Swimming in the Subliminal Soup

I've read that when you have a successfully creative day, you should stop and take note of the circumstances that allowed it, so that you can try to recreate them in the future. So, here it goes.

This morning I woke up at 3:50 am with thoughts of a solution for a poem that had been going wrong for me. I've woken up with fully formed solutions in my head before (see this post and this one) thus I am a big believer in using the liminal space between waking and sleep for creativity (see here, and here), but this time I woke up without the answer but with the conviction that I could solve the answer, if I thought about it hard right then and there. And so I drifted in and out of sleep.musing and making illogical connections that the sleep state is so good for, and the answer did come. Then came answers to another poem that had been stalled, and then some new ideas for two new poems, and then some more revision ideas.

So you can imagine that I'm interested in recreating this kind of amazing flow that I encountered between sleep and wakefulness for about an hour and a half this morning. How did this extremely productive time come to be?

First, I went to bed after reading poetry (Charles Wright, in case you are interested) and I fell asleep thinking about a poem that was stuck. These pre-sleep inputs gave my unconscious mind the suggestion to work on the creative problem I was having.

Second, this week I have been trying to go to bed 30 minutes earlier than usual to combat the exhaustion I've been feeling of late. I think that getting more rest over several days made it possible for me to be able to stay in the liminal space this morning rather than falling back to a deep sleep (or even a fitful unsatisfying sleep). I think if I had been as tired as I usually am, I would not have had access to the liminal space and to my subconscious work on the problem.

Third, this week I received some feedback from a poet whose work I admire, some very specific feeback, and it gave me a starting point for thinking about a trend in what goes wrong with my work. Having access to his observations pointed my thinking in a way that was more fruitful than my own floundering around usually is.

All this came together this morning in a perfect storm of creativity in my mind. Here's hoping I can instigate another frenzied storm in the near future.

Celebrating Charles Wright

Charles Wright, recently named poet laureate of the United States, has long been one of my most favorite poets, if not the favorite. Here are some of his poems that have meant a lot to me:

High Country Canticle                      Charles Wright

The shroud has no pockets, the northern Italians say.
Let go, live your life,
the grave has no sunny corners —
Deadfall and windfall, the aphoristic undertow
Of high water, deep snow in the hills,
Everything's benediction, bright wingrush of grace.

Spring moves through the late May heat
as though someone were poling it.

**********************************

China Traces                                                               Charles Wright

Nature contains no negatives.
                                                  Nothing is lost there,
The word is. Except the word.
In spring there is autumn in my heart,
My spirit, outside of nature, like slow mist in the trees,
Looking for somewhere to dissipate.
I write out my charms and spells
Against the passage of light
                                              and gathering evil
Each morning. Each evening hands them back.

Out of the nothing nothing comes.
                                                        The rain keeps falling,
As we expected, the bitter and boundaryless rain.
The grass leaves no footprints,
the creek keeps on eating its one word.
In the night, the light assembles the stars
                                            and tightens their sash.

******************************

"There's so little to say, and so much time in which to say it."  Charles Wright

*****************************

Future Tense                                  Charles Wright

All things in the end are bittersweet—
An empty gaze, a little way-station just beyond silence.

If you can’t delight in the everyday,
                                                         you have no future here.

And if you can, no future either.

And time, black dog, will sniff you out,
                                                            and lick your lean cheeks,
And lie down beside you—warm, real close—and will not move.  

*********************************

Body and Soul II
by Charles Wright
(for Coleman Hawkins) The structure of landscape is infinitesimal, Like the structure of music,                             seamless, invisible. Even the rain has larger sutures. What holds the landscape together, and what holds music together, Is faith, it appears--faith of the eye, faith of the ear. Nothing like that in language, However, clouds chugging from west to east like blossoms Blown by the wind.                  April, and anything's possible. Here is the story of Hsuan Tsang. A Buddhist monk, he went from Xian to southern India And back--on horseback, on camel-back, on elephant-back, and on                                                                foot. Ten thousand miles it took him, from 29 to 645, Mountains and deserts, In search of the Truth,                     the heart of the heart of Reality, The Law that would help him escape it, And all its attendant and inescapable suffering.                                                And he found it. These days, I look at things, not through them, And sit down low, as far away from the sky as I can get. The reef of the weeping cherry flourishes coral, The neighbor's back porch light bulbs glow like anemones. Squid-eyed Venus floats forth overhead. This is the half hour, half-light, half-dark,                             when everything starts to shine out, And aphorisms skulk in the trees, Their wings folded, their heads bowed. Every true poem is a spark,             and aspires to the condition of the original fire Arising out of the emptiness. It is that same emptiness it wants to reignite. It is that same engendering it wants to be re-engendered by. Shooting stars. April's identical,              celestial, wordless, burning down. Its light is the light we commune by. Its destination's our own, its hope is the hope we live with. Wang Wei, on the other hand, Before he was 30 years old bought his famous estate on the Wang River Just east of the east end of the Southern Mountains,                                                      and lived there, Off and on, for the rest of his life. He never travelled the landscape, but stayed inside it, A part of nature himself, he thought. And who would say no To someone so bound up in solitude,                            in failure, he thought, and suffering. Afternoon sky the color of Cream of Wheat, a small Dollop of butter hazily at the western edge. Getting too old and lazy to write poems,                                       I watch the snowfall From the apple trees. Landscape, as Wang Wei says, softens the sharp edges of isolation. ****************************

Empty

Gone                                                      Malena Morling, from Five Points

          The world
is gone
      like the exact
shape of a cloud
          or the exact shape
of a hand waving
      in the sunlight
from across
          a crowded
train-station
      parking-lot
to another hand
          that waves back.

Come to think of it,
      everything up to now
is gone.
          And I have also
already left
      even though
I still ride
          the train
through the outskirts
      of the city.

And I still sit
          by the window,
the filthy
      train-window
while what is left
          of the demolished
buildings
      go past
and the empty
          billboards
and the transitory
      architecture.

It's amazing
          we're not
more amazed.
      The world
is here
          but then it's gone
like a wave
      traveling toward
other waves.

          Or like
the delicate white
      spaceships
of the Dogwood
          that float
as if there were
      no gravity,
as if there were
          no moments
isolated from
      any other
moments
          anywhere.


*****

Everything that seems empty is full of the angels of God.  St. Hilaire, fourth-century bishop (and patron saint against snake bites)

 

******

Empty similes                                                                  Bob Hicok

Like standing in front of a woman who says thank you
when you tell her you love her, that stuck

sound of a crow, pulling the one nail from its voice
outside your window and you

going down to the sea too late, where it was
three million years ago, waving your little towel
at the shadow of waves, like dropping

your stomach when you drop the phone,
a voice spinning at the end of the chord, your mother,
father, everyone

dead, even the person telling you
gone and you
waving your metronome arm, and time

inside the trees making clocks we check
by cutting them down.

 

******

Genesis                 Herman de Coninck, tr. By Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Kurt Brown

It was the sixth day. Adam was ready.
He saw the oaks firmly rooted
in the void. Power is a matter of branching.
He had seen the mountains, vast storerooms holding
only themselves, high empty cellars.
And deer. With legs as thin as stethoscopes
they stood listening to the breast of the earth,
and as soon as they heard something, they ran away,
inventing pizzicato as they fled the horizon.
And he had seen the sea, the busy swelling and receding
that makes one calm. And the empty, provocative gestures
of the wind, come along, come along, though no one followed.
And the depths, gulfs that make one uneasy. And being silent,
because that's what everything was doing, and being too big.
Then God said: and now you. No, said Adam.

 

******

Bats                                                                 Paisley Rekdal

unveil themselves in dark.
They hang, each a jagged,

silken sleeve, from moonlit rafters bright
as polished knives. They swim

the muddied air and keen
like supersonic babies, the sound

we imagine empty wombs might make
in women who can't fill them up.

A clasp, a scratch, a sigh.
They drink fruit dry.

And wheel, against feverish light flung hard
upon their faces,

in circles that nauseate.
Imagine one at breast or neck,

patterning a name in driblets of iodine
that spatter your skin in stars.

They flutter, shake like mystics.
They materialize. Revelatory

as a stranger's underthings found tossed
upon the marital bed, you tremble

even at the thought. Asleep,
you tear your fingers

through your damp neck hair
and search the sheets all night.

******

Future Tense                                                                                                                                                                                                              Charles Wright

All things in the end are bittersweet—
An empty gaze, a little way-station just beyond silence.

If you can’t delight in the everyday,
                                                         you have no future here.

And if you can, no future either.

And time, black dog, will sniff you out,
                                                            and lick your lean cheeks,
And lie down beside you—warm, real close—and will not move.