From a speech by Elizabeth Gilbert on creativity
"I had this encounter recently where I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone, who's now in her 90s, but she's been a poet her entire life and she told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet. She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, "run like hell." And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. And other times she wouldn't be fast enough, so she'd be running and running and running, and she wouldn't get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it "for another poet." And then there were these times -- this is the piece I never forgot -- she said that there were moments where she would almost miss it, right?So, she's running to the house and she's looking for the paper and the poem passes through her,and she grabs a pencil just as it's going through her, and then she said, it was like she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it.She would catch the poem by its tail, and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. And in these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact but backwards, from the last word to the first."
By Bud Koenemund
ReplyDeleteI never have to run to the house. :-) I always keep a pen and paper in my shirt pocket, next to my bed, in my car, and in the bathroom.
I never know when inspiration is coming, but I know when it hits me. Often, my Muse pokes me in the middle of the night. I'm asleep and I don't want to wake up, but she persists. She pokes my shoulder until I murmur and roll over. She always asks,"Are you awake?" And I say, "I am now."
Or, the words start banging around in my head. As they bang together, or hit the inside of my skull, they begin to create a rhythm (usually it becomes iambic pentameter).
Sometimes, an entire line hits my head, or a single word jumps out at me, or an idea falls out of a book or magazine or another poem.
I usually get hit with inspiration in unfortunate times when a pen and paper aren't handy...
ReplyDeleteIt is then when the muse runs through me, a if I were some tool for her creativity, and then the thoughts construct themselves as articulate prose in my mind...
I become desperate to cling on to it, to consume it entirely before it disintegrates.
It floats into me and through me. It saturates me.
I become one with it.
But only for a brief moment until they evaporate into an amorphous state and my ability to retain them in their beautiful form vanishes that instant.
I feel that as much as the poems chase me, I end up chasing them more.
We engage in a creative game of tag where sometime I win, and often not.
Creativity is an encounter: a little bit of me and a little bit of the other, wherever it originates from, enmeshed together for a brief instant at the horizon.