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.

_________

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

Il Pleut

Like a sanctification,

it rains, sending all inward
to the physical and psychic centers.

Veins of flowing water merge,
becoming tiny ribbons and rivulets,
streaming, flowing and cleansing,
outlining paths of reconciliation
we might take, once sun returns.

There is a world of hurt out there,
being bathed and healed in holy tears;
the birds are already rejoicing.

© 2012 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

What Nyx Told The Philosopher

AWAKE, mortal! By wild horses drawn in teams,

you have come here on the waves of your dreams;
you to me my daughters duly have conveyed
and will return thee after what I have said.

KNOW that what can be observed is and must be,
whether or not you can think it or see
it shining brightly in the glinting sun,
have felt it or some other experience done.

But know also that what you have not seen,
felt or heard is, being beyond your mean
and feeble awareness and thought,
apart from the observable and the taught,

Any such is just as true and as real
as that by which you set your seal;
Reality is not as small as your mind,
but large enough to fit all and every kind.

Even both reason and opinion cannot, alone,
conjecture truth so complete and prone
to be fully fathomed by the human eye,
but, alas, these are the tools you have to ply.

Nature, unaltered pool of Being, is One;
from it all things rise and fall, ever redone,
as need and season call, or wit and wile
contrive through vision, putting craft to trial.

What seems static moves slowly to your eye,
but nevertheless has life, and then will die
to be reborn in a different form, visible,
or even, wonder of wonders, wholly invisible.

As much as you crave a truth absolute,
justice is found when the pure of repute,
mitigate the starkly formulaic with art,
arriving at an equity whose best part

Satisfies all sides to a harmonious end,
beyond which none further shall contend,
for all affected, touched and involved
shall truly believe the matter resolved.

So vital art is to nature, I converse
with you in this clear yet simple verse,
that you may completely comprehend,
remember, then impart to all and any friend.

And now, Parmenides, my speech being done,
I return you to the arms of Day, having won
knowledge of nature so noble and rare
that you must carry it forward and share.

And then, Nyx turned aside, with a sigh
and a smile, soft and kindly, yet wry,
while the hapless Parmenides was flung
into the chariot by which he was brung,
whereupon the daughters of the moon
whipped her mares over the cloudy dune,
finally dropping their guest in his cot,
violently waking him to think on his lot
and on all that Nyx had spoken
by way of her unusual token.

© 2012 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Adventures in Paralysis

Paralysis:
inability to choose a lesser evil,
owing to there being none least;
find suitable work two hours away or
continue the local treadmill of austerity;
pay the universe to pursue art and beauty,
at the mirrored risks of overwork or idleness.

Politics:
a legal way to empty the pockets of the poor
into the pockets of those who need no more;
there is money for denial, for cheating, for robbing,
but none to uphold the dignity of life for those living;
leave no tree standing, no stone unturned,
toil and boil ‘til you spoil the water and the soil.

Plight:
the list is longer than the hours for doing,
but a divided self cannot think or walk or do;
the band plays on and on in my head,
so that I cannot achieve deep sleep;
when I do slumber, I dream there is no coffee,
yet whilst I am awake, I brew too much.

Pickle:
to convert an object hierarchy into a byte stream,
thereby serializing, marshalling or flattening, or to remain firm;
to pluck cucumbers from their vines and shove them in brine,
or to serve them as a lovely salad with tomatoes, greens and beans;
kosher dill or gherkin, bread and butter, sweet or onion,
to serve them warm or cold, in sandwich or clear libation?

Ping Pong,
Ding Dong,
Sing Song,
Fling, Flang--Flung!

© 2012 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

This Business of Poetry, Part 6: Trial and Error, Blank Pages and Failures

So, now, we get on to the writing.

To the writing.

Writing.

And there is all this yawning space on the blank page or screen.

Waiting for you to write.

To write.

Write.

And that, in a nutshell, is all there is to it! (She says, with a false breeziness.)

Writing.

To write.

What that means is that you have to take what has been on your mind, in your mind, over your heart and between your ears, and the silent music that is there must form words that become a music that can be transcribed from your mind to the silence of the page or the screen—for what we are talking about is silent music that moves mysteriously into different silent venues before taking flight as sound. What you may be doing is a kind of translation from the music of your mind into the speech that you have been trained to use and understand.

Easy?

HA!

Here is an example of an idea I had that has never quite made it to completion. This past November, I got an idea. The idea was the title (this happens from time to time), and the development was supposed clarify my idea artfully. HA!

--* White Out *--

That was the idea. I was clear about what I was trying to achieve. The problem was, all I had was the title. The rest of the words were not finding a pathway onto the page.

I had, I suppose, a certain expectation that now that I had the idea and the clarity, the words would pour out. But they didn’t.

[I will digress for a moment to talk about the revelatory experience that can be an aspect of writing. This is an aspect that cannot be taken for granted. It is an aspect that cannot be overlooked. If you believe in something we will call, for the sake of discussion, “Divine Creation” and that life is somehow an integral weaving of communicative energies, then it can only seem natural that, if nothing else, your writing is a “note to self” of a sort.

I have done some work that I felt sure I had conceived and crafted, only to read it later be astonished at what bounced off the page at me. What I am saying is that the messages that bounce off the page can frequently be other than what you thought you were meticulously crafted. Be prepared for this. Be prepared to be amazed.

On the other hand, be prepared for this to be an unusual circumstance.]

So, the words weren’t pouring out, and I thought, gee, I guess I should make the words happen. So, I began…

“White Out” – Draft Notes

white flakes, snow moon

purify widening circles

like waves, rings

cause the negative cast

to surrender shadow to void

wideness of truth

“White Out” – Draft 1

If light is as easy as breath,
and liquid as the sea of stars
shining over the south seas,
then I can believe light wills
its journey to  fill the darkness

to white out and thus

cause each negative cast

surrender its shadowy mantle
for the wider array of truth.

If light is as easy as breath,

wrapped in the mantle of light

we shall be blind  to differences,

keener to our similar roles,

being, as we would, all of us,

points of light, pointing to one light

Light reaches out from a sea of stars…

…

    …

        …

 UGH!

No, this was not flowing. It was not feeling good. When you feel like what you are doing isn’t working, it is best to move on and come back to it.

(sigh)

So, I came back to it several days later. This time, I was armed with an epigraph that I thought might be helpful in channeling the proper words onto the page.

“White Out” – Draft 2 Notes

Epigraph: John 1:51

And he said to him, “Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending…”

“White Out” – Draft 2

One star,

one light;

one night

gives flight

to possibility.

Sparks fly,

moons sigh,
singing tales

of probable fails.

Positives shout:
white out
instances
of differences
to abiligility.  [yes, this is a neologism…]

Star lighting,
fly sighing,
shout outing
among any snowy shores…

…

    …

        …

(sigh)

No. It was just not happening, so I abandoned that draft.

I came back later.

“White Out” – Draft 3 Notes

What if an angel came in answer to a prayer? – refigure the piece as a question.

“White Out” – Draft 3

Moonlight frames her
as she scans the field.
Her visibility perturbs her not

[and then I remember a similar line in a Wilfred Owen poem,
            which disturbs me, but I keep going…]

--shameless self-promotion
is neither desired nor needed needed nor desired;
she is well-known,
if little understood—

outstanding in her field…

…

   …

      …

I now realize that I am writing about an owl. I ended up writing two poems called Night and Day from that material.

[So here is where I mention, casually, that everything you put down could actually end up being used and part of a completed poem someday, with patience and perseverance. So don’t tear the sheets of paper up and ball them up. Nothing need go to waste.]

I set “White Out” aside for a number of weeks.

In the meanwhile, my notebook records meeting minutes, grocery lists, calendar items and drafts of other poems that are now complete.

I return to my “White Out” – Draft 3 Notes,  thinking I can begin again.

(What if an angel came in answer to a prayer? – refigure the piece as a question.)

“White Out” – Draft 4

Complete white out
is what we need.

Answer our prayer,
if you dare,

Dear Angel,
do this deed;
prove wrong
the naysayer,
and all who clutch at doubt.

I feel you heed
by warmth of music,
and then you fall—
a daystar into the sea.

Your ribbon of flame
freezes the waters to ice,
reflection which blinds
as surely as viewing the sun
or sighting burning bush.

In white out,
deprived…

…

   …

       …

no. No. NO!  That’s not it.

(sigh)

Have I finished “White Out”? No. I have hopes.

Meanwhile, I have written a number of essays and other poems, have premiered a new piece of music, as wells as published some short interviews and a chapbook.  And I keep observing and reading and thinking.

You do what you do and the branches of the tree eventually bear fruit. Some of the fruit is easier to bring forth, but that is only normal.

Keep on writing!

----

Next time: Flow, Wherein the words flow onto the page

This Business of Poetry, Part 5: Practice and Meditation, continued—10 Poems That Have Changed Your Life

I spotted this book at a garage sale: 10 Poems That Will Change Your Life. The title was both intriguing and audacious. I disagreed with the premise implied by the title, but I had to read it—the price was right, and I needed to see what the choices were and how the anthologist asserted each poem’s significance as a “life changer”.

Let me start by saying that I completely agree with the idea that interacting with poetry can be a life altering, perspective changing enterprise. I firmly believe this. Czeslew Milosz’s poem “Dedication” positively aches with these lines:

What poetry does not

save  a nation

 or a people?

I believe in the uplifting and healing power of poetry. Poetry is, for one thing, a compendium of human history, of humanity’s struggle, resilience and survival, if not also of transcendence.

I am suspicious, however, of a programmatic approach—to me this smacks of didacticism, rather than a sincere attempt at guiding others toward portals and new ways of thinking. This, incidentally, is why I tend to read books of literary criticism with a skeptical eye.

T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets are among the most beautiful poetic testaments ever crafted, but if you know that Eliot was an elite member of the intelligentsia of his time, and that he was writing with an eye toward programming others of his rank to work in support of the prevailing Tory, oligarchic “power elite”, this rather colors one’s reading of the work, doesn’t it?

I will not write an apologia for Eliot; he was a class-conscious bigot who used his position in the publishing world to promote philosophies for the uncommon man, and that these philosophies were conveniently conformative and acceptable to what the ruling class wanted the public to think. There is no doubt that he placed himself in a position of authority among the intelligentsia, and allowed his work to be used as a political tool. While I find it repugnant that he used his undeniable talent and vision to promulgate a sociopolitical cultural agenda, I cannot deny that the Four Quartets are a brilliantly crafted collection of works. These poems are utterly beautiful, and the messages they convey (if you don’t follow up on all the references; these would require several volumes of annotation and particular readings of American and British history) are ultimately transformative.

What I suggest is that if you encounter this body of work by Eliot without benefit (or detriment) of the foreknowledge of Eliot’s cultural agenda, you are likely to have a much different, more uplifting and transcendent reading of the pieces than after you have read a biography of Eliot, literary criticism of his work by other authors and one or two of his plays, which positively ooze with disdain for the common man. It is too bad that Eliot set himself apart to be an arbiter and that his intended audience was so small and narrow. It is also too bad that one must have read so much beforehand to really understand what Eliot meant by all of what he wrote in those four final poetic writings of his career.

The work stands on its own and transcends the purpose its author made for it. I treasure these works because of their unintended message to me.

Returning to my thoughts on 10 Poems That Will Change Your Life, the well-intentioned author of this small anthology spends much of the space in the book telling us how the ten selections were life altering for him. If you remove that commentary, the biographies of the authors of the poems and the suggested further reading, then this book really offers very little for its retail price of $14.00 plus applicable sales tax. You and I could spend that much money on a much larger anthology or on the collected works of a single author, then to mull over the work on our own, without being told what to think about it.

I considered the selection of poems offered, and wondered at it. Yes, there are some interesting selections. Whitman’s Song of Myself makes total sense. Mary Oliver’s The Journey is also a powerful statement. But out of all the 27,000 lines of poetry by Rumi, why select Zero Circle?  And, if you are presenting one poem by a Persian poet, why then take a selection from another Persian poet? Why not represent a Chinese or Japanese zen poet?

The small sampling in this thin volume is a highly subjective one, and while the dust jacket claims they are “astonishing poems” that “can inspire you to live what you always knew in your bones, but never had the words for”, I wonder. In fact, I think the book failed to do that for the original owner, which is why I found it at the garage sale. Ultimately, the book failed to do that for me, as well. Why should I care about how the anthologist experienced these poems?

I long ago came to the conclusion that individuals cannot (although they try to do so) buy or sell personal experience. The people who try to sell their own experience to others are false prophets; the people who try to buy someone else’s experience are abdicating their own. The publishing industry should heed this, if it wants to survive.

To his credit, the anthologist does acknowledge his small sampling to be a starting point, but I think he missed something by not proposing a next step, which I will do now: to create a practice around the poetry that inspires you.

How would such a practice work? You could start with a short list of poems that have inspired you. Copy them into a notebook and think about them. Recognizing that such exercises are naturally subjective, write what you think about the poems, cite reasons why you love them and why they inspire you. Use this as springboard to your own thinking, thought process, analysis and writing.

A friend of mine told me that she had shown her work to a mentor who offered the criticism that too much of her life was reflected in the writing!!! Well, for heaven’s sake, your writing is a subjective experience, and it should be—it is your experience!

When asked by someone “What should I write?” the author advised, “Write what you know.”

Amen.

___________

Next time: Trial and Error, Blank Pages and Failures

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.

________

¹ English translation by Matthew Smyth

______

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