poetry – Page 6 – from the heart

Unanswered Questions from Dinner with a Poet

“What are you thinking about now?” he asked,
across the table,
over the empty plates,
into the silence of an unfinished conversation.

“Is it normal to be terrified?” I want to say.
And when will writing not feel
like assembling a jigsaw puzzle
where all the pieces are gray,
or like being in a country
where my currency is defunct.

But I swallowed my words with a sip
of good Chilean red,
and all I remember now are these two things:

With tired eyes and a precise, compassionate voice,
he looked at me and said,
“Fear is a useful diagnostic tool.”

And then, when we got up from the table,
he took my wine glass, not quite empty,
put it to his lips,
and drank it.

LCS
2/13/10

I wrote this poem for my sister-in-law last summer when she was very kind to me at a difficult time. “An der Ringkirche” is the street where she lives, and ‘Ringkirche’ means “the church near the ring.” You can see a gorgeous, almost magical 19th-century church right outside the window of their apartment building. This poem tries to describe a moment when a small gesture made me feel truly loved.

June 1-An der Ringkirche
for katja

After months of struggle
in this hard interior country
I am landed here–
a clean sunlit room with one white orchid,
and air that rings round and rich
with cathedral bells.

In the center of the glass table
someone I love has left a gift–
pale gold perfume.
When I spray it into the sunlight
it makes a living glimmering cloud,
and as I step through it I breathe, Yes.
Yes: it can be as easy as this.

LCS
2/10

“There ain’t no answer. There ain’t gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer.” (Gertrude Stein, 1874-1946)

1. Is everyone creative?

2. Why does it feel wrong to say no and not quite right to say yes?

3. What is the difference between creating something and making something?

4. In Hebrew only God can create; humans make and God creates. What does this mean?

5. Does being “creative” always involve restlessness?

6. If creativity a force, where does it come from and where does it go?

7. Why does creativity seem so far away sometimes, and so close other times?

8. Is being creative a choice?

9. Is not being creative a choice?

10. Why are we attracted to the idea of creative genius?

11. Why would having answers to these questions feel both comforting and dissatisfying at the same time?

Joyce Carol Oates wrote: “[Emily Dickinson] was not an alcoholic, she was not abusive, she was not neurotic. Neurotic people who go through life make better copy, and people talk about them, tell anecdotes about them. The quiet just do their work.”

12. Oates means this to be normalizing, comforting, challenging the idea of the tortured artist. But Emily, were you…sane?

Still wondering about creativity, still immersing myself in some of the vast quantities of material out there, and am very grateful for all of the amazing work that has been and is being done to explore the connections between creativity and “madness.” But to steal (and probably badly paraphrase) a line from “Beowulf”: “tis not very far from here and ’tis not a pleasant place.”

Poet David Whyte has said that stifling your creativity is not a passive act; he likens it to letting the smoke build up in a chimney–the greasy, black smoke that slowly backs up into your whole house, and if you did light a match to it, it would burn your house down. This is suffocating and paradoxical imagery–you need to allow creativity to move as a force, but some forms of its movement are life-threatening.
Continue reading “Blood-Red and Black/More on Creativity” →

I’m in the midst of preparing for a Heartland Writing workshop on creativity that I’m giving on January 30th, and being “in the midst of” is just what it feels like. There is so much material on creativity out there, so many points of entry into it as a “topic”–creativity as a marketable workplace asset, creativity as a skill to be taught, as a mode of behavior, as a stereotype involving either chaos, alcohol and mental illness, or bright colors, trips to Michael’s, and pieces of felt.

The two biggest categories for me with regard to creativity are: safe and unsafe. Is being creative safe or unsafe or both? I don’t know, and that’s why I’m doing the workshop, which is called Creativity and the Quest for Meaning. My planning for this workshop has been stealth planning–read a little bit of this, think about a little of that; try not to feel overwhelmed. Mostly it’s been sitting in or next to the midst of material in my head, heart and study, and closing my eyes and not thinking at all.

Continue reading “Lost (and Believing in Found)” →

Tag: poetry

Unanswered Questions from Dinner with a Poet

Because there are all kinds of love poems

# of questions about creativity=many; answers=none

Blood-Red and Black/More on Creativity

Lost (and Believing in Found)