| |

STILL GROWING (and a draw for you to enter!)

ByLee Ann

Getting Inspired by Growth

Hello there!

In this post, I’d like to turn your attention for a moment away from the havoc Nature has been inflicting across the continent: drought, floods, relentless heatwaves, wildfires… I think that sometimes, after we’ve done whatever we can for those in peril, we need to refresh by pulling our focus inward, closer to home. In my backyard this season, plants are especially large and lush; overall, it seems to me to have been one of those glory years for my garden. Is it the same in your neighbourhood?

Bounty from my backyard in August

And there is more growth and beauty to come! Autumn already hints at her arrival with the cooler nights of September, bringing the first tinges of colour to the maple trees at my cottage property. When I can keep my gaze out of the headlines and focus on my own personal landscape, the feeling is of happy anticipation for the fall season: blazing leaf colour (not actual flames); fresh, crisp air (instead of wilting heat); fall’s bountiful harvests (versus devastating losses.) Summer may be over, but there’s still plenty of potential with the fall season!

All this reminds me of something the English novelist Mary Ann Evans (writing as George Eliot) famously wrote:

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”

Isn’t that fabulous? (Can you think of something this might inspire you to try?)

I’ve been inspired lately along these lines, and I’m excited to share some things that I think reflect what Evans/Eliot was talking about:

  1. My latest Poetry Art, “Still Growing”. A reminder of what can happen in our glorious “autumn years”!
  2. My new feature: Gardening Advice for Your Own Backyard. There’s a timely article available for you, “What to Do and Not Do in the Fall Garden.”
  3. A free event: I’ll be reading some poetry at the League of Canadian Poets New Member Reading, Thursday, November 9, 7:30-8:30pm., EST. This is an online event and you can get a free ticket here.
  4. Most exciting is this newly transformed website, packed with offerings, new information, free resources, plus a shop where you can buy my books and artwork. Click on my name above to get to the home page, take a look around and do let me know what you think!

Enter to Win!

To celebrate new growth and the new website, I’m having a draw! Let me know your favourite thing about the redesigned site (layout? features? Blog?) In particular, what would you would like to see more of from me here? Which of the “Creative Works” are you most interested in? I would love your feedback.

Contact me with your thoughts and I’ll enter your name into a draw for a chance to win one of my Poetry Art chapbooks. There are three to choose from – you’ll find out all about them under “Books”.

Deadline to enter is October 1, 2023. Have fun and remember when you contact me with your entry, to tell me which chapbook you would like when you win!

Good luck everyone – and may we all keep growing with the help of strong feedback!

Lee Ann

|

ART FROM REAL LIFE

ByLee Ann
This entry is part 9 of 11 in the series The Creative Process Unmasked
Homework: spinach. Artistic inspiration?

I’ve been thinking lately that I have nothing to write about. This winter I’ve been sick. I injured my back from coughing so hard when I was sick. I’ve been taking a horticulture course at U Guelph, and I’ve been writing for other people. In other words, no artistic inspiration in my real life!

Luckily a friend alerted me to an online poetry course given by Governor General Award-winning poet Lorna Crozier (thanks, M2!) And the very first lesson in that course reminded me that real life – in all its pain and all its glory – inspires any artist who takes the time to observe.

Observing is a skill, and it’s a critical part of the creative process. Turns out, I did not have to look beyond what has been happening in my real life to be inspired. We received two prompts in this lesson. One was to write from a line in a poem called “Peaches” by Peter Davison:

a mouthful of language to swallow

What a great line, I wish I had written it! But I did write from it, which is just as great. The second prompt was to write what’s called an “apostrophe” poem. That’s a poem addressed to an animal, an inanimate object, an idea, or a person who is absent. I did not have to look far to find what I wanted to address.

So there you have it. Often real life does provide the source for inspiration. It’s right there if only we look closely.

Winter beauty: a gift of the season! And may be artistic inspiration as well.

Why not try it yourself? Observing, I mean. What do you see/hear/feel when you take the time to observe what is happening in your own real life? You may not arrive at a new poem, but I’m betting you will benefit. May you gain some insight, recognize the gifts of this current life phase, or at the very least, enjoy immersing yourself in the beauty that is unique to the winter season.

Meanwhile, please enjoy the two poems I created directly from my real life. “A Mouthful of Language to Swallow” and “To the Muscles Surrounding my L2 to L5 Vertebrae.”

Lee Ann

|

WHEN “I” DOESN’T MEAN “ME”: Lesson #1 From My Latest Poem

ByLee Ann
This entry is part 8 of 11 in the series The Creative Process Unmasked

It’s easy to assume that when a writer uses the first person in a poem or story, the “I” she’s referring to is herself. Not so! Well, sometimes it’s so, but more often than not the writer has made a creative choice, and there are many different reasons to decide to write something in the first person. This decision is a big part of the creative process.

Here’s an example: a poem I recently wrote with a first-person narrator. Click here to read it; I’ll wait while you do that.

waiting patiently while you read

What’s Real and What’s Not

OK, welcome back! Now, a number of people have told me how interested they were to read about my grandmother and the experience I described from childhood. The thing is, I had no such grandmother and no such experience. In fact, the entire back yard scene was conjured up by my imagination during a “free write” session in a poetry workshop. I saw the scene clearly in my mind and wrote it down, up to the point where the young girl is trailing after the tall, muttering old woman. Certain elements – the rooftops, the clothesline – matched my actual grandmother’s back yard. Beyond that, the key elements – the sniffing, the predictions, even the wicker basket – all made up.

My Mimi’s clothesline did not look like this

I actually decided to make this a first-person narrator because first-person is the best way to give readers direct, unfiltered access to what’s going on inside a character’s head. The character herself is telling the story, not a separate narrator once removed. It’s more immediate than if I’d written “she set out to practice”, or “she learned”. Try replacing “I” with “she” when re-reading the poem, and see if you agree.

Time to Marinate

When I wrote the scene, I knew I wanted to expand it into something, but I didn’t know exactly what. So I filed the scene away and didn’t look at it again for over six months. The creative process involves a lot of marinating. I’ve written about this already in this series: draft versions take time to develop into a finished product. They benefit from being set aside for a while. In this case, when I read the scene again with the fresh eyes that six months’ distance gave me, I immediately started to wonder about how this young girl character might respond to her grandmother and this power. Which led me to the second half of the poem, and the decision to use a first-person narrator.

“Rain’s coming,” she’d say.

In the next installment of this series, I’ll write some more about the second half of the poem, as I continue to “unmask” the creative process for you. Meanwhile, remember: beware the temptation to assume that the use of “I” in a story or poem means the writer is writing about herself! It’s a choice she makes as part of the creative process.

Lee Ann

|

PERSPECTIVE

ByLee Ann
This entry is part 7 of 11 in the series The Creative Process Unmasked

The creative process has a lot to do with perspective. I was reminded of this a couple of years ago when I went to a painting party. Over a few hours, an artist showed a group of us how to create a simple painting of a sailboat at night. No two pieces of art, even though they represented the same subject, were the same. Each nascent artist brought a specific perspective when creating their painting.

Of course, an artist’s skill level also plays a role in the resulting piece. Do you know the most important skill any artist needs to hone? Observation.

Keen observation: the building block of artistic perspective!

Think about it. Even in the context of the painting party, each person’s ability to observe – the interrelation of the boat’s parts, how parallel lines converging give the illusion of depth and distance – in large part determined the success of the final product.

Observation + Perspective = Art

Poet and author Molly Peacock goes so far as to say that a poet’s skills are “noticing and comparing one thing to another.” She says a poet must become “an expert in observing.” I think this goes for all artists, whether their medium is poetry or dance, painting or song.

What an artist notices and what they think about that is the heart of any piece of artwork. If an artist is very skilled at observing and then expressing from their observations – well, they’ll have endless creative output! Plus, a skilled artist often brings to us new insight via their work.

If you want to read a delightful example of observation and perspective, look for American poet Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s book, The Old Woman, the Tulip and the Dog (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014). It’s a collection of over 30 different poems, each written from three perspectives: that of an old woman, a tulip, and a dog.

Meanwhile, why not try practicing keen observation of what is in your world? Notice what you notice! Then express it somehow, even in a post-it note that you stick on your monitor. You just might begin to awaken your inner artist!

Until next time, here is my tribute to Ostriker: “Aging from Three Perspectives”.

Lee Ann

TAKING A SHOT

ByLee Ann

I don’t often use sports metaphors. I’m more of a face-in-a-book, dreamy, poem-writing type. But recently, I was sorting through a number of poems I’ve been working on and I decided I wanted to “do something” with a few of them. They didn’t suit being turned into Poetry Art – they were either too long, or didn’t have a suitable photo – so I decided to enter a poetry contest.

The Canadian Authors Association National Capital Region runs a contest every year; I’ve entered before, but not for quite a while. When I noticed this year’s judge was a poet I admire – Governor General Award winner Lorna Crozier – I started picking and polishing what I thought were my three best.

And I took a shot.

And here’s where the sports metaphor comes in.

You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

Canadian hockey great Wayne Gretzky

What is not often quoted is what he said right after this:

… even though there is only a one to five percent possibility of scoring.

Here’s the thing. I felt a bloom of pride when I did the work, decided the work was worthy of a shot, and made the effort to submit. Even though this is a contest open to poets across the country, which made the possibility of my poems “scoring” one of the top three prizes about the same as Gretzky’s chance of scoring a goal.

But that’s OK. I picked and polished and submitted anyway. And I tell you: that bloom of pride is something to aspire to, something very worthwhile.

As it turned out, Canadian Authors notified me that one of my poems was shortlisted: one of six poems selected by Crozier as finalists. It went on to win second place in the contest.

This, of course, is a very big deal for me as a writer! I wanted to share my delight with you, yes. But more than that, I wanted to describe to you that blooming sense of pride that comes from doing the work – whatever that means to you – believing in the work, and taking one step towards making whatever you’ve worked on even bigger than it already is. I wanted to remind you to take the shot.

Do it!

Lee Ann

P.S. Thank you for your patience as we sorted out the lost subscriber list! If you are reading this, you don’t need to do anything to “re-subscribe,” you’re in!

If you had unsubscribed from my site in the past and suddenly got notification of this new post, my apologies; we had to cobble together a new list from past ones, so you inadvertently got re-subscribed. Of course, I’d love it if you stayed with me, but if you prefer, you can easily unsubscribe by clicking at the bottom of the email notice you received about this post. I’m truly sorry to see you go.

| |

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

ByLee Ann
This entry is part 5 of 11 in the series The Creative Process Unmasked

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