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
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