SIGNS OF SPRING and A GENTLE MANIFESTO

ByLee Ann

Hello again! It’s been awhile…

As you know (my faithful followers!) I am on a mission: to find, photograph, and be inspired to write from the beauty in my everyday world. Through this, I hope to provide a small respite for you, a moment of calm and inspiration in the form of pictures and words.

First bloom soon!

This is not a new mission; I’ve been doing that and sharing the resulting Poetry Art on this site and at the owaa Art Gallery in Ottawa for years. Yet somehow, here and now in April of 2022, I find myself needing to review and renew my commitment to this mission. Chalk it up to a particularly dark, cold winter season – and I’m not talking weather. COVID-19 lingers. Ottawa is still feeling the effects of February’s 24-day occupation of the city. War escalates in Ukraine with terrifying implications.

All events that affect you and me and that we have very little influence on. A terrible feeling, yes? One that I find has crept over me like some kind of sinister spell this winter, causing me to lose faith in my belief in all things lovely and good in the world. Maybe this is how you’ve been feeling too. I hope not! But in any case, upon review, I’ve decided to renew my commitment to my mission. And further, I’ve decided that my recommitment will take the form of:

Morning Light
  • taking 10 new photos of beauty in my neighbourhood during the month of April (some of which are here in this post!)
  • exploring new options for sharing my Poetry Art (stay tuned for updates), and
  • posting more regularly on this site. I’ve missed doing so and want to provide you with some fresh, new, positive content that reaffirms there’s beauty in people, and in the world.

This month’s Poetry Art has taken the form of a gentle manifesto as I move ahead with renewed energy. I want to remind us that, like the arrival of spring every year, beauty is real and can be counted on.

Here’s I Lost My Rose-Coloured Glasses. As always, I’d love to hear your feedback!

May your spring season be full of the lovely and the good.

Lee Ann

Spring Migration at Sunset

CREATIVE SPARKS

ByLee Ann

The creative process is often triggered in surprising ways! Did you know that artists’ inspirations – their “creative sparks” – regularly come from outside their own genre? Here are some examples of what I mean:

  • American dancer and choreographer Martha Graham designed ballets inspired by a wide variety of stimuli. These included modern painting, the American frontier, religious ceremonies of Native Americans, and Greek mythology.
  • In 1975, musical group The Bee Gees’ first big disco hit, “Jive Talkin’” was born of the rhythmic sound of their car wheels rolling along a bridge over Biscayne Bay, Florida.
  • Architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s favourite muse was Mother Nature. His entire body of work focussed on integrating human-made structures into the natural world. He took his inspiration from the surrounding environment and created beautiful, innovative buildings. They not only fit into, but also echoed key elements of their settings.
Fallingwater by Frank Lloyd Wright

Music as Creative Spark

Music is probably as big an influencer of art as Nature. A 1993 study coined “The Mozart Effect” went so far as to say you could improve your creativity by listening to the piano concerti of Mozart. Whether that’s true or not is under debate. Yet maybe a little background Wolfgang couldn’t hurt, right?
A few years ago I had the experience of being quite transported by a jazz performance. Has this ever happened to you? Music takes you to a different place or time – beyond simple memory to a place where Truth is found. Music has the power to do that. As a creative, my genre is words, so in response to my experience I created a poem sparked by that music. To complete my piece of “Poetry Art”, I then took a photograph to enhance the poem.
So I’ll leave you with this personal example of how an artist’s inspiration comes from outside her genre. As always, I’d love to hear what you think!
Here is “Summertime.”
Lee Ann

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THE CREATIVE PROCESS, PART 5: How Confinement Can Expand Creative Expression

ByLee Ann

COVID has taught us something that I think relates to the creative process: being confined can lead to greater creative expression. We can’t get together with friends for dinner, so we sign up together for an interactive cooking class online. We have to wear masks everywhere we go, so we find some fabric that makes a statement or makes us smile. Europe is out of bounds, so we discover new places we didn’t know existed, right in our own neighbourhoods. This is how, in the pandemic world, confinement can lead to new creativity.

I am a poet whose typical style is free verse. By definition unstructured, free verse has few rules beyond those that relate to good writing. But sometimes I feel the need for a poetic structure with very specific rules. Surprisingly, it’s that very restriction that can expand the creative expression in a poem.

There are so many forms of structured verse that entire fine arts graduate courses are taught on this. Structure can be found in rhythm, in rhyming sequences and in the number of lines or stanzas in a poem, to name a few.

How Shakespeare Did It

For example, Shakespeare’s preferred rhythm structure is what is known as iambic pentameter. The best way to think of iambic pentameter is that it’s like a heartbeat. It goes like this: da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM. Here’s one of Shakespeare’s more famous lines in iambic pentameter (see if you can get the rhythm structure):

If music be the food of love, play on.

William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

Nice, eh? Shakespeare, of course, was a master of rhythm, using its structure to help express all kinds of different emotions.

When Every Syllable Counts

Haiku is a structure that consists of three lines, the first line with five syllables, the second line seven syllables, the third line five syllables. Here’s one that I wrote after my dad passed away:

LAMENT FOR MY DAD IN HAIKU FORMAT
We always ended
phone calls the same way. Now, for
all time: “love you, ‘bye.”

From the straightjacket of those three lines can come very big thoughts and emotion.

Repeating Lines

When I started writing my most recent COVID poem, I was feeling the squeeze of Ontario’s latest stay-at-home order. The first draft was in my usual free verse, but I was unhappy with the result. It did not convey the constriction I wanted to express, so I turned to structured verse. A pantoum uses four-line stanzas in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza serve as the first and third lines of the next stanza. The last line of a pantoum is often the same as the first.

Demanding? Yes. Constricting? Actually, no! I found that pantoum’s structure itself provided the sense of restriction I was feeling. That sense became an integral part of the poem, without me having to spell it out. So, structure allowed me to expand the creative expression in the poem, beyond what I could have done with free verse. This is how, in poetry, confinement can lead to new creativity.

I hope you’re finding innovative ways to live within the restrictions of COVID. Maybe this structured poem will help you to appreciate how sometimes, being confined can lead to greater creative expression. Here’s Hope and Chaos; I’d love to know what you think!

Lee Ann

SPRING AND ITS PROMISES

ByLee Ann

Hello there!

How are you doing, one year “in”? What’s been your saving grace, your favourite coping mechanism, your way of living differently?

For me, the answer to all three of those things is: SPRING. This season always feels like my saving grace, with its birdsong and blooms, this year more than ever, of course. My favourite coping mechanism is getting outside and getting my hands and knees into the soil, and after last week’s snowy setback, I’m happily digging and pruning. Plus Spring offers a wonderful way of living differently than the way I did in winter. Lighter coats, longer evenings, stronger sunlight, all welcome!

Some spring blossoms I found in my neighbourhood

I am both inspired and reassured by nature’s return to new growth. Reminds me that, as with winter, this too shall pass. So instead of offering a poem about COVID, I want to provide you with a springtime respite in the form of a photo and some words in honour of this, my favourite season.

May you find a little relief in Spring Promises.

Lee Ann

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THE CREATIVE PROCESS UNMASKED: Part 4, Rest Time

ByLee Ann

Hello there! I hope 2021 has been good to you so far. It’s winter time in my part of the world. To respect that, I am allowing myself a season of rest. That doesn’t mean doing nothing! But it does acknowledge the natural rhythm of the seasons. Winter is a time when energy levels are naturally a little lower, and hibernation is the theme. The winter season also reminds me of the value of rest time in the creative process.

My garden at rest, January 11, 2021

Issues With the Freshly Written

You may remember that last year I wrote several pandemic poems. (Maybe one or more of them struck a chord with you. Maybe they help you express what you might be feeling during the isolation. I hope so.) I had the opportunity to look again at these poems in November, when The Ontario Poetry Society held a Pandemic Poetry Contest. Well, I learned anew the importance of letting something newly-created rest for awhile before proceeding.

One poem in particular stood out. I had struggled with the ending of “Reframing the View” when I first wrote it. I wanted to lead the reader to a conclusion, but not dictate that conclusion, allowing each person to look at the accompanying photo and decide for themselves what they saw. This is always a challenge for a writer. You want to respect the reader’s intelligence by not spelling everything out and giving her a figurative hit-over-the-head. Yet readers do appreciate being led towards the writer’s intent and/or what they might conclude.

My writers’ group members (the insightful Lynn and Jen) told me the poem did not lead the reader quite far enough. Neither of them were entirely sure what they “got” from looking at the photo after reading the poem. When I looked again at the poem with several months’ distance to sharpen my view, I saw they were absolutely right as usual! And more to the point, I knew what I needed to write in order to fix the problem, which I couldn’t see when the poem was freshly written.

Why Artists “Let it Rest”

This is something that seasoned writers know well: to put something aside for a period of time, especially if it’s not working. That rest period will sharpen the general sense of unease and expose the specific flaws. More importantly, that time away will often result in the writer realizing what it will take to create a much finer piece… and by that I mean one that readers can respond to more strongly. And that connection is what every artist is striving for.

“Reframing the View” now leads the reader more directly. It also has a more structured “poetic turn” at the end. This is a technical term that poet Kim Addonicio describes as: “picks the reader up in one place and drops them off somewhere else.”

I’d love to hear what you think. Do you have a preference for one version over the other? Do you like poetic turns as much as I do? Were you surprised to learn about the value of rest time in the creative process?

By the way, “Reframing the View” (the words without the photo) was awarded an Honourable Mention in the Pandemic Poetry Contest and will be published in an upcoming anthology. Further encouragement for me to remember the importance of rest!

May this season’s slower pace help refresh you.

Lee Ann

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WHAT IS POETRY FOR?

ByLee Ann

This month’s post was going to be a few paragraphs to answer the question, “what is poetry for?” This is also the subject of this month’s poem, and after trying several times to write some paragraphs, I decided that my best answer to the question is in the poem itself. So here it is.

My other answer to “what is poetry for?” is more personal. Although I am the published author of historical non-fiction books, short stories and magazine articles, poetry is my first love and focus. It’s how I express. It’s what I turn to, to figure things out. It’s how I respond to my world, both internal and external.

Billie Holiday

Here’s a recent example. As I grind on and on coping with COVID (along with the entire world) I found myself putting my feelings into a new pandemic poem. This one is a bit different than the ones I wrote when the crisis was newly upon us. This one is a blues poem. Yes! There is such a thing as a blues poem. Like the musical genre, this form has its origins in the American Black experience. It has as its structure two repeating lines, then a third line, all with end-rhymes. Sorrow and heartache are staples in terms of content, but so is triumph over adversity and sometimes even humour.

I offer this to you today as part of my answer to “what is poetry for?” If it expresses some of what you are feeling too, or what you’ve experienced too, or what you might want to say to explain what it is like to live in these times… well, then, there’s your answer!

Here’s The New-Normal Blues. Hope it helps.

Lee Ann