I have been in a serious creative slump for a while now. I try to tell myself it’s all part of my process, which it is, but that ends up feeling a little disappointing. I want to be writing, painting, creating. I want to be expending my creative juices on more than just tweaking my newest gluten free bread recipe find. But instead of writing and painting, I’ve been cooking, reading, studying, dating, thinking about how I will make a living after my grant ends in August, and other worthy activities.
Something shifted today. I don’t even know what happened, but as I was at work finishing up processing of the A.A. Humphreys papers (for more info on that, see my work blog http://processandpreserve.wordpress.com), suddenly I looked at the blank scrap paper on my desk and I decided to write a line of a poem, or what might become a poem. I meant to only write one line so that I wouldn’t forget it, and then I decided to write another line an hour later, and then I thought that this could be a way to make my work day more joyful. I could write a poem line by line throughout the day whenever one occurred to me. I wouldn’t be “wasting company time” because it would only be a matter of 30 seconds here and there throughout my 9 hour day. And at the end of the day, I would have some kind of poem–maybe a bad one, maybe a good one, but something. I think this could change my relationship to both work and poetry in such a stunning way.
I realized, too, that my creativity is definitely linked to my feelings of desire and passion. Perhaps it is that these two channels are feeding from the same deep well of freedom and openness. I’m really unsure at this point, but it was amazing to realize this. I know my poems are poems of the body–always. I know I am tangibly connected to words with my energy. I can feel their pull–I am moved by their forces. This is big–something to pay a lot of attention to and to use while it’s vibrant. How to cultivate desire and passion without an object other than art… hmm.
Here’s today’s writing:
On account of embrace
. this
lungs empty — lungs fill
ordinary exchange
what hand what mouth
the places voices hide
snowflakes in our teeth
payments number millions
. and then breath .
creativity tied to desire
longing leads