This Business of Poetry, Part 7: Flow, Wherein the words flow onto the page

There are times when words flow onto the page. There is no doubt about it; inspiration frequently comes as a storm, even a flash flood. I mean by that, of course, that such storms do not last, but pass through you.

Those rare occasions when you are primed and ready, when you have pen and paper or keyboard to hand and the words start flowing like a waterfall onto your page, such occasions are absolutely amazing! Often, what flows out onto the paper started as a tiny idea and ended up as a torrent of unexpected text.

I cannot explain how this happens—or why—but it does happen. This started happening to me when I was about 12 years old. I would be awakened in the middle of the night with words on my mind; I was unable to go back to sleep until I wrote down what was on my mind.

To this day, much of my writing comes from these late night nudges.

Do such nudges “come from somewhere”? That is a question I cannot answer. Unconscious, subconscious, dream-work, lucid dreaming—these are all terms that may have validity in such discussions about creative work, and you can explore these on your own. Wherever the words “come from,” what ever hits the page is real and valid.

Is there a “muse” or “guide” that is “helping” you with your work? Here again, I cannot answer such a question for you.

I do tend to feel as though there is a muse involved with my own creative process. Is that silly? Perhaps. However, I believe that there is a revelatory aspect to the creative process. There are times when I read through the material that has “flowed” onto the page and I think to myself, “wow!” The “wow” can mean “I didn’t expect that train of thought to go there,” or it can mean “I can’t believe I wrote that,” or it can even mean “gee, I need to look at that more closely and think about it in order to figure it out.” The work that flows is a gift that leads to more thought and more work. It can often be a “note to self” about your life.

Is there anything you can do to make creative flow happen? NO. Absolutely not. If nothing is happening, don’t beat your head against a wall; the time is not right and the ideas are not ripe. Better to go for a walk, or listen to music, or read.

Creative flow is a marvelous experience, but I don’t think that absolutely everything that comes from such experience is necessarily complete or good. The work can often take turns that you do not intend, and it is up to you as to whether you want to retain digressions or cut them from work you intend to complete. Digressions can be useful to retain for further development.

Creative flow does not replace editing, revising or reworking material. Yes, there are rare times when the flow hits the page and you feel like it is done. Though you can’t expect this to happen often, you can treasure it when it does.

I am a strong advocate of saving work process in the form of handwritten notebooks. I sometimes work directly into the computer, but not often.

Whether you have a “muse” or work by means of  “automatic writing” or not, the experience of flow with regard to your writing can be thrilling, the resulting work is a passionate example of what is most authentically you. Savor such times!! They do not come frequently.

Could more be said? Of course, but this is enough to get you thinking about it all, in relation to your own practice.

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Next time: What To Do In The Desert While You Await Inspiration

This Business of Poetry, Part 4: Peak Experiences, the Abyss and Everything Between; Writing as Meditation Practice

Last time, we talked about experience and awareness, as well as how the poetic mind engages with experience in reflection.

This time I want to make it crystal clear that every kind of experience is fair game for the poet. When everything is not “coming up roses”, that may be as good a time as any to think and write about what is happening in your life. Peak experiences are fabulous, if short lived in the scheme of things and infrequent; one peak experience may have to do for a lifetime. We may experience many more moments of pain, sorrow, horror or otherwise abysmal moments; writing about these can help us through crisis and toward healing.

Rumi is the best selling dead poet ever! The ecstasy of his revelatory conversational relationship with Shams, and the agony of Shams’ departure were the food that fueled, during the next twenty or more years of Rumi’s life, no less that 27,000 lines of poetic text and additional prose, recorded by amanuenses.

Carlo Gesualdo, an Italian nobleman of the late Renaissance period, is known today for two things: he was a murderer, and he wrote some of the most tortured chromatic music for choirs to sing. Those pieces that were secular undoubtedly settings of texts he wrote. Here is an example of one from Volume IV of Gesualdo’s collected madrigals for five voices:

Io tacerò

Io tacerò, ma nel silenzio mio,


La lagrime i sospiri, 


Diranno i miei martiri. 


Ma s’avverrà ch’io mora, 


Griderà poi per me la morte ancora.



(I will keep quiet, yet in my silence, 


My tears and sighs, 


Shall tell of my pain. 


And if I should die,


Death shall cry out for me once again.)



In van dunque, o crudele, 


Vuoi che’l mio duol e’l tuo rigor si cele. 


Poi che mia cruda sorte 


Da la voce al silenzio ed a la morate.



(Thus in vain, oh cruel one, 


Yearn you for my pain and your harshness to be hidden. 


Since my cruel fate 


Gives voice to silence and to death.)¹

I get the feeling Gesualdo wasn’t a fun guy to be around.

Emily Dickinson could write of pain:

Pain has an element of blank;

It cannot recollect

When it began, or if there was

A time when it was not.

It has no future but itself,

Its infinite realms contain


Its past, enlightened to perceive


New periods of pain.

But she also of  an envisioned joy:

Me! Come! My dazzled face

In such a shining place!

Me! Hear! My foreign ear

The sounds of welcome near!

The saints shall meet

Our bashful feet.

My holiday shall be

That they remember me;

My paradise, the fame

That they pronounce my name.

The point I make is that life’s joys and pains can most assuredly be commemorated in your writing, from among an infinite combination of words. All that is needed is the courage to explore the landscape of your dreams and feelings and experiences. And it does take courage.

After tragedy, some people find they cannot express themselves. I know I have difficulty; the writing that results can seem stilted or desultory, unfocused. This may be due to depression or a feeling of numbness. The Canadian writer, Mordecai Richler said, bluntly,

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing: it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustrations that it creates.

Maxwell Perkins, who was editor for Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, put it this way:

You have to throw yourself away when you write.

There is truth to this; while you write, you are committing bits of yourself to paper or to a digital screen. There is an element of self-emptying to writing that may ultimately be medicinal, but it could be difficult to arrive at that point. I cannot cite any document or study that will prove what I say; all I can tell you is that I have experienced this for myself.

How do we process our joys, tragedies and terrors through writing? Well, it cannot be too obvious that we need to write. You need to write something everyday in order to see results and completions over time. Author Ann Lamott puts it this way, in her wonderful book Bird By Bird:

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.

Elsewhere, she also said:

If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.

The hardest part of writing is letting go (or committing) so that you can “throw yourself away,” as Perkins suggested, even if what you are letting go of is what you love the most or has given you the greatest pain.

Writing must be practiced just as any other skill is practiced. How do I do it? Well, to start with, the size of my purse is dictated by whether it will hold a simple composition notebook; I tend to haul one around with me all the time. It has a pencil stuck inside it. I write everything in the notebook: dreams, meeting minutes, ideas, shopping lists, ideas for poems and actual poem drafts. This is my practice, anytime, anywhere. You never know what will happen; every place can offer inspiration, and anything you write down could be further developed later.

Simply put, writing and refining what you write is the practice—and the meditation. Whether you end up with anything you would want to publish is not the point.

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¹ English translation by Matthew Smyth

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Next time:  Practice and Meditation, continued—10 Poems That Have Changed Your Life

This Business of Poetry

I was taken aback when I saw an advertisement (on the local parent network listserv) offering poetry classes. I read the ad with interest. $200.00 for six weeks, offered in the home of the teacher… Plus, you must purchase a book of poetry by someone I have never heard of … explore the specific poet’s work, first half the class, then “take cues” from the “unique voice” of the poet under examination as a jumping off point for your own writing, second half the class. Offered by a published poet and former editor of a magazine I’ve never heard of … MFA from a local college… blah, blah, blah.

Interesting.

Got me to thinking… poetry as a cottage industry?

NIX! NADDA! NOT!

If I had $200.00 to spend, it would be on an evening of music, a book or two, a cup of coffee, a tea cake, and thou…

Why is she offering this out of her home? Why doesn’t she have a classroom and office hours?

Here’s the thing: poetry is not a business. Not a cottage industry. Not some little shoppe on the square (although it could possibly be described as a house of cards) with cute little note cards, a book or two, pens, leather bound notebooks and calligraphed verses and such. More to the point, in this case, you can’t teach anyone how to write anything by using your approximation of someone else’s voice. I think it takes a lot of gall to ask people to pay you for teaching them how to express themselves in writing by using someone else’s voice or technique.

I figure that I might be doing a great service to the community by offering free discussions about poetry and writing right here, on this blog. Not daily, but occasionally, in this month and a half ramping up to National Poetry Month (April).

What Is This Thing Called Poetry?

We get the word from the ancient Greek ποιεω (poieo) and the word means “I create.”  When you look up the word “poetry” in Wikipedia (or, who knows, perhaps you have an antique lying around your house labeled “Dictionary” or another bearing the legend “Encyclopaedia”), you will find a lot of interesting information about what poetry is and of what it can consist. I won’t bother to repeat any of that here—if you can see this blog, you can look that up for yourself.

I would like to define poetry in a less academic sense, couched in a more personal reality. Poetry is an activity of the mind, using the tools of everyday vernacular language, in response to personal experience of life. In essence, poetry is a word game that you play with yourself. This game is, however, grounded in your unique experience of the world, which could be thought of as philosophical, particularly existential or hermeneutical, rather than confined to being literary, in the most basic sense of the word. This may be why Poetics, the study of and theorizing on the nature, principles and elements of artistic composition, is considered a philosophical activity. You will find books on poetics in the Philosophy section of your library and bookstore, but seldom, if never, in the Reference or “How To Do It” sections or even the Poetry section! Moreover, you are more likely to find the earliest Western book on the subject, Aristotle’s Poetics, in the Classics section than any of those other areas I mentioned.

Aesthetics is another branch of philosophy that has a bearing on a broad range of artistic endeavor; it is the study the nature of beauty and sensory values, usually within the context of culture.

Literary Criticism can straddle the divide between philosophy and literature—this is sometimes described, perhaps unkindly, as a method academics use to put their mark on someone else’s work. Literary Criticism tries to establish a philosophical and cultural framework around a work or a body of work, sometimes with the intent of guiding people toward meaning or understanding or validation of the work. Personally, I don’t take much stock in literary criticism, as it has a history of foisting ideologies on readers, rather than allowing the work to stand on its own within the context of the readers’ experience. Some authors have little sense of humor when it comes to a Literary Critic telling the reading public what to think about their work.

So, we have talked a little bit about poetry, poetics and aesthetics and literary criticism, but knowing about these disciplines doesn’t get you anywhere close to writing poetry. The good news is that there are some “How To Do It” guidebooks, called poetry handbooks. These you might well find in the Reference section of your library or bookstore. Such books will talk about diction, tone, voice, rhythm, meter, rhyme schemes, and such. Sometimes they will do this by examining actual poems by well-known poets, poems that may be already familiar to you. I like reading poetry handbooks that are written by well-known poets, as opposed to those written by well-meaning “publish or perish” academics you likely haven’t heard of or read anything about.

The interesting thing about poetry handbooks is that they don’t all say the same thing. Yes, there are set forms and formulations, but poetry is not a science. You can take the forms and formulas and jam a bunch of words into such, but will the end result be a poem? Chances are that if you hand a set of Scrabble tiles each to two people, each person will construct a different piece of writing from among them.

But now we are back to the notion of word game. And that is what poetry is: it is your creative act using words that talk about your experience of life. Poetry differs from prose in that it is laid out line by line in stanzas, whereas prose is organized in paragraphs following grammatical structure and perhaps more regular speech patterns. Poetry differs from prose also by virtue of its music—that is to say, your music.

Poetry is your music, your experience, your truth:

            Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

~ PLATO, Ion

--NEXT TIME: What and Who is a Poet?--