Creative Process

Artist: Duy Huynh

Here an essay about the necessity of embracing the unknown as part of the Creative Process: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/04/virginia-woolf-darkness-embracing-the-inexplicable.html

In honor of National Poetry Month: New York in Haiku. If anyone has a haiku about Fairfield, please post below in the comments! http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/27/nyregion/new-york-city-in-haiku.html?hp&_r=0

And here a share by Jeanette: Elizabeth Gilbert on TED: “Success, failure, and the drive to keep creating”:

Tamara’s Share

Tamara’s Share, “Vincent” or “Starry Night” by Don McLean:

Creativity Log Template Downloadable Here

Dear Students,

I emailed you all the Creativity Log template twice, but some of you have reported not receiving it. Here a link where you can download the template. We’ll discuss further on Monday morning.

You can download the Creativity Log Template here, and you can fill it out like a questionnaire, so that you cannot miss anything:
CREATIVITY LOGQuestionnaire’14

Photo: Conner Carey

IF YOU HAVE TROUBLE DOWNLOADING THE ABOVE TEMPLATE, TRY THIS VERSION, WHICH IS DOC INSTEAD OF DOCX: CREATIVITY LOGQuestionnaire’14

The Ars Poetica

Poesia

The Ars Poeticais the a poem about the art of writing a poem–since only the language of poetry itself is subtle enough to touch upon the unspeakable creative process of writing.

“Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.”–Paul Engle

Ars Poetica
by Archibald MacLeish

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown –

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind –

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs

A poem should be equal to:
Not true

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea –

A poem should not mean
But be

Infant Joy Blake

Introduction to Poetry
By Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Blake

And one by former student Leah Waller:

Where Is My Poem: Ars Poetica

Where is my poem?
I must have been too needy for him.
I demanded that we spend every evening together,
so one day he said that he was going out
for a pack of smokes
and never came back.

I saw him in a dance club months later
flirting with other poets
and he looked so good-
lines cut in a sharp buzz,
his images even more direct and clear.
A cigar stuck in his mouth
like a fork in a pie
as he cleanly told me
he was done.

I stood on the other side of the glass
watching him dance with the other poets.
He saw me and, feeling guilty,
put on his black fedora
and came out into the street light.
He said, “What do you want?
Can’t you see I’m busy?”
I said, “I came for my passion,
hand it over, and we’ll be done here.”
He placed it in my hands
wrapped in a small couplet.
But no sooner had he touched me
than he wanted more.
He held me in iambic pentameter,
tangled my hair into simile and metaphor.
He kissed me uncontrollably.
Wet lips pulsing stanza after stanza,
he filled my page.
Then he pulled away,
went back inside to dance with the other poets.
leaving me
with only
a page of words.
–published in Under the Cedar Tree (First World Publishing)

The Gift
by Chard deNiord

In memory of Ruth Stone (June 8th, 1915-November 19th, 2011)

“All I did was write them down
wherever I was at the time, hanging
laundry, baking bread, driving to Illinois.
My name was attached to them
on the page but not in my head
because the bird I listened to outside
my window said I couldn’t complain
about the blank in place of my name
if I wished to hold both ends of the wire
like a wire and continue to sing instead
of complain. It was my plight, my thorn,
my gift-the one word in three I was
permitted to call it by the Muse who took
mercy on me as long as I didn’t explain.”
Poem a Day

Live from Prairie Lights

Praire Lights Bookstore • 15 South Dubuque St. • Iowa City, IA 52240 • 319-337-2681 • 800-295-BOOK • Open 9:00 a.m. daily

“Live from Prairie Lights,” held at Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City, is an internationally known readings series, which features some of the best up-and-coming and well-established authors & poets from all over the globe. Presented before a live audience and streamed over the world wide web, this long running series brings the spoken word from the bookstore to the masses.Most readings begin @ 7:00 p.m. Arrive early to assure yourself a seat. Link to the upcoming readings:
Live at Prairie Lights upcoming readings

The University of Iowa is home to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, one of the most highly regarded graduate Creative Writing programs in the country. As a result, many distinguished as well as up-and-coming authors and poets come to Iowa City to give readings, usually at Prairie Lights downtown or at the Shambaugh Auditorium on campus. The Virtual Writing University Archive, featuring hundreds of audio and video recordings of emerging and renowned writers from around the world, documents the history of writing at The University of Iowa and its surrounding community. The collection is continuously updated with recordings from local readings. The project, founded by Jim Elmborg of the School of Library and Information Science (SLIS), is a collaborative effort between SLIS and the Virtual Writing University.

Writing University Virtual Writing Library ARCHIVE:
Writing University Archive

The Writing University live streams many of our readings here.

The Live from Prairie Lights audio archive is available here.

Iowa City PATV has a video archive of readings located here.

A Muse Box Filled with Musings

One type of shrine you can make is a Muse box filled with musings:

Erato Muse of Poetry, 1870

Your Muse Box is for collecting scraps, letters, photos, magazine pictures that remind you of things you know, drawings and sketches, objects that remind you of things you want to write about, ideas, lists, mementos, and anything else you can possibly think of that might stir your memory as you begin to think about your portfolio. You can even include letters to your Muse (your very own “genius” as Elizabeth Gilbert calls it), notes to yourself or the universe–truly whatever you want and whatever inspires you, especially random things that don’t fit in the confines of a notebook or journal or items that you haven’t yet sorted for your journal. Collecting scraps for inspiration–either in boxes or books–has been a long-standing literary tradition, especially on this continent. Here the literary examples of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain:

From Christopher Benfey, “Scrapbook Nation”: NYBooks Scrapbook Nation, a blog reflection on Ellen Gruber Garvey’s Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance

A scrapbook advertisement from The New York Herald, December 11, 1876

Garvey notes that Whitman and Dickinson “were not poets that Civil War scrapbook makers sought with their scissors.” True enough, and yet both poets extended what might be called the scrapbook culture of the nineteenth century in new and surprising aesthetic directions. A newspaperman by trade, Whitman wrote capacious poems that Emerson characterized as a hybrid of the Bhagavad Gita and the New York Herald. Like a reporter assigned to the Metro desk, Whitman proclaimed:

This is the city… and I am one of the citizens;
Whatever interests the rest interests me… politics, churches, newspapers, schools
Benevolent societies, improvements, banks, tariffs, steamships…

Whitman’s Specimen Days, which he described as “the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed,” is a moving scrapbook of clippings and jottings from the whole span of his life, including his years as a volunteer nurse in Union hospitals. While conceding that “the real war will never get into the books,” in Specimen Days Whitman tried to get at what he called the “interior history” of the war. Unlike more conventional scrapbookers with their impersonal digests of clippings from the distant battlefront, Whitman (who famously boasted, “I am large. I contain multitudes”) wrote himself into the proceedings. Sitting at the bedside of a young Irish boy, asleep, with a bullet hole through his lung, Whitman wrote that the boy

suddenly, without the least start, awaken’d, open’d his eyes, gave me a long steady look, turning his face very slightly to gaze easier—one long, clear, silent look—a slight sigh—then turn’d back and went into his doze again. Little he knew, poor death-stricken boy, the heart of the stranger that hover’d near.

A hyperactive cutter and paster, Emily Dickinson also repurposed scraps and clippings for original creative work, shifting—like Whitman, or perhaps like ambitious Facebook compilers today—from consumer to producer. Late in life, she wrote dazzling fragments of verse and prose on discarded envelopes, chocolate wrappers, and stray bits clipped from magazines and newspapers. These scraps functioned as something more than convenient notepads, encouraging spur-of-the-moment poetic spontaneity and the creative challenge of fitting stray thoughts to odd shapes of paper.

She wrote poems about birds on the twin wings of envelopes and poems about houses across the roof-like flap. (These fascinating creations were recently published in limited-edition facsimile as The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope-Poems, with a list price of $3,500.) At times, she seems to be venturing into some new concept of poetry as visual art, as when she enigmatically deploys a serpentine poem about encountering a spider in an outhouse or a prison (“Alone and in a Circumstance / Reluctant to be told / A spider on my reticence / Assiduously crawled”) around a passage clipped from a review of George Sand and a postage stamp with an image of a train.

Photo: Emily Dickinson Collection/Amherst College

(…) Mark Twain was perhaps the king of American scrapbook culture. According to the OED, he was the first writer to use “scrapbook” as a verb, writing in 1881 about the origins of his book A Tramp Abroad, “I scrap-booked these reports during several months.” Prolific in inventing ways to lose money, especially in his attempts to predict how books would be published in the future (not, he found to his chagrin, with type fashioned from clay), Twain successfully marketed his own patented design for a more efficient scrapbook, outfitted with no-muss adhesive pages and an index awaiting entries. Twain’s scrapbook can be seen as the ancestor of the lavish “Keeping Memories Alive” scrapbook industry today, with its glitter and fluff and hobby stores, and, incidentally, its more recent origins in the genealogy-affirmative Mormon community. “For members of the Church,” as a Mormon website puts it, “creating memory books seemed to come naturally.”’

Twain, as befitted his pen name, was ambivalent about scrapbooks. In Huckleberry Finn, he lambasted the necrophilic scrapbook of the amateur poet Emmeline Grangerford, filled with “obituaries and accidents and cases of patient suffering” along with her own morbid contributions—including, in one of Twain’s most inspired satirical creations, stanzas like this:

Despised love struck not with woe
That head of curly knots,
Nor stomach troubles laid him low,
Young Stephen Dowling Bots.

[In Victorian times, many women especially collected scrapbooks filled with obituaries and other morbid memorabilia.]

Page of Twain’s Scrapbook

And yet, Twain’s loose and baggy non-fiction books Roughing It, The Innocents Abroad, and A Tramp Abroad were assembled from his own carefully maintained travel scrapbooks, and retain some of the pleasingly serendipitous and fragmented feel of life on the road. “Anyone may compose a scrapbook, and offer it to the public with nothing like Mark Twain’s good-fortune,” as his friend William Dean Howells wryly observed. “Everything seems to depend upon the nature of the scraps, after all.”

Ellen Gruber Harvey’s Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance is published by Oxford University Press.

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/feb/20/scrapbook-nation/

Brief excerpt from the above article on Maude Newton’s blog, click here: Maude Newton Blog Tumblr Emily Dickinson Repurposed Scraps

Hesiod Listening to the Inspiration of the Muse