About the tension, fear and mystery of creative practice...
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The Why of Poetry
I sat looking at the faces that had been meeting mine for the past four Saturdays....
In a Divinatory Poetics session, we read together—the poetry of masters, the masterworks of artists who have perfected their craft. We read them slowly—silently, and then aloud. Each individual voice, with its unique cadence and tone, feels its way through the metaphors and imagery, the fields of emotional color.
Then we write; without censorship or second thought, (as much as possible). And finally, we converse, wedding our voices with the language that inspired them. It’s an imaginal journey—and the landscapes we invoke together are so rich they often give me chills.
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Ask
ask questions.
a question is open and receptive,
yet articulating – it invokes.
this is the art of divination.
amidst all possibilities, it reveals a subject of concern,
curiosity, attention, attraction.
it reveals a prayer – the desire for a meeting or
an answering that reveals itself only
in the act.
it is revealed IN the working.
Bricolage
Bricolage. The word embraces me. It has the graceful awkwardness of my long limbs. It describes the curious jumble of thought, aesthetic accumulation, fragments, the bit of stripe, the ragged graphic, the pencil cursive interrupted, torn. It accepts the enchanting ordinaryness of my life. All of it worthy. All of it rich. All of it in dreadful disarray.
Look how that irritating shred, that meaningless utterance, goes just right there and sings.
Bricolage defies the tidy. Bricolage is collapsed sculpture. Bricolage is image in three dimensions. Bricolage is askance and askew with asymmetric angles. Inclusive. What else can i say? Depart.
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Real or Imaginary?
As a child, like most children, I was not much interested in designating the differences between ‘real’ and ‘not real’, (not to mention that much of what was considered ‘real’ by the adults around me seemed positively distasteful). I longed to know, to validate and discover, to make real and to follow the beauty, mystery, and luminosity that emerged unexpectedly in glimpses, at moments when the motivation to avoid punishment receded or the teacher looked away. This longing did not loosen its grip on me.
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The Gate Cards
The Tarot cards, particularly the 22 Trumps represent a number of familiar and potent archetypes: symbols of human experience that arise again and again across cultures: the old sage, the fool , the emperor-king, the mysterious priestess. The minor cards, otherwise known as ‘pips’ might be said to offer a symbolic view of ordinary human experiences over the course of a lifetime. By way of imagery and symbolism, the cards are a tool capable of drawing together the unconscious/mythologically-oriented mind and the reasoning mind.
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Divinatory Poetics
Not knowing, waiting and finding — though they may happen accidentally, aren’t accidents. They involve work and research. Not knowing isn’t ignorance. (Fear springs from ignorance.) Not knowing is a permissive and rigorous willingness to trust, leaving knowing in suspension, trusting in possibility without result, regarding as possible all manner of response. The responsibility of the artist […] is the practice of recognizing.
~Ann Hamilton
Divinatory Poetics describes a particular approach to composition: the cultivation of attention, entering in to a sort of lucid trance, experimentation with modes of thinking and angles of perspective.
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