When you sit down to write, what happens? Is it a thrilling experience? Does your hand tingle and do your legs shake? Or are do you anxiously fret over every word choice and syntactical construction? Does creating enliven or exhaust you? As someone who has been on both sides of this coin, I am interested in what happens to us when we write, paint, sing; in short, what happens when we create?

These days, writing is an abstract process. I have ideas in my head and I want to get them out. But I don’t spend that much time working out exactly how I am going to do that. I am sure there are some readers of the blog who have noticed glaring errors, an occasional logical looseness, sloppy construction, poor flow. Heck, I notice them. But let’s be honest, this is a blog. This isn’t the New York Times Magazine. I am my own editor.

What Twists and Turns Does Your Creating Take?

When I sit down to write, I often have nothing more than a few ideas, scribbled down on a notepad beside me. The notes might be nothing more than a headline with some bullet points. Sometimes the ideas are more flushed out. But either way, when I sit down, I often look at those notes merely as a guide, not as biblical imperatives. If I end up going off in a direction that I didn’t have in mind when I first sat down, I tend to go with it.

It’s like starting a car but not having a map. I know I have to get to the mall. So I start driving, but I don’t know the exact direction I am going to take. Often, I do end up at the mall, just not the one I planned to go to in the first place. To take this ridiculous metaphor just a bit further, I may miss out on the specific sneaker store I wanted to get to in the first place, but that is not to say that the mall I find myself out, may not have something else I want or need, but was unaware of.

That to me is the magic of unleashing your creation. One has to allow for the abstraction, for chance and fortune to take their toll. My absolute favorite poet is John Ashbery, commonly referred to as a “language poet,” but who is in fact, a descendant of a great tradition in American poetry. That tradition began with Walt Whitman, continued with Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens and was picked up, consciously or not, by Ashbery. He is also an Abstract Expressionist.

The Mind of the Poet

To wit:

The poets took their lead from the Abstract Expressionists (also known as the Action Painters and as the New York School of painting) in several key respects. From Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, they learned that it was okay for a poem to chronicle the history of its own making — that the mind of the poet, rather than the world, could be the true subject of the poem — and that it was possible for a poem to be (or to perform) a statement without making a statement.

So can a blog post chronicle the history of its own making? Indeed it can, and it should. Should all creation be carried out in this manner? No, it is not appropriate for all work. But it is how I work, a radical place to be, because it means that most of the time I am going to fail. Inhabiting this place is difficult but the method I have chosen. Our minds work in ways that I don’t think we can, or should, understand. For me, trying to control this chaos is the only mistake I can make.

I’ll leave you with a piece from the Ashbery poem, The Ascetic Sensualists; consider the abstraction and tangles the poem takes:

All…..All these numbers easily…Why…
Unwashed feet and then…typhoid fever…
The leading drains multiplied, then over ocean head
Is a dangerous feed broken easily.
The reeds came up to her, lying without life
Standing halfway to the shore, They they came over and…

Calm clouds borne over. The reeds, not strife.
These were thoughts of happiness
In the dark pasture
Remembering from the other time.
The old man ignored.

Image Source: alexdecarvalho on Flickr

A sestina is a highly structured poem consisting of six six-line stanzas followed by a tercet (called its envoy or tornada), for a total of thirty-nine lines. The same set of six words ends the lines of each of the six-line stanzas, but in a different order each time; if we number the first stanza’s lines 123456, then the words ending the second stanza’s lines appear in the order 615243, then 364125, then 532614, then 451362, and finally 246531. This organization is referred to as retrogradatio cruciata (“retrograde cross”). These six words then appear in the tercet as well, with the tercet’s first line usually containing 1 and 2, its second 3 and 4, and its third 5 and 6 (but other versions exist, described below). English sestinas are traditionally written in iambic pentameter or another decasyllabic meter.

Never before have the silos been so ablaze,
The atoms dipping in and out of the water wells
Licking and frolicking in the negative space.
The silent sound of columns attaching
Themselves to the hyperlinks, bits parsed
From the drunk seats of the monumental opera.

If you had to sell your tickets to the opera
You would have missed the actors all ablaze
In mystical acts. The performance would have to be parsed
By the bots and crawlers graphing the wells,
Indexing the languid bones of sentimental attachments
Throughout the hologrammed space.

Who are the kiddies who keep passing through the space,
Momentary glyphs scribbled on our wall? The opera
Class helped our vocabulary even though we still attach
Paint screams into the stream, shoving out the blazing
Firewalls with buckets of ink gathered from the wells.
The only engine that matters is the one that parses

The derivative constellations. Scrubbed, cleaned and parsed,
Our new colonies suddenly appear as the solutions to the space
We’ll need to store our server farms. The wells
Will have to be dug with new mechanics gleaned at the opera,
Like how hard to haul the sand traps to extinguish the blazes
Of stark, empty light. Here we finally get attached

To the project funnel, discover our avatars attaching
Themselves in a final violent agglomeration. Parsed,
the widgets stand for themselves on new bionics, ablaze
In the side view mirrors of a hundred million voices. Space
has never been this grand. Just more land to avoid the operatics.
Here is the laughing virus, wishing well

Of all of us, requiring more quarters to be thrown down the well.
The embezzlements of the gloaming lends itself to attachments
Like appendages grown overnight so we can have bit parts in the opera.
Who is running the show, segregating the divas, parsing
The sycophants for lingering violences in the space
Behind the grand sheet?  The screen captures a face ablaze.

This new business is mostly a parsing of existing space,
Somewhat similar to the wishing wells heroines tumble down at the opera.
The irreverent blazes are meant only as finicky attachments.

Image Source: Kiewic on Flickr

I

This reality show deafens the nerves.
Numb devices generate the blinding bells,
Pistons aflame, these exotic auctioneers
Jar me in their processed velocity.
The pace they travel.

I’ve got to get my cupcakes for the crowds
We hesitated to inform all afternoon.
They wait for us to get our act together,
But I’ve got nothing to instruct me.
The minutes stomp and I only think of canning
Winter’s tomato stock. “Enough to last the year.”

Bakery smells pillowing the breeze.

On the set of a choreographed street-scene
I am wide-angled into comfortable streets,
Steel lamps shadow me like an assassin’s scope,
Fronting windows of cake.

I wash my hands.

A jaundiced reflection in bakery glass
Is only a poor boy staring up at you with thin fingers
Outstretched and filthy and thinly finally real.
His mother beside him, old, already destroyed
All ready to cannibalize. A lifeline marauded,
Made out in tomato cans and soup kitchens
Decorated with greasy lard lick speckling,
Ten pennies tossed in the air, deflectors.

She is there where you’re going.
The street like the mother-hen of all urchins,
Gang apart, walking the plank stepping over
No one in particular’s furniture,
Over concrete trash and silk stockings,
Balled up at the foot of the bed.

I’ve seen this scene before in some streetlight
Advertisement for evicted childhood.
Intimate, inanimate lighting,
Klieg-like in a cartoon bubble,
Sepia-toned. A cradle of pictures we loved
But rocked away from us

And now I’m lost in the bubble,
Disorganized branches tangling off in
Wisely designed directions
That never occurred to me.
I could barely keep my eyes open, horizontally,
Inclined on dreamtimes deep couch.
They closed like curtains on me,
Thick maroon columns, velveteen, frosted,
The dust running their channels
Like a thousand feudal lords
Gearing up for a fight.

The lamp heat presses on me from below
Grabs at my under-skin. Lit from below,
Lugosi hollowed-out his performance;
screened gumshoes and wishy-washy dames
and Peter Lorre’s dinner jacket lingering, smoking.
Bela’s cue ball sockets that he had to look out at
Those worn pajamas, be seen in those forever.
The old man walks by with a brush,
A flashlight that kept me awake,
Beacon for my derivative dreams.

II

Wasted old man! Why
Keep showing up uninvited when
I never saw the point of you in the first place?
You’re stationed here as the resident
tennis pro but your rook is gone,
You’ve gone blind and that gives you no wisdom
That I can see.
The plug that prevents runoff.
I saw your story in half.

You taught upstate in tweed,
Perennially pacing a leafy quad,
The northeast chill decomposing an August’s wrath.
Your chalk dismissed and the world
Is a Friday afternoon at five in the pastoral fall.
All Iberian ham slices and melon balls,
20-year old vinegars from Modena, artichokes
Frying by the wayside in incorrect oils.

And the misfortune of others tastes the same.
Take from it, to share has nothing for you;
To get the blood boiling, boil away anything
Approaching convenience. Reduce
the unfamiliar elements, the senses smarting
infused with thyme and other
more precious aromatics that I never named.

We didn’t exactly have a family night of it.
More a ruckus chorus, beds in different rooms.

We don’t need those here do we now?
And I know you’re reaching impatience
Like a railway station coming into focus.
The periphery is where the attendant thought occurs,
The knowledge of this, “It’s about to happen.”
We’ll get there soon enough, the day
Not long ago when answers were there
For the taking like low-hanging fruit.
But we never harvested and can’t now.
“We haven’t satchels or proper shoes.”
Though there are those who head out
To the fields with neither and come back
Apple-red in the face in the sky wide autumn
Hoping to peel and core.

But he said that, I didn’t say it
And can’t take the credit now
Not for apples I didn’t pick or mash, boil and core.
Even if I made it mine, part of my crosswords.
It’s in my fancy gallery near the all-night diner
We used to eat rye toast in, checker-boarded
Foyer. Afterwards, we crashed like indices onto 10th Avenue.

III

A talk show begins and ends on a day spent indoors.
The credits slip down working like thick polenta.
It just became a part of my own personal abyss
Sunk in some diabetic cashiers till.
Back-lit lithographs that blemish the perfection.
Can it ever be so precise again?
I’ll see it again. I know that gallery. That diner
We stopped for the imperfect midnight omelet
Stuffed with mushroom caps.

I’ll show you how it was once pure when I had it.
I never did anything with it,
and it was purer still when I lost it,
Its’ sounds, familiar rounds; the road bends to the left
In the special photo that entranced you.
See the sphere teeter like a bowl
And the artist said simply:
“It is enough and too much
See if he gets it”

The courtier went back to the Vatican on horseback
And stopped for lunch and ate with simple peasans.
The landscape was littered with pilgrim’s chips,
Pebbles left on jaundiced monuments as a tithe.
Not a bad rate of return for ghost-investing gods.
They were people of the hills,
Never to see the sea or dream of it.
The courtier enjoyed their clothing and wanted nothing of it.

Further west, it was a fish day at the market.
The mongers with relish shelled
Their tournaments about like tinsel.
Gold-leaf banners hung in the arcade, flapping
Like gull-wings in the sea-swept mistrals.
And the Salon de Gusto went on in the square
The old men in the square went on smoking in red parades,
Playing chess with teenagers that weren’t theirs.
Their hideous tobacco charming the pants off of people.
Sometimes they let themselves win.

“Don’t worry we’ll get there”
Get told it’s a journey
Enough times and you might even
Begin to disbelieve the veracity of cliché,
Wage war against it, like the British.
They’re the ones with the bigger guns
These days though they pump it like moisturizer
Onto their palms and slip their socks on with it,
Thumbnail’s clicking on leather wheels.
This is how a day is supposed to end.

Sleeping in the city, I contain foraging dreams, farms
That fester and root their delicious tangles
Deep into the very earth-root I soak in.
Basidiomycetes.
I have no idea where they sprout,
They fume the tunnels. Electric cords punctured
By a clothespin, sparkling bits, glass that pins my utensils
Up against the steel and glass fences
I once coveted. But now those dreams
May as well be charcoal chips on a forgotten hearth.

We found a hearth once in the Maine-woods
Grill-plates tossed and torn, belly-flesh remnants
Rendered into balls of wax. I smell wood.
And I pass the boy and his mother, the old man;
A couple caught in the rain.

We were taller than the entire street on wheels.
The hundred former delusions that were me. These hockey
Mockers, all rough gloves and baseball caps, pucks and sticks.
It may be delusions on his part, the blinking old man.
I rarely take responsibility for non-actions
Only those things I thought I could do.
I’ve never acted, and the stage I imagined
Was as empty as that black box we jaunted to once.
We felt ourselves so avant-garde.
Another stage-managed affair where the female lead
Refused to leave her dressing room until the lamplighters
Took their place above and angled projections
A bit closer towards her duct-lined cue.
Waving her arms about like a defanged turnstile
She said, “This is where the sun shall shine.”

It’s not all the same scene.
Here are street-lamps, urban oak wands
Rooted and wired into the concrete infrastructure
As sure as a nano animating our waking scenes.
Professional, experienced like the most forgotten stage hands.
The credits roll by like a stuck creek
And we want to change the channel.

We’ve never seen those names and it’s simply not our fault.
It’s still only 4 o’clock and we’re almost never late.

The sun drenched windows soak up the Hudson light,
And the pane is just another flower root
Of the concrete soil, budding.

Coming home at sunset from a day in the country,
A giant orange greeted us on 57th street, furry, pot-holed,
A mirror of the wide street.
That merry warrior has seen all the lives in supple stars,
An album neither fading nor gray, we strain our ears
to hear a foreign soundtrack’s rhythms
another room’s fading dimensions.
And hear our parchment prejudices
Pressed between two fingers, conspicuous.
Bone to bone, one finger always wins that battle
And the children are put to bed a little sadder.

I slept on vinyl chairs, my face stuck to plastic memories,
Not wanting to peel away slow saliva histories.
Rather live here in this forever sofa of the soul.
We cannot see organisms breathe through gills.

A bioluminescent paralyzes a weeknight.
In subway channels they hoard their filmy air,
Sucking at our channel-surfing sensibilities, agog.
The cities organs’ pump and skewer steam through grates,
steam flushes away yesterday evenings’ news
In a rinse cycle.
Softly now, we’re slowing down.

This escalator malfunctions all the time. Stopping,
Starting, rising again, like a delayed attraction.
But only on this stretch of 14th street,
Where the crud is landowner extraordinaire,
A mad developer ponders his statutes.
Upstairs the crazies gather all alit,
A giant forever carnival complete
With lips ticked off at candy apples.

Ventricular passages heaving with magnificent energy,
Heat and steam a rocket propellant,
Warm air plunging the hems,
The universe crackles, an old man with a guitar stares.
And again we have to confront his rot,
His lot a gang of perplexed patrons,
Defending the arts without batteries,
Stepping out of roomy histories,
Never enough space to move around, “in there.”
And what’s going in there
That we haven’t heard a peep out of this one
For ages? How do you measure
The slowly creeping television sounds?

It was always done by feel, the art and faith
Combine and conspire against us,
The young and merely curious,
No intentions other than to foster enough blood and water and air
To propel us forward toward a pure white pillow.
It’s nothing else, the ambition-less have to leave
Empty-handed, like the forever beggars staring up at you.

You’ve seen those stick fingers before
The thin reeds that catch you in a forest sprint,
Entomb your heat, tangle your limbs, stall your hunt.
And you have never been more scared than you are now.
Each created memory moves like a dime on wheels
Into the bank’s vault.
You deplete your savings like a runaway.

Insufficient kaleidoscopes triangulate your position
Like startled bankers heaving at the crush.
Depositors bequeath their mornings to reconciliations.
I’ve worked the spreadsheets and seen their projections
Stretching out like a thousand fuzzy moons lining the horizon,
Golf balls waiting to be shanked.
What more could you possibly want to bestow?

I rode the tide as far as it would take me in
And for a second I felt the seam that runs
Along the beach joining death to life, a raised stitch.
I rode the tide as far as it would take me in
To a place like the beginning of land,
The start of the road.
It doesn’t bend for miles so we have some early
Starts to prepare for, bags packed, keys jingling
In side pockets, water bottles tucked away.
We are warriors now like the sun who never complains.

Image Source: Johnathan Gill on Flickr

I read once that all the stores were bursting with wares.
You forged a century without lifting a finger.
When you fell those shops fell too.
You skinned your own people; naked tomatoes
For long winter’s summer sauce.

Where is the magic in that?
But I’m not interested in magic.
I want to know your thoughts, need to know really,
As much as anything I’ve ever wondered. How?
How you slept? Ate?
Tore bread apart as if it was a throw-away act,
Like ripping a hole through the universe,
The demented seamstress.

You were a world eater, one of the only.
I want to know what you tasted,
They never thought to ask.
That’s my angle here, the moment when you knew
The jig was up, your father’s fantasy torn, gone
To pieces, bread bites on a moonlit lake,
Soon to be logged and sunk. This lake
Has been here a hundred years.

You ruined it for us all, the century was a cask
Of a hundred individual history tastes, flavorless tapas!
You know this now don’t you?
When the clouds organize like you imagined,
We look over horizons and see you, standing inert
Like a jaundiced monument, with a flag in your hands
Plunging the earth’s core, impaling our history,
A century and more. A hundred million chilly chests
Cheating nothing but their only dream’s deaths.

Image Source: Ben Sutherland on Flickr

The hill is not as spooked anymore
The hill with the factory perched upon it
Staring down the questioned town
Riddled with gentle craftsmen
For whom making mistakes
Was their breath

See the light go on in a short room
In the factory, a single glowing bulb
Spackling yellow-hued light on the forgotten office
Punchcards strewn about by toppled server space.
It is enough to get the town crowded around the city center
Toeing the sidewalk cracks with brio.

The weavers had won a war with their fathers
Fifty years ago and collected for their remaining pensions
the spoils of hate
For their remaining pensions
They replaced their pants when the moon
Turned over in the night regarding its pillow
As another strange visitor with queer sounds, motions
Disruptive to the limpid rhythm of rest.

They won a war with fate, and cauterized their fingers
Against the oncoming hatred.
The librarian saw it coming, indexed volumes specifically
Yet was promptly ignored at the café.

They won the war with fate and suffered their losses
In the shadowed marbles of the usurers dome,
Tabulating up and down the street,
Looking across the sheets to see their wonderful losses
Accumulate as a cloud storm fidgeted with the moon’s currency.

There are no craftsmen now on the hill.
Evictions posted and everyone went downhill
Towards the bar, to have a century’s laugh
At histories migration.
The ancient nightmare caught up with them
Like a beam in the sky honing on heat blooms
In military surveillances.

It knew where to find them, never really lost sight of them
Through the fog and frogs breath of tiny island leaps.
Nameless, horrendous.
The great heaping mass of a quarantined town
The dead piled high in a wheel barrow
Paraded in town as a victory for the elders,

The borrowers infecting the groundswell, interest
Bleeding into the water table, the air. The forests’ breath
Sprays out webbing between two thin leaves that
Hang discordantly in embrace, waiting for the ant to come
And cut them free, liberated to get on with histories tussle.

And as the water payments were mailed monthly
To the brothers, the monks sat in the library
Querying old databases, reading the looms for any signs
Of digital deliveries, quorums, decisions in history
That could be recalled and examined for a simple way out,

Or at least a preparation for the virus and its symptoms.
The cough begins, the fifty years war rages
With group shouts and tantrums of dust,
Tank columns enlivening towns
That now are to be administered by the good sirs,
The ballplayers, the managers and apparatchiks.
The meek go on collecting taxes for the waterways,
The boat must be led across by twine
And the rocks are felt for by a blind boatsmen,
The permanent mate.

And here the town daily addressing hair with a comb
Readying for work and reaching for keys in peanut butter dreams
And silent slopes. The joints creak ten years too soon
And another lease is originated, a credit sold,
Children taking into the gloaming.
And the lease is piled in the marble room
Ledgers redacted into an inner sanctum’s hush and attention.

Usurers have not enjoyed this much fame since Genoa
And the adamantine wars, the turpentine decisions
Spiraling through acres of desert like a slope,
Winded and spun like cloth around a stick
Dipped in fuel, frazzled with firelight.
Here comes the neon man, screwing his bolts into place
To announce the new partnership between history and decline.

Image Source: Dominic on Flickr

These digital talks will be our last warming moment.
Death spins around its axis toy, stapled to its own importance.
The only thing we ever got right.
And when I wake today I immediately imagine
Hourly disappointments saturating
Into an inconvenient stew.

We used to write letters to people we knew
Wouldn’t answer. A kind of denuded
Correspondence, one-sided, our words
The final ones uttered
Though they kept coming.
They float up there in our imagined depots,
Processing facilities carefully extracting
The truly urgent from the not so.

“I am still completely happy”
And that’s the biggest shock really.
All evidence to the contrary
I look up and down the tabulations
Wondering where the projections fan out to
And what will one day be interpreted
By my betters, the so many of them.

There are so many of these
Bitter captains steering through headlong catastrophes
Seeing only what is in their most immediate reach,
Slalom courses conforming to their blurry perception,
This is a terra-formation.

I want you here with me,
Listening is the only form
Of comfort I have.
And yet even that illusion I have seen through
A thousand times, more even,
And I recognize the limits of something so viscous,
It cakes the fingers like fine flour,
And you know it is there but for the life of me
I cannot feel it.

I listen to myself constantly
And have never been more confused
By what I imagine are the important questions.
Do I have to suffer so?
Where was this orange juice squeezed?

II

See the umbrellas from above, slowly twirling
In a carnival atmosphere, the streetlights staging
A massive disaffection,
Worse than declarations of love and war.
The memory produces so much sound
Grinding away the minutes like so many herbs
In a mortar and pestle.
Who holds the root
As firmly as that?

But for now we have to imagine raincoats
And the mannequins they belong to,
Walking agendas through the rain,
Upending once placid puddles.
The plans were well thought out.
We constructed a scene in our bedrooms

And as the water wicks away centripetally,
Like sweat, coursing towards the veined edges
Of a flexible product,
It is so close to its stashing yet resists indefinite jarring.
The street fills with these devices
Posting like letters to the heavens,
Mechanized hooks cranked askew,
Branching out as if ready to be embraced
Tentatively; a new lover comes
Through the archway with shiny hands
And as yet unbroken shouts
And faulty manipulations.
The chips are down.
The sense of what we are really made of returns.
It’s not a pretty picture.

Image Source: Anna Pearson on Flickr