Stream of Consciousness

From Araminta Ross...

Also known as...Harriet Tubman

I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more, if they had known they were slaves.
           

My (Second) Word for 2011

 

 

I just had to take on another one: Acceptance. Fearless acceptance? A combination of the two, maybe that will work. The image is of an open hand, letting go.

 

Speaking to Me Loud and Clear Today

  

Τhese words from  the art critic, Robert Hughes, found in an article about Tommy Wiseau, one wild and crazy movie actor/director dude:

"The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize."

Writing the Mind/Righting the Mind

“First thought is best in art, second in other matters.”
—William Blake

Naropa Institute (now Naropa University) in Boulder, Colorado was founded in 1974 by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a lineage holder of both the Kagyü and Nyingma Buddhist traditions. Rinpoche’s initial idea was to create a university that would combine traditional Western academic and creative disciplines with contemplative, spiritual studies. The Beat poet, Allen Ginsberg, spent over twenty years teaching poetics there as well as leading meditation workshops throughout the country. From those experiences—as well as his wide-ranging reading of other poets and study of spiritual masters—Ginsberg collected and then boiled down a list of mind-writing slogans that have been quite popular in certain circles in recent years.

According to Ginsberg, it was Chögyam Trungpa who initially remarked, “Writing is writing the mind.”  All of these are meant to guide us in the experience of writing out what we find in our minds. Some are cryptic and enigmatic; others are both profound and simple.

Ginsberg grouped the collection into three basic categories:

i. Ground—situation or primary perception of the mind. This category suggests that our minds are all we have to work with, that consciousness is mutable, and often presents the appearance of chaos.  Example: “My writing is a picture of the mind moving.” —Phillip Whalen

ii. Path—the method or recognition. “How,” Ginsberg asks, “do we use, order, & select aspects of mind, how accept & work with ordinary mind?” This category tries to get at practical techniques. Example: “No ideas but in things…No ideas but in facts.” —William Carlos Williams

iii.  Fruition—the result or appreciation.  What in our work do we aim for, what do we expect, what are the results? Example: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” —Shelley

Ginsberg’s slogans sample widely from contemporary literature as well as spiritual doctrine and thought. He starts with William Blake, the visionary poet who was a huge influence on him, and then meanders along, offering up pithy sound bytes from the likes of Plato and Plotinus, Shakespeare and Keats. Walt Whitman and Bob Dylan also have cameos along with Frank Lloyd Wright and Carlos Castaneda. And the ever-controversial Ezra Pound gets almost as many mentions as Ginsberg quoting himself.

Some teachers encourage the use each of these mind-writing slogans as individual writing prompts; others tout them as surefire ways to break through any case of writer’s block. I tend to pick out my favorites and see if I can apply the wisdom of a particular slogan to writing I am working on at the time. Sometimes, they remind me what to focus on. Other times, they offer no-nonsense, worth-remembering rules.

Below are a handful I have used to help me move from the blank page to words and then keep going:

If we don’t show anyone we’re free to write anything —Allen Ginsberg
Clamp the mind down on objects. —W.C. Williams
The natural object is always the adequate symbol. —Ezra Pound

When the music changes, the walls of the city shake. —Plato
The purpose of art is to stop time. —Bob Dylan
I’m going to try speaking some reckless words, and I want you to try to listen recklessly. —Chuang Tzu

Compose in the sequence of musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.  —Ezra Pound
Savor vowels, appreciate consonants. —A.G.
Don’t think of words when you stop but to see the picture better. —Jack Kerouac

Shopping for new inspiration? Take a look at the glad rags on Allen Ginsberg’s mind-slogan racks. You might, as I’ve done, try a few on for size and, if there’s a fit, see what they inspire. First thought, next thought has led more than a few writers to surprise, surprise. Listen as they change their tunes and shake down those city walls.

 

There's No Place Like Not-Home

“Writing is a way of saying you and the world have a chance. All art is failure. -- Richard Hugo

Trigger is not one of my favorite nouns mostly thanks to its too frequent use under sad and horrific circumstances in this gun-toting, trigger-happy country of ours—even more of late, it seems.

But one of my favorite books about writing is a little gem by Richard Hugo called The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing. In large part, I love this book because Hugo’s idea of what will get us as writers to pull our literary triggers—to precipitate, set off, spark, give rise to, launch, set in motion, bring about, generate, initiate even enkindle our true and real subjects—makes so much sense to me.

When I snagged my now-yellowed copy back in the early 1990s, the back cover blurb had already labeled this 1979 volume a “classic.” Its hard-to-categorize ramblings cover a multitude of topics in quirky, surprising ways. Hugo’s obvious generosity as a writer and teacher runs like a clear, encouraging river through each chapter whether it’s musing on how poets find their subjects or defending the teaching of creative writing itself.

The chapter on “nuts and bolts” offers many helpful craft rules-of-the road, i.e., “Make your first line interesting and immediate” and “When rewriting, write the entire poem again.” Other offerings seem deliberately controversial even kooky, almost as if to provoke: “Use ‘love’ only as a transitive verb for at least fifteen years.” Or “Maximum sentence length: seventeen words. Minimum: one.”

Another favorite of mine is “Statements of Faith.” The epigraph at the start of this post is one of its pithy gems along with these: “An act of the imagination is an act of self-acceptance.” and “One reason many poets drink so much may be that they dread the possibility of a self they can no longer reject.” There is much more. Trust me, you will want to read this book.

And about that triggering town idea. Well, that one is proving elusive to even hint at summary-wise here. For Hugo, any poem you write seems always to be set in your hometown—let’s call that the world you know—but, in his view, it’s more likely you’ll find the true poem you are writing (and may not know you are writing yet) in a strange town instead—the triggering town. In his view, “the relations of the words to the subject must weaken and the relation of the words to the writer (you) must take on strength…somehow you must switch your allegiance from the triggering subject to the words.”

I come back to Hugo’s thoughts on this matter time and again in my own work. Notions like the importance of unfamiliarity as we find our way to our own words, the ones we can take on and own. How I owe the details I assume absolutely nothing. And the crucial importance of trusting that, in time, this way of working-with-words will reveal the bigger, deeper subject, my own triggering town.

Hugo writes: “Our triggering subjects, like our words, come from obsessions we must submit to, whatever the social cost. It can be hard. It can be worse forty years from now if you feel you could have done it and didn’t. It is narcissistic, vain, egotistical, unrealistic, selfish, and hateful to assume emotional ownership of a town or a word. It is also essential.”

In the end, it seems to be that Richard Hugo’s thoughts, musings, advice, rules, exercises, and encouragements in The Triggering Town are all about getting each of us to dare to seek and find, to mine and discover our individual paths into the—and our—language. Then again, maybe I like this book simply because he and I share the same taste in blank books:

“Write in a hard-covered notebook with green lined pages. Green is easy on the eyes. Blank white paper seems to challenge you to create the world before you start writing…The lines tend to want words. Blank paper begs to be left lone. The best notebooks I’ve found are National 43-581.”

Great minds think alike—at least about office supplies.

A Tao of Writing

 

“A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.”

—William Stafford

In his smart and insightful collection, Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer’s Vocation, William Stafford has the briefest of essays that always has something to say to me. Originally published in the second issue of the the-then-fledgling FIELD in Spring 1970, it’s called “A Way of Writing.”

Lately I’ve come to think of it as my own 21^st century Lao Tzu, a simple gathering of a fairly small number of paragraphs that can swiftly reassure. Whenever I find myself doubting my poetry process, doubting the words I choose to speak my voice to the world, I remember to dip back into this collection and, in no time, all is OK in both how I approach the work and the word. I wonder if, from time to time, all of us who write need to be reminded just how important receptivity is to any creative work. Using his own writing life as example, Stafford reminds us to open and accepting of any and every “nibble” that inevitably comes when you sit down for a stretch of hopefully uninterrupted time with the intention of courting words. Because, in his words, “something always occurs…to any of us. We can’t keep from thinking.”

There is another “readiness” that goes along with this receptivity: being willing to fail. And being willing to fail just might mean that we then take risks, we let ourselves follow our thoughts, our amazingly untamed minds, our words as channeled through our scribbling or typing hands into perhaps crazily original, yet-uncharted territories.

Which leads to another Stafford truism—making no judgment when you are first doing the work as to the significance or value of what you are writing. The time for judging is later, after your creative discoveries have been made.  Stafford believes that those discoveries may not have much to do with one’s skills but rather to a deep, mysterious connection with the process whereby “I do not know what I am going to say and then I find out what I am going to say”—straightforward as that. Indeed, in his view,  “a writer is one who has become accustomed to trusting that grace, or luck, or—skill.”

Finally—and again, this is all in barely four pages—Stafford leaves us with two other insights from his “process-rather-than-substance” perspective on writers and writing. First, he offers a reminder that, of course, nearly all of us possess the skills of language. And that, in this regard, writers may not necessarily be special or more talented and gifted than everyone else who speaks and writes and reads.

What is it then that writers actually do that is different, that allows them to make art from our commonly shared reservoir of language, of words? For Stafford, it all swims back to a sustained engagement with language—anything created “comes about through confident reliance on stray impulses that will, with trust, find occasional patterns that are satisfying.”

And the second, even more elegant, simple, and to my way of thinking, decidedly profound insight: that “writing itself [remains] one of the great, free human activities” one that offers ample room for “individuality, and elation, and discovery…Working back and forth  between experience and thought…writers have the whole  unexplored realm of human vision.”

So we wait. We listen. We dream. We wade. We practice laps. We test the waters. We venture into the depths. We skim the surface and we dive. We keep some, toss back others. We are always willing to fail. And we are always willing to trust, and to forgive.

That when we know we’re on the way.

Quietness, Indeed

Quietness

Inside this new love, die.
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky,
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape;
Walk out like someone suddenly
born into color.

Do it now,
You're covered with thick cloud.
Slide out the side.

Die and be quiet.
Quietness is the surest sign
that you've died.
Your old life is a frantic running
from silence.

The speechless full moon
comes out now.
- Rumi

And So, After a Month...

 
Do not depend on the hope of results.  You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and achieve no result at all, if not, perhaps, bring about its opposite.  And as you get used to this idea you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.
— Thomas Merton

 

Since last fall, maybe early November, I’ve been drafting (mostly) a poem a day with time off for Thanksgiving, my husband's 60^th birthday party/reunion with his visiting brothers, Christmas, and our recent delirious spate of Pacific Northwest early spring. Every day in the short month of February, I posted my thoughts about the process, as well as excerpts from the daily poems, one-a-day like a creative vitamin.

 

So now it's March and, after three or four months of focused writing, what have I sorted out, what lessons (if you can even call them that) have I learned?

 

—One thing that comes with writing so regularly and so often—you do feel that it is the showing up at the page that calls forth the work, not a muse or inspiration.

 

— I am definitely feeling more confident, for sure. It is as William Stafford and Franz Kafka say. If you sit still, wait, listen, something will come up that wasn’t there before.

 

— I think I am getting to “well-crafted” sooner rather than later. So that must be the whole result of focus, immersion, and regular practice like any sport or work. Apprenticeship. Sticking with it. Absorbing lessons from draft after draft, revision after revision

 

— I am pleased with my ability to write in different styles, voices, and tones. I thought my work was beginning to sound all the same. Now, I can see that, with some study and deliberation, I can break out of that. So versatility is perhaps another trait I am surprised to have discovered.

 

— That said, I also think I am now more clearly writing in my own voice—which isn’t a bad thing either. In fact, perhaps a necessary sign of the beginning of a poetic maturation?

 

—Throughout this daily poem project, I’ve been surprised how much I can “mine” from earlier drafts I was ready to toss in the trash. Another lesson that even failed work doesn’t go to waste?

 

— And the more I draft, the more I feel confident about how and what to revise.. I’ve even begun to develop a stable of questions to ask my first-draft work as I seek to begin, complete, and then move on. Oh, I’m still tinkering and doing subtle revising—and probably will always work that way. But I find now I’m also more willing to let a piece go because I know there will be more where that one came from, something I often wasn’t certain of before I did this poem-a-day project.

 

— Writing daily and such a diverse batch of work has also helped me to refine my own aesthetic for how/what I want to write as well as read. And what I want to ignore and toss out as uninteresting to me as well. So I’ve definitely gained more confidence in my own instincts as well as the ever-present sense of too many books, too little time!

 

— And this may sound strange. But it has occurred to me that maybe this poetry writing “thing” isn’t as hard as I’ve been making it since I returned to it in 2004. That it isn’t as inscrutable as many academics would like it to be in order to defend their own engagement with it, their publish-or-perish treatises on endless (often boring?) minutia of poetics to justify the getting of tenure and working in the academy, etc. That the more I practice my daily writing muscle, the more joy seems to attend to the actual working with words, the more play and experiment enters in, and the less angst remains in the room.

Not every poem I’ve written during this project will necessarily be a “keeper.” And there have been those few-and-far-between, unexpected gifts that have come, I swear, directly from Erato, the muse of poetry, poems that both surprise and delight. Mostly what has been great for me about this journey has been the knowledge that the well of creativity, with some priming and pumping, now does feel inexhaustible.

Only to keep showing up at the page…

A few books that have been helpful to me in this process are listed below. Several are about form; the others are filled with exercises and prompts that can work for both the beginning and more accomplished poet. I have in no way exhausted all of the resources in these books but they certainly offered both direction and inspiration on more than a few days when my own muse’s energy flagged.

A Poet’s Guide to Poetry. Mary Kinzie.

An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art. Annie Finch and Kathrine Varnes, editors.

In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet’s Portable Workshop. Steve Kowit.

The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. Mark Strand and Eavan Boland, editors.

The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry. Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux.

The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach. Robin Behn and Chase Twichell, editors.

The Teachers & Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms. Ron Padgett, editor.

 

Photo:  Lunch counter at the amazing Columbian Cafe in Astoria, Oregon.

Reinhold Niebuhr on New Year's Eve

"There are no simple congruities in life or history. The cult of happiness erroneously assumes them. It is possible to soften the incongruities of life endlessly by the scientific conquest of nature's caprices, and the social and political triumph over historic injustice. But all such strategies cannot finally overcome the fragmentary character of human existence. The final wisdom of life requires, not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it...

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; there we must be saved by hope.

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; there we must be saved by faith.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our own standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness."

Photo: John's exquisite shot of the pollarded trees along the shore of Lake Como at the Villa Melzi, Bellagio. May 2008. Bellissimo!

Passionflower!

As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.

                                                            —Goethe

This flower was blooming on the most sumptuous plant on the back porch of the Blue Moon Bed and Breakfast when we were in Ashland, Oregon to see plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival this year.