It turns out that I only have so much creative energy in me. The last few months I’ve wanted to do more writing for this blog and a few articles about marquetry for a magazine. Then there are a couple of poetry collections that are stalled that I’d like to restart. It’s not that I don’t have the time – it’s winter and we’re indoors a lot. It’s more about creative energy and it’s limits.
Since September I’ve been doing a weekly class in ekphrastic poetry. That’s poetry written about an art work. This class has covered a variety of forms including photos, paintings, collages, and a sculpture or two. Each week we write a poem, workshop it with the other poets in the class and then get a new piece of art to work. There have been twelve weeks of this. It’s a lot of work.
I did post one of these poems I was working on a few weeks ago.
The work is interesting, exciting, productive, grueling, exhausting and often frustrating. It’s also been a wonderful learning experience and I feel that my poetry has grown a lot durning this course. It’s really the process and discipline that forces me past my normal writing blocks of lack of inspiration and an excess of self-criticism.
It takes a lot of mental and creative energy to just push and crank something out. One thing that does help is setting the correct expectation for the work. These aren’t polished poems and all the work brought to class is assumed to be draft quality. Editing, polishing and perfecting the poem is work for when the class ends.
The class does take up time in the week, part of the discipline part. There’s one night a week on zoom with the class. This is the best part of the deal. We have a great teacher and the other poets in the class are all great poets. Their feedback on my work is invaluable and studying their poems has taught me so much.
Writing the poem for the next class is a three step process for me: Research, reflect, write. I don’t just look at the picture, I also read about the artist, the type of art, how it was made, when it was done and so on. Research helps me understand the work to a deeper level and points me to my response to the work. After all ekphrastic work is about responding to and creating an understanding of the art we’re looking at. All of this research is just input and I like to take a few days to let everything kind of soak into my brain before I write. Typically I can spend half a day researching.
The actual writing of the poem is usually an afternoon’s work, and often done the day before class. There’s nothing like a deadline to get your fingers moving over a keyboard.
It’s harder to put a specific number on how much time I spend reflecting on a particular piece of art as some of that time is while washing dishes, cleaning the kitty litter, riding my exercise bike or driving around town. But it’s this time that tends to push other projects out of my mind and when it comes time to think about say writing a blog post I find my brain simply not able to handle one more writing project.
When I started writing this blog eleven years ago, I had the goal of writing one essay style post a week. I’ve rarely met that goal, but normally I’d manage three out of four weeks. Since I started this class, I think I’ve done maybe one essay a month. Oh sure, I’ve posted jokes every week along with the occasional picture of something I’ve worked on, but that kind of posting doesn’t take the same level of creative energy as an essay or a poem.
In her book, The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron talks about the need for creative people to, “breath in” or do things that aren’t writing but yet are restful or inspiring. The list includes things like taking a walk in nature, visit to a museum, reading a book, gathering with other artists and so on. I do that kind of stuff, and afterwards I “breath out” by writing. You can only breath out and in so many times in a week without hyperventilating and passing out.
Which brings me to here, this blog. While I’ve enjoyed the writing and blogging community, it does take up creative energy that I started to feel the need to use elsewhere. I have three poetry collections I want to work on. Two are in progress and one just a concept. I’d like to spend more energy writing about woodworking and quilting.
To do all that I have to make changes here. I’ll still be posting things, but not as often and not the longer essays I use to do. The biggest change that I’m thinking of is changing my writing discipline and creating new things.
Oh, I’ll still post my wisdom as that just naturally flows out of my person and from time to time there will be pictures. I do recall promising some followers of my blog more kitty pictures, but these longer essays? More like once a month.
I have been thinking of new thing I might do. Sundays is pizza night in our house and I’m the pizza heater upper (I hate to say cook, as I just take it out the freezer, add a few things and pop it in the oven) and between waiting for the oven to heat and the pizza cook, I have a few minutes of nothing to do so why not type out a quick post of some simple thought or question in my brain.
I’m thinking of calling these posts, “As the Pizza Cooks.”
Andrew's View of the Week 