ACCESSING THE METAPHORIC MIND

A Writing Exercise:

Susan Buller in my writing group told us as an exercise, she had written down her idea as fast as she could write, without stopping. I am not sure if she wrote it in longhand, or on her computer. Following is the poem she wrote:

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Cacophony

Sincerely startled by a sultry wind

gaping into two holes

frosted onto five loaves

of compressed sadness

Sorrow and longing

plastered into

every single note

I sing on a wing that belongs to someone else

I wonder will my time ever come

Can I ever discover

what has taken me this far

on such a stargazing expedition

on the winds of someone’s brother

or someone’s mother

or a preacher’s lost place

little ants eating away at the knowledge of tomorrow

Knowing there will be sorrow and sorrow and more sorrow

when we see into our lives yet one more time

We wreck havoc on our tempered steel bones

Wreck postures with

hunched backs and backs packed

full of bitter waste

bent on bars of steel to hard to manage

with out a brace of some kind to prop it up

a conflict of interest demands a little smile

of faltered ego

Tattered treasure of temples on hills

where no one lives or wants to live or will ever see

Sadness of sorrows spent in search of someone’s lost song

listening to nothing on a lead-filled wall

Tomorrow will gleam its own future

prepare for its own downfall

weep its own destruction

Another mourner weeps into a wind that is

flung out into the limits of silence

A cry no one hears, no one cares, no one mourns

A cry of desperation in proclamation of their own losses

Their own travels into nothingness

of sorrow and mourning

And what is left, dear friend

is the death of a dream life.

by Susan Buller

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Susan’s poem is full of surprising imagery, and shows how the intuitive mind makes associations through a metaphoric process, so suited to poetry.

A variation on this exercise, given by John Rybicki in a class I took several years ago, was to write in your own handwriting, a one hundred fifty word sentence.

It may be that writing in long hand is another way to access your right brain, or intuitive mind. Judy Reeves in A Writer’s Book of Days, advises this way of recording thoughts in daily journaling which nourishes creative process because handwriting is more directly expressive of the right brain or intuitive mind and more connected to the senses.

I have also used The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron for at least 15 years, intermittently, journaling by hand.

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The Artwork on this post is the Copyright © of Ruth Zachary.

WRITING ABOUT ART

Reconstruction, Collage 18x24" by © Ruth Zachary

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Writing About a Piece of Art, Assignment from the Previous Post -

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Techno-Challenged.

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To write about a piece of art

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when viewed only as a tiny band

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on a panoramic screen

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is really hard. It breaks my heart

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when a tiny streak the thickness of a hand

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is all that shows or can be seen

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after all the junk pre-empts the part,

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that my collages might command,

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but must instead be scrunched between.

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So, now I am using the following poem instead. It does relate to the abstract image above, in an abstract way but isn't so much about art. Blogger keeps reformatting everything I put in, so I will try to enter it one more time, but it changes after I publish the post, and I apologize if it still isn't right, but I can't spend any more time. It doesn't recognize a paragraph (return) so that is why all the little periods to create a break. Wouldn't you know that my blog about writing would turn everything I write into a document by a seeming ignoramus?!!! The following poem was
copied in Times New Roman, regular font, and Blogger's HTML pastes it in as an italics document in a different font and size, and pastes one line over to the left of all the others. It doesn't matter if I type it in from scratch, or copy and paste. It still messes up everything.

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The Spiral Path

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Once I saw the dance of life as a journey.

It seemed an apt metaphor, because

I wanted to be on course, undeviating,

walking across a map on a path I had

plotted for myself. Even following a

a river, upstream or down provided a

similar idea, albeit more interesting, and

hinting at the unexpected events life

throws your way; interruptions, or fate?

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Looking at the landmarks of my years,

it has not been even a voyage on the

ocean’s surface that I have undertaken.

It was more similar to a multi-dimensional

passage through space and time, where

the significant persons and events or I,

cycle, return to, and resemble other

experiences from the past, not sensed

in the sequence of occurrence.

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It emerges as a spiritual quest, a shaman’s path.

And in the view through time, the earlier

events now take on a transparency

through an aurora borealis of vibrating

energy, absorbing new colors, and I see

it all through depths of greater meaning,

layers of significance, a galaxy spiraling

outward, a multiverse interacting with my

passage, expanding, and creating …me.

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Writing and Art Images are the sole © Copyright of Ruth Zachary

WRITING ABOUT WRITING

Artist- Speak.

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You might think an artist would write and talk

in artist-speak, art being so ingrained.

You might expect the terminology

of pigment, tools and techniques to be

genetically imprinted in the gray matter of

language, and no manual of technical terms

would be required.

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For me it isn’t so.

It’s like the discussion of regional sub-cultures.

You can’t hear the dialect rolling out between

your lips, but you speak it, and what you say

or do as your art expresses your world,

your milleau, your culture, and unwittingly

you are it from the inside out and whatever

comes out of you is of that world,

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whether you see or hear it or not.

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Still, that walnut shaped hemisphere sprouts,

blossoms into trees, flowers, hands with

green leaves growing from branching fingers,

vining out to reshape and embellish

the surface of an ever-expanding universe.

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The creator, the creation impacts that universe

interactively. It becomes the artist, the artist

becomes the universe, re- forming the other.

What is seen is transcribed. What is known

is translated into new language, descriptors

of visual wonders that others might see;

but expressions of color, movement, balance,

rhythm, more, can never be fully conveyed

into that old language, to those without

that special sight .

Words fall short,

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because visual art is a different tongue.

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Some workshop leader once told the group I was in not to write about writing. Others do say to write about art. I gave a presentation a year or two ago to the Greeley Poetry Club about many poets who

have written about art.

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I find it is a great stimulus to write about a painting. The poem above was prompted by knowing I am an artist, and yet I don't write about art very much. I do convey imagery in my writing, but use words to do so, and often fail to find metaphors in the materials and techniques of art.

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Hmmm- maybe I should use that as an exercise. I think I'll try it. How about you?

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Writing and Images are the sole ©Copyright of Ruth Zachary.

BELIEVE IN YOUR OWN CREATIVE VISION

When Flowers Grow Free, Pen and Ink and
Computer Drawing Tools, ©by Ruth Zachary.
To see more art and read about the drawing
techniques, go to ruthzacharyart.blogspot.com.

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Daffodils

Daffodils appeared on the hill

I planned to move them

to a cultivated place.

After digging two feet down

those tender shoots drooped

disappointed, snapped off by accident,

where stems curved in earth

from some deep nocturnal residence.

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Roots undiscovered, buried

there twenty years or more

by a dozer digging a drain field

beneath the hill. What will to live

could endure such valiant effort?

How many years, if ever,

before they found the sun again?

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Not long.Their roots in darkness knew

not only when spring arrived

but how to grow toward the sun.

And I, compelled by nature's need

to love, obeyed some internal

compass drawing me to light.

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This past month I have experienced a time like this, when many of my creative efforts failed. I started over each time with a new approach to make my ideas materialize, until I began to learn from the failures. Some experiments and some visions do have limits. They have natural ways to grow which are inherent to their nature.

I wanted to integrate my abstractions with realistic images, but as long as I sought to do this using the old methods, the attempts didn’t work. As soon as I realized I would have to work differently, and to use black and white without color, my efforts began to work. And because I wanted the images to be used for illustrations in poetry chapbooks, black and white was well suited to the planned use.

I am very pleased with the process and with the results. I feel as if I have come out of the darkness into the sun. What I have learned is to be patient, and to realize creativity doesn’t only exist when things seem to go right. It is still there, even when it seems dormant. Creativity lies deep within, and with continued nurturing and effort, beauty manifests in its own time and way.

Images and Writing are the Copyright © of Ruth Zachary.

WHERE VISIONS GATHER

Visions Gather

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Shapes take order

out of chaos

as darkness yields to dawn .

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Words sound in the virgin snow.

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Footprints lead to where

no body moves.

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A ghostly promise

compels the artist to make images;

the poet to

make poems of them.

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Art work images and writing are the Copyright © of Ruth Zachary

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DO YOU EVER RANT?

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WRITING A RANT

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A Rant is usually a long poem in which the poet explores a subject in a noisy, fast paced, declamatory or bombastic manner. It was a form developed by the beat poets in the1950s in California. It is a form

presented in free verse, or as a series of prose paragraphs. Allen Ginsberg’s Howl is a well-known

example. Rap is similar to this form, but rap usually incorporates rhyme and rhythm accompanied

by a drumbeat or electronic percussive beat.

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This poem began in a class taught by John Rybicki, in Michigan. He had class members write down

words that had great importance for them. These were “words of power.” We all exchanged our words,

and I drew John’s word, brick from the hat. At first I thought I could not relate to the word at all.

My resistance reflected my anger and led to writing this rant, which in the end I discovered I liked.

It turned out to be a word of power for me after all.

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Resistance to something is a good indication that there is some suppressed emotion about the thing

being resisted. If you encounter it in yourself, you may find it will provide fuel for a poem

(or even another writing form) you had never thought about writing. Try this as a writing exercise.

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Begetting Bricks

Dedicated to John Rybicki

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i

The bow-tied gift is painted

in hard brushstrokes, mortar

scraping the hand, drawing blood.

Unwrapped, I see only brick.

Bricks are unyielding, brittle,

I become hard in saying it.

I am like my friend who built up walls

without windows around herself.

I tried for a while to knock them down,

but learned self made walls,

regenerate themselves.

resistance is a pointless effort.

From the brick,

I learned something about resistance.

I accept the gift.

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ii

I try to be flexible, creative

even with bricks.

Firebricks piled grandly

in the basement of my childhood home

for years were the source of imaginary

playhouses and yellow brick walkways.

In my youthful fantasy,

I built a kiln with those bricks,

and in that primal oven,

fired sculptures, bas-relief,

tiles, tablets, containers,

to hold all manner of bounty.

I once wanted to fire clay into pots.

Foundries, ovens and kilns utilize

fire to harden objects

molded to the will of a creator,

but the bricks and daydreams

stayed in the basement,

sold by my father with the house.

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iii

Bricks are artificial shapes

in a natural world with a life force

of their own, which expand

upward, hard and linear,

against an ever more distant sky.

Bricks and concrete are allies with asphalt,

infrastructure crusting the earth.

Brick structures become wedged against the

natural boundaries of organic space.

Bricks are mortared into inflexible walls,

forming a fortress of power over others,

as well as the impenetrable prison

holding some within, and barricading

others without, exiling the poor

often without resource.

Bricks break the windows of the dreamer.

They become bunkers for predators

Bricks become tombs,

gas chambers; crematoriums.

Bricks become the poor man’s bludgeon;

the means for crushing the structures

which crush them; the means of survival

for the fittest, as the poor feed on each other.

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iv

Kilns are brick wombs birthing

clay offspring; bricks, whose families

will become other ovens.

Bricks are loaves in the oven, bread

to feed other bricks.

Societal forges burn, melt,

reshape other material

to the will of the mass mind of Brick society,

structures built in modular sequences as

hard and linear as the original unitary shape.

These structures, brick by brick

expand upward but have limits,

which demand glass ceilings to limit

higher achievement by other material,

Unless allied with concrete and steel.

I overheard an unkind remark, harsh,

bruising. The words fell like bricks

on the ear, hard rectangular shapes,

mortared together in rigid concrete

structures, prototypes for conformity,

blocking territories in the mind.

Bricks are the foundation and walls

of homes and churches, nations.

patterned in conformity

molded by invariable formula.

and in turn, they are the structures

housing religious family values

that would demand conformity

as regular as salt crystals,

cubed and cloned in exactly the unitary shape.

the ultimate Nirvana brick where

the ultimate family values

are of one mind, one cube, one hive,

with computers, mass media

and assimilation for all.

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v.

The ikon god of bricks

would be as indestructible

as the ominous obelisk

from 2001 hurled into space.

That brick, morphed into a monolith

in its trek to other worlds

(where no brick has gone before)

has become the robotic ship

inhabited by Borg. Resistance is futile.

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If you would like to see more of Ruth Zachary's Abstract Art, visit her blog,

mixedmediart@gmail.com

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Writing and Images are the Copyright © of Ruth Zachary.