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.
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!
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!
Artistic imitation is something that many creatives have recognized is an important aspect of the creative process. Steve Jobs, for example, was apparently fond of saying,
Good artists copy; great artists steal.
Alfred Lord Tennyson, England’s Poet Laureate 1850-1892 Known for, among other famous words: “‘Tis better to have loved and lost/ Than never to have loved at all.”
This is a quote he attributed to Picasso. Actually, an English journalist named W.H. Davenport Adams said it much better in an 1892 article in “The Gentleman’s Magazine.” He was talking about the work of Alfred Lord Tennyson when he wrote:
Great poets imitate and improve, whereas small ones steal and spoil.
I had the opportunity to practice artistic imitation during National Poetry Month this past April. In a workshop led by poet and writing coach Sage Cohen, participants wrote a poem a day for 30 days. One of the exercises she had us do was to write a poem inspired by another poet, in this case Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day.” The lesson had to do with engaging the reader directly, as Oliver does with a question at the end of her poem. It also had to do with writing description at a fine, even micro-level of detail, something Oliver mastered in her career.
Coincidentally, a dear friend had just sent me a birthday greeting in the form of time lapse photography that showed the opening of different types of flowers. I absolutely love time lapse photography of flowers! Watching the video over and over, I delighted in the life of blossoms as we can never experience it with the naked eye.
So I got the idea to use that time lapse for the workshop exercise: I would describe the opening of a peony, in fine detail. And I would – what? Steal? Imitate? Improve? – Oliver’s question to the reader at the end of the poem, because I absolutely loved that question.
If I could summarize the process, this is how I’d describe creating my poem, “The Peony”:
Something caught my attention, in this case the time-lapse photography of opening blooms. For sheer enjoyment, I spent some time with it, took it in.
Paying closer attention to the images, I paused the video to observe the details of the flowers opening. I started jotting down some descriptive words.
I studied Mary Oliver’s poem for word choices, ideas she introduces, the pace of the poem. This was more a process of absorption rather than a technical analysis. I got a “feel” for her poem, since I’d decided to use it as a launching point for mine.
I drafted my poem (several times!) and found a suitable photo from my garden collection, which helped in the refinement of the words.
This list implies that creating is a linear process, which it is not! It’s more like a spiral, twisting around itself many times.
Once the poem was drafted, one of the members of my writer’s group pointed out to me that my question to the reader is not an exact copy of Oliver’s question. I had not realized that until she mentioned it! So also in the process of creating, it seems that some kind of alchemy re-molded Oliver’s words into my question, formed my way.
Maybe ‘alchemy’ is a better word than ‘imitation’ for what really happens. An artist absorbs what she thinks is fabulous from another artist, then molds something new in her own way.
What do you think about this? Is there really “nothing new under the sun”? Is this “artistic imitation” a legitimate aspect of the creative process, or thinly-disguised thievery? Here again are the two poems; if you like you can compare the two and see how one inspired the other. “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver. My poem, “The Peony.”
As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts. I hope you found something new to think about, through this latest peek “behind the scenes” into the creative process!
During April (National Poetry Month), I took a course with poet and author Sage Cohen, during which we wrote a poem a day for 30 days. For me, was an adventure in reading lots of poems and experimenting with different styles of poetry. But mostly I worked on honing the one skill that is key to any artist: different ways of looking.
It’s what artists do: examine an object, a person, an experience and ask questions like:
What does this make me think of?
What else does this look like/feel like/taste like/sound like? And probably the most important question:
What’s really going on here?
By looking at something in more than one way, a poet can open up a reader’s imagination, or offer a fresh interpretation. She can make connections the reader may not have thought of, or can probe more deeply into a specific aspect of life.
Continuing with our celebration of National Poetry Month, I’d like to take you behind the scenes and show you an example of how one particular poet (me!) went about creating a piece of what I call “Poetry Art.”
Step 1: The Photograph
Riviere la Peche
For me, the process usually begins with an image that I’ve captured with my camera. This is the Art part of my Poetry Art. For example, this little river in Wakefield, Quebec, caught my attention last year: rushing so fast it cut a line of movement through the frozen landscape. And I thought, “hmm.”
Step 2: Notes, Research and Scratching Out
I always start writing by hand, usually in pencil, making notes, jotting the phrases and feelings that come to me when I look at the picture, or that caused me to take the picture in the first place. In this case, you’ll see words like rush, tumble, foam, power… all words that I tried out, to find the ones best depicting what I saw and felt about the river. You’ll also see some dates and names as part of the notes. I researched the Mill at Wakefield and found out when the village was established, because I knew I wanted this poem grounded in history. My rough notes are here.
What followed was a lot of scratching out and playing with word placement as I worked towards saying what I wanted to say with this poem. Once the writing starts to flow, I usually switch to the keyboard, since I can type faster than I can write. That’s where I work out the first draft.
Step 3: Critique
I’ve had the great fortune to work closely with two excellent writers for over a decade now. Lynn, Jen and I work hard to help each other be the best writers we can be, and I don’t publish anything (except blog posts) without getting their input first. Here you can see their suggestions for this poem.
Step 4: Editing and Compression
A different example of compression!
Based on the input from my writers’ group, I then rework the poem. I pay particular attention to removing rather than adding words. Poetry is an art form that conveys much in few words, and I love this challenge! Poetry also evokes emotion and visuals in the reader’s mind through the use of the right words. Poets (me included) spend a lot of time finding the right words. In this poem, for example, I thought hard about the use of realize versus understand, finally settling on realize. This was important, because I wanted to convey there had been an epiphany of sorts on the part of the narrator, as she stood on the bridge at the top of the dam.
Step 5: Photo Edit
Finally, I need to ensure that I’m happy with the composition of the photo that will accompany the poem. I actually took over half a dozen shots from the bridge. I chose the above shot, but cropped it so that the tree forms a kind of border on the right hand side of the frame.
