In the great artist you see daring bound by discipline and discipline stretched by daring.
As Time Goes By (inspired by the song of the same name)
People have often asked me why I write...why I picked up a pen to write poetry at the age of 60 when I'd done very little writing before that. And I have some pretty articulate answers (I hope) I've shared in my volumes of poetry and will share here too. But very few people have ever asked me HOW I write - the creative process behind any given poem. So I'd like to talk about that today as well. I'm fairly certain that the process is not unlike that most artists go through but it is a bit different for me from how I create an artwork.
Let me tackle the why first. People have told me that my poetry is very personal, intimate or evocative, maybe even that it exposes too much of who I am or what circumstances have shaped my life. Perhaps that's true - but as I said the other day, there is great freedom in letting down the walls of pretense and allowing oneself to be vulnerable. I can be exactly who I am. Still I don’t write or create just to “emote” or have some kind of catharsis. I create in order to share something of myself, yes, but something I hope that has universal application, something that will “help” another person make sense out of life. I like to think that my own experiences - painful, joyful or introspective - have some universal application and like artists in other genres, hope that as a poet I share where my own journey has taken me in a quest to answer the great mythic questions of who we are as both physical and spiritual beings, how we should live with one another, what we can learn from suffering or loss, and what our own individual purpose might be as part of the connected whole.
I often write or create from what seems to be a dark place, from grief or sorrow, heartbreak or illness, but I almost always wind up with hope or with an expression of something extremely positive gained from even the worst of experiences. For me the bottom line is love…period. Love conquers all, redeems all, renews all, and I am convinced that love is the divine light within each and every one of us if only we would lift our eyes, open our hearts and uncover/recover what we have hidden from ourselves out of fear. I try to remind myself constantly that “everything but love is a lie.”
So that pretty much covers the why; now for the how. If there were any factor in my background aside from an almost idyllic childhood spent in the country that played a role in how I work and think as an artist/writer today, it would be my teaching career. For me, teaching wasn’t a job…it wasn’t even something I “did.” From the very first moment I set foot in a classroom, I knew that teacher was who I AM not what I DO. And I gave it my all – every ounce of creativity I possessed went into my planning, my instruction…and what I learned from that that is still essential to both my writing and my art was that there were many different ways to say the same thing, teach the same principle and what was important was to find the way or ways that each of my students could relate to, a way to translate my own “story” into something more universal. I could write a book – should have – on how that works.
Specifically, my preparation involves a number of steps beginning with an openness to what sparks that creative urge to write - perhaps it's a song lyric, a line from a novel that I'm reading, a storm or a natural event, the change of seasons. I keep prolific notes in a little notebook I carry with me everywhere. There I record whole paragraphs from inspirational books that I find meaningful, or just a single phrase that occurred to me while I was driving somewhere. Next, I might actually research an idea so that I don't wander too far afield - for example, I've a poem called The Observer Effect which I'll post in a day or so for which I spent weeks studying to understand the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. I took reams of notes, even diagrams, and read about Schrodinger's cat and the debate over this fairly recent principle in quantum physics.
What do I do with all those notes? I make a point to reread everything I've put in my notebook every day and I pick one idea to play with, writing a line or two on which I might be able to build a new poem. Then I do the most important thing...I leave it alone for a bit. I move these bits and pieces, these lines and phrases into a file that I call "my simmering pot." And I let the ideas slow simmer for days, weeks, maybe even months. It's always in the back of my mind and some new idea or experience, something I've heard in a lecture, read in a book, may connect with what's gone before and trigger a few more lines. When I've got the bare bones or the framework for a poem, I move it to another file I call "building blocks." These are the pieces I work on every morning - trying to expand and refine what I've already got finished. From building block to finished poem might take a day or a year...and I've no way to predict that. Some poems have been sitting unfinished in my files for years now and some internal roadblock keeps me from being able to edit them or rewrite them. Maybe because they are too personal or maybe just the opposite...they aren't fully truthful. I find I cannot finish a poem if it doesn't honestly reflect what I truly feel. The idea might have sounded good at first but if it isn't me, it doesn't get written. Occasionally, as with the poem and image I posted a couple of days ago, I don't post a poem until I've created an artwork to go with it because the words alone don't say everything I want to say.
So that's the why and the how of it - I'm not sure any of that is helpful to other artists, whether we're talking visual or written arts. But for myself, I apply much the same process to visual arts so I have so many "works in progress" that it would take the rest of my life to complete them. That accounts for my limited number of posts - I have something like 148 images to show for the three years I've been on Fine Art America and fewer than that on other sites.
If you've been having trouble with inspiration lately or you feel as if you're stuck in a rut in terms of style or subject matter, perhaps it would help to let your ideas "simmer" for a while before trying to finish it. There's no rush, is there? Great work takes time and discipline.
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