadol packet. I had slivers of time, so I wrote in slivers of words: a page here, a paragraph there. Eventually the slivers would add to something. (p145)

So it seems there is no perfect formula for making space to speak. Whilst some conditions might make writing and other creativity more likely, if we are serious about it, we need to write and create in whatever situation we find ourselves. It’s possibly also that waiting for the perfect conditions is just another form of resistance to getting down to work.

That’s why this blog is so important to me; it’s a stay against silence, a way of creating space to speak, a way of practising making space, so that my writing here now (nearly) each week is an achievement, a making of space in an otherwise very busy life.

So with all this in mind, what habitat suits you to create? What conditions help you write or create art? What have you learnt from your experiences in creativity over time ?

5 Comments
love, loss & longing poetry

Poetry: Optical Illusions

July 1, 2012

Personal poems recount lived experience so it is re-felt, but with resolution, rising above the tragic.

‘Writing Personal Poetry,’ Sheila Bender, p4

Sometimes, eyes can play tricks. What seems solid and tangible is only a shadow, possibly your own. You try to get hold of what you love, but it fleets downstream. You choose a setting, you hold a camera, you level a fixed lens, you get just the right aperture and the shutter clicks firmly. You have a perfect image, but not the original you desired. At least you have that image to hold onto for a long time afterwards. Even then, it can still play tricks, watching you, reflecting the light this way and that, catching a smile, wandering and jagging like a fishing line pulling at something, possibly your heart.

Optics

Every night that river chased dreams
like sleek fish
running from the echo
of sleep.

Rivers seem so simple now:
just filling themselves
endlessly,
no emotion to speak of.

You stood in a doorway,
I took a photo,
and there was a river
dancing behind.

You, the one clear eye
I craved and strived to
capture neatly in a
single frame.

That horizontal string
of sparkling promise
you always offered,
that river I can still taste.

3 Comments
love, loss & longing poetry transcending

That you couldn’t feel

June 10, 2012

My younger brother died tragically five years ago this coming November. His death changed the face of my world, and that of many others, forever.

Not. a. day. goes. by.

It’s especially when the sun is shining in a beautiful place where I happen to be, on a day when I have felt the greatest sense of achievement at work, when a song I love is reaching me and making me smile, that I feel his presence.

The beauty and achievement collides with this presence and then the sense of absence comes, keenly and sharply.

I have learnt to live with these moments. I have learnt to learn from them. But still they catch me, not unlike the moment when I found out about his death. The stillest moment of absence against a day of pure sunlight and the greenest of trees. Me sitting there unable to move, still trying to take it in. After all this time, I have learnt that you really never fully can take it in; you just keep trying.

Reflecting on this has made me search for the poem that came resonating back in recent days, the quintessential poem that equates such joy and sorrow, such beauty and pain. It is John Keat’s ‘Ode on Melancholy‘ and it captures the feeling of where the saddest feelings so closely align with joy and beauty, as if the extreme counterpoint brings the other into play.

So it is for me: sometimes I go deeper into the sadness as below, feeling it or thinking about what it means; other times, I celebrate the beauty I am experiencing, my achievements or  happiness and think of how it relates to my brother, our family, our achievements and our happiness over the years before all the pain and that makes me smile.

That you couldn’t feel the possible beauty

of this sunlit day, beside the harbour,
by the edge of the aquarium,
the sails of yachts lashed with gold
like the promise of the treasure,
of another day, buried, while
the lean bodies of dark fish move past.

That you couldn’t feel the possible beauty
that night, of a small shard of hope,
a tendril of smooth glass to hold
to cut through past midnight,
to something like the chance
to hear again a song you loved.

That you couldn’t feel the possible beauty
of the ordinary flags of another day,
rainbows littered around,
scraps of coloured paper you could
write a life on, strung together
to harmonise the way.

That you couldn’t feel the possible beauty
of this very ordinary day now
finds me sitting by the harbour
as I bathe in the brightest warmth of light:
your absence shouting from the sparkling seas
and speaking from each body fleeting past.

1 Comments
poetry transcending writing

Poetry: Into the Light

June 3, 2012

I’ve always loved poetry, read poetry and written poetry, on and off and over many years. It is the great life-blood of transcendence: celebrating the small moments; recording how you or others uniquely see and link ideas; connecting with the highest joy and worst of grief; and making sense of the deepest pain and anger so it doesn’t stay with you, in that form, forever. It’s the working through to light, mostly, though this often involves working through some elements of darkness. It’s the reworking of feelings and perceptions in order to understand them, hold them in time for a moment and then move on.

As Sage Cohen writes in ‘Writing the Life Poetic‘:

Poetry gives us an opportunity to experience our lives twice. First, as it happens, in real time. And second, in heart time. The poem gives us a kind of cosmic canvas to savour a moment, make sense of it, put a little frame around it, and digest it more completely. It also gives us a way to travel profoundly into experiences that are not our own and, if we are lucky, alight on a  moment of truth about the human condition now and then. (p1)

So here’s to bringing my poetry, and the poetry of others, into the light here as part of a journey and record of transcending.

Image

 

Narrative

She starts up high, facing north

towards slow mist,

watching the sea wash

into the rain’s drift below.

 

She is called to the beach

as if to a baptism, bride-like,

white as the air, stepping

down the rough rock stairs.

 

She narrates her life,

writes as she walks,

as if the sand and shells are

the bones of her story.

 

And the pieces connect her:

an imperfect white oval shell,

a fig leaf from a canopy,

the sketched black lines

of a creature’s moving home.

 

Cool and tight limbed,

she ends in another place,

as if washed by waves,

her contours, clear and shell-lined

as the Borromean grottoes

of Isolabella,

her white shining lights

coming home.

 

Previously published on the net at Sage Cohen’s ‘Writing the Life Poetic’ – Poetry for the People student poems.

In what ways has poetry helped you move into the light?

7 Comments
creativity poetry writing

Gems #14 Writing Poetry

March 26, 2011

 Some gems on writing poetry whether you are just getting started or an old hand needing inspiration and direction…

Writing the Life Poetic: An invitation to read and write poetry – Sage Cohen

Poetry is often seen as a rarefied art on the fringes of life; even when you are a poet yourself, you can feel like this. Sage Cohen’s Writing the Life Poetic takes poetry from any pedestal it might have ended up on, and brings it firmly back into the central context of your life. The book is beautifully written and gorgeous to hold, with quirky graphics through-out. It feels like you are being taken by the hand and gently led back to the heart of poetry and its rightful place for you. As Sage points out in the introduction:

Poetry gives us an opportunity to experience our lives twice. First, as it happens, in real time. And second, in heart time. The poem gives us a kind of cosmic canvas to savour a moment, make sense of it, put a little frame around it, and digest our experience more completely.

Especially for people who love poetry and might have lost it somewhere along the way, Writing the Life Poetic helps you discover or rediscover the power of poetry, its place in everyday life and how to engage practically with this creative space. The book is full of advice such as starting where you are, showing versus telling, working with the senses, using imagery, reading poetry, understanding how stanzas work, revision, writing rituals, creating a system for poetry practice and so much more. Each chapter is short and focused with  exercises to practically apply the skills and concepts discussed.  It’s like a sensitive guidebook to take you through a deep engagement with poetry from wherever you are starting or recommencing your journey.

Writing Personal Poetry: Creating poems from your life experiences – Sheila Bender

I found this brilliant book in my local library and then had to have it so I could read it more fully and over time. The introduction ‘Poetry is always a good idea’ had me saying, ‘Yes, yes!’ as I read through. Sheila quotes poet Louise Gluck saying that:

writing a poem begins with a haunting, as if the finished poem already exists somewhere. In this way…the poem is like a lighthouse, “except that, as one swims toward it, it backs away.”

Coming from a similar space as Sage Cohen, Sheila Bender situates poetry in the context of daily life, commenting that poets also ‘cook, clean and take out the garbage..’ and then identifies how finding that writing about the ‘lighthouse-that-already-is’ can be part of this daily life.

Sheila’s focus is personal poetry, why we write it, how to empower yourself to write, acknowledging your poetic intelligence, getting the confidence to start, the value of reading poetry, tools for writing poetry and the poet’s stance. There are some excellent poems in progress included in this book from Sheila’s students’ work. They show how a poem progresses from an idea to a draft to a revision to a fully realised piece of work. I loved these students’ poems and what they showed about the progress and realisation of their art. There is much to be learnt from this book: especially heart for the journey and specific processes and techniques for writing personal poetry.

Creating Poetry – John Drury

Creating Poetry  is a little more technical in approach and this a useful complement to the above two books. It’s an accessible introduction to poetic terms like metaphor, assonance, simile, alliteration, rhyme and enjambement. These terms are explained with clear examples. The book also provides an excellent summary of poetic forms and rhyming patterns: ghazal, haiku, pantoum, sestina, villanelle and sonnet, for example, again clearly set out and explained.

The book takes you through the stages of preparation, language, the senses, shaping, patterns and traditions, voice, sources of inspiration and the revising and finishing processes. Full of practical exercises that help you engage as you read, the book is an accessible reference for the more technical side of writing poetry.

All three of these books have a central place on my poetry writing bookshelf and are heavily underlined. They are guidebooks I visit regularly to help me orient my poetic journey, to keep me moving positively ahead and to ensure I have courage and skills for the writing process.

What are your recommended guidebooks for writing poetry?

Image by alexschwab  from flickr and used under a Creative Commons license with thanks: One poem of thousands located on the longest poetry wall in the world in Changde, Hunan Province, China.

Share

1 Comments
creativity transcending writing

The Writer as hero

October 3, 2010

I’ve been reading Chris Guillebeau’s great post, ‘The Agenda Part II: The Individual as Hero’ about how it’s okay to pursue your big dreams, invest in yourself and understandable that you have difficulty explaining the reasons for your quests to others:

 

You don’t have to apologise for pursuing a big dream, because a distinguishing feature of such things is that not everyone relates to them.

Chris talks about the Olympics, marathon runners and other sports people among his heroes. I acknowledge these journey and achievements, but like Chris says, they are not the heroes I relate to. My heroes are writers – their stories are the ones I read, treasure and follow.

For me, there is something incredibly heroic about the writer’s life and journey. This is because it is my goal: to write and publish work of value that speaks to others: poetry, novels, creative non-fiction. This blog is part of that goal – getting me writing and connecting with writers – but the real goal is larger and more compelling, hard to explain, talk about and justify, but I know it’s what makes sense and connects the dots for me. I know it’s elusive and also very hard work, but it’s when I am writing that I feel truly alive and myself. So today, following Chris’s lead, I celebrate the writing heroes who inspire me.

My writer heroes fall into two categories:

  1. Published, famous writers whose books I read and biographies I study assiduously
  2. My blogging heroes who are all out there creating now and inspiring me

In this post, I’ll concentrate on the first category; next post, I’ll talk about my blogging heroes also writing books right now and documenting their journey.

My published and famous writing heroes’ lives intrigue me for their romanticism, their lyricism and their commitment to craft and writing practice. They embody what I aspire to. They are mostly women; today’s list of my key writing heroes is all women. Their stories of how they strived to balance work, family, creativity and their craft are often difficult journeys. There are themes of obsessive love, drugs, alcohol, mental illness, suicide, struggling to make ends meet, trying to write while making a living, reclusiveness and withdrawal. There are also themes of: success, achievement, the pursuit of perfection, hard work, constant crafting, connection with people, being in the literary milieu of an age,  publishing and public readings attracting many.

For these heroes, it was mostly a battle for their creativity to be expressed in the works that endure. I am grateful for their determination, their quest and the lyricism of their work that speaks to me over the years. It is because these heroes understood the ‘big dream’ and lived it that they mean so much to me. I celebrate these six heroes:

Daphne Du Maurier

I love Daphne Du Maurier’s sheer prolific work, diversity, narrative and story-telling skills and her dedication to her craft. Her unique vision created historical fiction, psychological thrillers such as ‘Rebecca’ and ‘The Birds’ and wonderfully innovative works such as ‘The House on the Strand’ which blends historical and psychological fiction together in a narrative about experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs way before it was fashionable. I am absolutely in awe of Daphne’s writing skills and writing life. My journey to Fowey in Cornwall where she lived was a pilgrimage and to be there taking the ferry across to Fowey and walking the narrow streets was thrilling. There are some excellent pictorial memoirs of Daphne Du Maurier’s Cornwall and the country that inspired her.

Suggestions to read: Rebecca, The Birds and other stories, The House on the Strand, Pictorial memoirs: Daphne Du Maurier Country – Martyn Shallcross; Daphne Du Maurier’s Cornwall – by Daphne Du Maurier.

 Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf’s novels are wonderful but I especially am inspired by her non-fiction, essays and diaries. ‘A Room of One’s Own’ is sitting here in front of me on my rolltop and is never far away. ‘Three Guineas’ is a favourite thought piece on war and also women; Virginia’s writing on women and writing excite and support me as the pioneering work they are. These works explore the barriers that women face in attempting to produce literature and help to understand the challenges in the dream of being a writer especially as a woman.

Suggestions to read: A Room of One’s Own, Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf: Women and Writing (The Women’s Press collection)

Sylvia Plath

I love Sylvia Plath’s poems for their genius, craft and power. Her poetry has had the most impact on me of any poet and I am thankful for her body of work and what she achieved in such difficult circumstances. I especially love the books that shows Sylvia’s mind at work as she edits and crafts her poems, the precision of it, the artist at work.

Suggestions to read: Sylvia Plath: Collected Poems, Sylvia Plath: a Critical Study – Tim Kendall (Faber & Faber) – for some wonderful copies of original drafting processes on poems

Emily Dickinson

I love Emily’s reclusiveness, her unique voice, her secretive commitment to her craft, her pearls created. The sheer volume of work created without an immediate audience is staggering showing a complete commitment to her individual vision and style. The story of her life is fascinating and worth a read for the contexts in which she was creating the work we now know and value.

Suggestions to read: The Life of Emily Dickinson, Vols 1 & 2, Richard B Sewall (Faber & Faber).

Elizabeth Smart

‘By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept’ is one of my favourite books for its sheer poetic power. A novella, ‘a cry of complete vulnerability’ as my copy says on the back. The story of Elizabeth Smart’s life is about balancing love, writing, creativity, children and a fight for self-expression. The narrative of her life is about ‘the experience of being a woman artist in the middle of the century.’ (Sullivan – below p xi) I wish she’d written more but I know it was difficult with how life played out and the choices she made, but I treasure ‘Grand Central Station’ as a classic novella in the style I would like to write in.

Suggestions to read: By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, By Heart: the life of Elizabeth Smart – Rosemary Sullivan (Flamingo)

Edna St Vincent Millay

I love Edna St Vincent Millay’s romantic lyricism, her sonnets and her commitment to form. She was amazingly well-known in her time – the most famous poet of the Jazz Age and the image of  ‘the new woman’. She was incredibly committed to her art and lived an extraordinary life for her times, taking many lovers of both sexes. Her poetry was widely celebrated with her poetry readings often sell-outs with around 1600 people attending in some cases and her collection of sonnets, ‘Fatal Interview’ selling 35,000 copies in the early weeks of release in the middle of the Depression. The beautiful  photo of Edna St Vincent Millay when young surrounded by blossoms graces my desk here and inspires me.

Suggestions to read: Savage Beauty: the life of Edna St Vincent Millay – Nancy Milford (Random House)

These are my heroes, my heroines. I didn’t seek out for them to be all women but they are. I love them for:

  • their commitment to their craft and art
  • the narrative of their writing lives
  • their passion and love for writing
  • the works they have created
  • the lines that make my heart sing
  • the ideas that support me

Especially I love them for being my heroes, the female role models of the ‘big dream’ of writing because they understood it and lived it. 

Image, Vintage Underwood Number 5 typewriter by emilydickinsonridesabmx from flickr and used under a Creative Commons license with thanks

Share

1 Comments

PRIVACY POLICY

Privacy Policy

COOKIE POLICY

Cookie Policy