We asked the poets to write an ode to the creative process.
I tell the poets, Coo-coo-crazy when they ask how I’ve been. They imagine fireworks but it’s more like money on fire on the front porch. Summer in the city means silk and a fever, means hope flammable and spaghetti strap patience, means hot air gassing up the world like an air mattress and running out of steam, energy that inflates. I’m talking about time and what we give our life too. Is it art? Can we find the time? I’ve been distracted lately, am distracted even now; the way we sometimes fade away.
I was right there next to you, glittering Wednesday children, but it wasn’t all of me. I was feeling edgy, toes off the rocks, tip of my tongue. The heat is stagnant today in our city. The locals are feeling landlocked and sweating it out in the book bar. Holy air conditioning, poets made of salt.
In the summer, everyone runs a little late and no one is mad at it. The Wizard does my homework for me and I rest for a little in the palm of their hand, chipped black nail polish. It has been difficult to commit to focus this month. I’m wound up in worry again and working through it. Even so, the Workshop was a light I needed to see. I had been looking forward to hearing about how everyone else had been doing, prioritizing their words over mine, their worlds over whatever I wake up in, words sprouting up from the concrete of our city w/ a different point of view.
The prompt this month was plucked from a moment of curiosity reclaiming doubt, a moment of complexity w/ our craft, of our altars under construction, everything under construction really. We asked the poets to write an ode to the creative process, whatever it was to them. We dropped it in the river. The river carried the artists. The artists were fearless and we made room.
Some folk’s relationships to their process are sexier than mine, some are more elusive, some are tethered to outside things and some live strictly w/in the body, some are free free free. Figures, this is the part of me that has wings, flapping and getting tired over the ocean.
I observe my process through my moods and what they make me do. I write about it intermittently but it’s a long study, this animal still molting. Now, when it feels as though I am running low on time and low on faith, I am humbled by what my community brings me.
The list moved quickly but everyone in the room signed up and read one by one. There was so much catching up and calling in, so much bravery in good company. Our little room downtown that reads us back to ourselves and lights little fires. Joan’s photos were still up on display and the chairs all pulled together. We found our words and left our mark, legs that stretch tall before the microphone and eyes that spiral and swirl while we listen, witnessing what we so often keep private. The poets brought their messes here and we marveled together at only what they could create, everyone experiencing the present together, inspired and incomplete.
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I N T H E R E C O R D I N G
Apologies for any stray sounds in the recording - the refrigerator staying cold, my cat snoring in my lap, a dog passing by.
I wanted to read the Pablo Neruda poem that Benjamine chose to open the show w/. I think mostly they wanted to read this one because it resonated w/ them for soandso suchandsuch personal reasons but poetry is powerful and important for the sake that it can be interpreted wildly and used eternally. I value the perspective that the creative process is a breaking thing. That destruction is inherent and creation is compulsive. That creativity lives beside us and colors our experiences Once the dust has settled, the Earth is responsible for what follows. In this Neruda poem, the sea reconstructs the broken bits. In the case of art and creation, art changes the world and the world changes the art (we know this one).
When we were first discussing this month’s prompt, Benjamine was feeling uncertain w/ their writing process, at least, that’s how it was presented to me. I was open to diverting to a different prompt but we pushed forward and Benjamine whipped up this beauty. There is frustration lying w/in it, though I would argue the frustration lies not so much w/in the creative process itself but surrounded by where it is meant to go, what art is meant to achieve, what poets and artists are meant to aspire to - ceremonies and awards and scholastic praise, and the disconnect between that and allowing the making to take over, the honest expression wrangled to the surface. It is a very vulnerable thing that seems not to have any good home, and as artists, in order to maintain the practice, we buy in, betting on something that could never be complete.
I pulled prose from my past and created a patchwork poem, a riddling thing, my ode overgrown. I started writing where I have been writing lately: half asleep in my driver’s seat, 2 AM in my driveway, sitting w/ myself. Then I thought of how writing has saved me, tried to imagine what I would be w/out it but didn’t linger there long. The bubbling thing that lets me feel free unto the nights and days of a city I can’t afford. And hope, always hope in creation. I put myself to bed, my own words on my lips.
I was seriously tempted to cut this piece down to simply the last segment, the parenthetical verse. It’s vague and earthy but ultimately, I was touching on the unpredictability and preciousness of a creative spirit. Creativity, something that grows and grows, that was dreamt up one night or sent to us one sunny day. At times, it feels like I have to surrender to it and other times I have to prune it back, cut flowers and meditate on them while they die or lay face down in the dirt like I can become the essence of creation and that will be enough. I don’t know what’s worth harvesting, my creative process says, All of it all the time, it says, Catch up, you’re running our of time, it says, This is what you were made for.
I remember when I wrote, desire asleep in doubt and felt like I finally got my hands around it. The strangling thing that doubt can be. The strange, arcane thing that creativity can be. Growing and dying, growing and dying, the same vine under the same sun soaking in the same nutrients, how some ideas last all season and some dry up before their time. When we are open and trusting, inspiration can be perennial.
I came to the seventh workshop caged and clinging to my trellis - my friends and my inconsistent body of work, this body tired of work, this body determinedly trying to work. I am happy w/ the poem I constructed but it will not read this way forever. It is owed a revisit and a kinder touch, one only the end of a season can guide along. I look forward to next month when we can mock the refresh. I anticipate cutting back the leaves and seeing my community shine w/ me.
Thank you poets, for showing up exactly how you are at the capacity you are able to. I tend to forget that The Wizard and I are “leading” this Workshop, as it feels so much more collaborative than that. From where I stand before you in the corner of the book bar in the West End of our summer city, I have my late blooms as much as any of you. Thank you for growing, here.
✺ In the spirit of the Internet, if anyone would like to participate virtually in the Workshop to some degree, be sure to follow Portland Poets Society on instagram and please get in touch w/ me somehow and we can develop that together.
The Workshop VII