Season's Greetings

November seems to have a different character each year in Colorado. One year, the leaves may still be green, and if like last year, trees were covered in snow. Actually in October of 2011, we had one of those early snowfalls, with the leaves still on the trees, and my apple trees still full of bright red apples! My maple tree in front was badly broken, but the apple trees held up very well.

The above scene was one of twenty-five from various places I have lived, that I have used in a book of haiku I am writing, representing changes of landscape and weather throughout the year. I am using fifty haiku poems. The images are not strictly illustrations of the verses. The sequence of both poems and photographs is generally from the start of a year to the end.

The following is a poem I am quite excited about:

Gathering Fragments                                 

Illuminated writing decorates black velvet

in her open-eyed dreams. It is one a.m.

Diverse innovations congeal from disparate

sources::  an assemblage of materials suggest

new constructions used in new ways. She is

wrapped by diverse threads, uncoiling from

the universe, wrapping her gently in a cocoon

of delight. The meanings are in a new tongue.

The woman can feel herself morphing

in the darkness but she cannot sleep.

Excitement boils in her blood, anxious as she is

to learn her new identity, what new creature

is shape-shifting within this matrix?

Her heart whispers, a gift is coming.

The confettied particles fall faster than

she can grasp them in her  hands:: to hold them

she must juggle in constant sequence.

Like leaves they blow before the wind.

Weightedness is needed to make them fly.

The woman has come before her time,

and her body fails before time catches her up.

She surrenders into now. She is herself a

flying scrap. The wind lifts her into her new

incarnation. Faster and faster the fragments

fall into her mind. Hands on her head, the shape

is like a satellite dish, a funnel. She sees

collages forming in her lap. Bits and pieces

grow from her fingers, gathered from living fully,

form patterns connected by intuition, layers

experienced through multiple spirals of time.

 The exercise for Greeley Poetry Club was to stretch in one's approach, by using methods to encourage divergent thinking, such as to generally collect fragments of poems-suggested over a period of time- phrases, words, images and write them down, and then to put them into a sequence of related ideas. This tactic was one called "Chasing Poems."

It was adapted by Mary Lauck, from Writing Poetry; Creative and Critical Approaches by Chad Davidson and Gregory Fraser.

I loved the surrealistic result, and also the delight I felt while noticing strange synchronicities emerge over the period of time I paid attention. I was sorting my books, and looking for missing books that might relate to making hand-made books. The books I was looking for appeared from other book cases, like fragments, and also art images literally fell out of some shelves as if to make me notice them. Having an open mind allows for connections between different ideas to occur, without having a linear goal in mind, both in the process of writing and in art.

The process ended with two poems emerging along with about a hundred approaches for making hand made books. And one large bookshelf is now organized!

Writing and Images in this post are the © property of Ruth Zachary.

Courting Your Muse

Autumn Concert. Mixed Media Collage. By Ruth Zachary©

COURTING YOUR MUSE Part 1

No one starts out being a great writer. But we all have the potential to become one.

I really believe this is true for nearly everyone, and yet I have so much to learn. I want to try to access the intuitive process of writing , and identify the ways to capture that elusive muse.

I believe the Greek muse, named Euterpe, muse of Music and Lyric poetry, resides in our brains, specifically in the right brain. Calliope, their muse of Epic Poetry, probably resides in the left-brain, as she would govern words and speech, a left-brained function. 

Ideas about the intuitive process in creativity and creative writing have also been around for centuries. Rational process has been identified with exposition writing for a long time as well.

Some others went a step farther, saying there were two separate processes during writing. Peter Elbow, in Writing with Power, (1981) said, “ Writing calls upon two skills that are so different that they usually conflict with each other: creating, and criticizing…. (Writing calls on the ability to create words and ideas out of yourself, but it also calls on the ability to criticize them in order to decide which ones to use.)” Elbow understood there were “two mentalities needed for these two processes, and that they flower most when they get a chance to operate separately.”

Elbow also said writers don’t suddenly arrive fully matured, that each piece of writing needs time after its birth to change and grow and reach it’s potential, and also that you “probably won’t find a pearl if you only pick up oysters once a year. ” (Advocating practice)

I mention this because regular practice also makes access to the intuitive process more available. Elbow’s book also focused mostly on exercises and mechanics of writing. Some of his exercises do seem inclined toward accessing one’s intuitive skills, such as one advocating “Free Writing” in which one writes rapidly.

In all the classes and workshops I have been in since the 1990s, including the class I attended at UNC in 2007, the emphasis has been on writing exercises, or writing about a particular topic, or forms of poetry.  Exercises can be wonderful for broadening a writer’s levels of skills, and familiarity with many kinds of writing. This awareness is just as important as learning to use the right brain in creative writing.

But being able to access that mysterious and miraculous place where a poem seems to write itself, has been a rare experience and seldom am I sure how to get there. I think even when teachers wanted to pass along what they sensed about intuitive writing, they didn’t know how to get it across.

In 1997, a WMU poetry professor, John Rybicki moved to my neighborhood in the country and started a class in his home and I signed up. He offered many exercises that triggered the creative process, and because I had read Rico’s book, Writing the Natural Way, I began to identify situations in which others and I talked about accessing an intuitive mental space.

I still knew no specific means for getting there, other than trying to recreate

the conditions which created that space. I believe this varies for different writers.  In my next post, I will list the situations and conditions and practices that seem most likely to put a writer into that right-brained state for writing creatively.

All images and writing are the Copyright of Ruth Zachary©

 

IN YOUR DREAMS

Sometimes a dream is a subject for a poem. I woke up one morning thinking about a friend, and wondering if I had failed to respond to her when she needed comfort. Dreams often present ideas for poems, and often the images in dreams are incredible metaphors for writing one.

Father’s Day

She related her story, how her

father was buried by a second wife,

under a tasteless headstone,

where if she visited, she would

be assaulted by the reproach

of her father’s wishes denied.

I shared with her how I had seen

so many cases of cruelty to others

upon the occasion of a death.

(But my own pains were not shared,

and my own unkindness to others

at another time suppressed as well)

.

I remember her running out, her

emotions overwhelming her. I started

to go after her, but didn't, thinking

she wanted to be alone to regain

her composure.

.

I shared with her later, a story of my

father... one of very few memories

of him which was wholesome but

which failed to erase the grief of all

the verbal assaults he made upon

my self esteem, so that by the time

I was fifteen, I had divorced him

emotionally, and shut down most

affection I would have liked to have

shared with him in a better world.

.

Now, I fear I also shut out my friend

by failing to reach out, causing a rift,

before our friendship could begin.

.

.

To learn about the techniques for creating the above drawing,
visit ruthzacharyart.blogspot.com

Writing and Art Work © by Ruth Zachary, all rights reserved.

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.

.

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.

.

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?

.

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.

.

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.

The Magic of Daily Writing

Spring Magic, Study for Collage, In Progress, by Ruth Zachary.

Writing as a Daily Practice

The Greeley Poetry Club is fortunate to have Mary Lauck, an English teacher, who provides the writing exercises every month. The December lesson suggested writing small selections every day, whether as a journal entry or a poem. I have followed such practice at other times in my life, and it took about one week to realize the positive effect it had on my writing, after starting it up again.

The lesson for January was to try to take up different writers of poetry, and to read until we found a line that stimulated an idea we would like to explore. The metaphor was that our chosen author would drop a thread for us to follow, and for us to go where it led us. This seemed like a relevant extension of a daily practice. Never have we as a whole group written so many inspiring poems!

Part of this kind of practice taps into the unconscious, or takes us to the intuitive level in our writing, especially if written by hand in cursive script. It works. It can even release some people from writers block.

Recommended Books

I took up three different books I have used before. These books all offer daily suggestions for writing topics. I recommend them! They are:

Simple Abundance, a Daybook of Comfort and Joy, by Sarah Ban Breathnach.

The Artist’s Way, A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, by Julia Cameron.

A Writer’s Book of Days by Judy Reeves.

These books also discuss a variety of issues artists or writers encounter on their own Creative Path, and offer solutions to problems that occur. All three books are extremely useful in discarding negative internal messages in our heads which condition us in ways that make us less productive than we might be without them.

I believe the process of daily writing functions to recondition a writer’s thinking both in removing negative messages, but also in opening easy access to one’s own natural creative power.

A third possibility is also that magic is afoot. Gratitude changes everything. The things we focus upon are what we manifest in our lives. This extends beyond the act of writing, and the process of creating objects. Amazing coincidences have repeatedly shown up in other areas of life, things I have hoped for, within days or hours of visualizing them. Wouldn’t it be irrational to discount something so amazing? I think it might even be ungrateful.

But if you want to be more “rational”, try Positive Visualization and record the results. And if you want only practical ideas for career building, I have found they abound on the Internet, and much of this information is free. I am happy to learn from these options as well, but why not avail yourself of ALL the Universe has to offer?

I Think I’m Back on Line Again!

It has been a while since I posted my blogs regularly. As I mentioned in September, I have had problems with my eyesight. I belong to two writing groups and two art groups. I fell back a little on the meetings, because driving at night was too difficult. But now I am getting back into the swing of normal living, and attending the writing groups is part of that.

And I am happy to say, in the months I was less functional, I never stopped creating, either my writing or my visual art, because those forms of expression are what I live for.

All writing and images are the exclusive Copyright © of Ruth Zachary.

BALANCING THE ARTIST'S LIFE

Unbeing Myself, study for mixed media Collage, by Ruth Zachary.


The Pause That Refreshes

So much to do... so little time. And when all the facets of one's life get out of balance, it is time to re-prioritize the tasks that must be done first. And so I have let my blogs slide.

I am happy to report that during the month of January I have designed... (not completed,) around 50 ideas for a series of mixed media collages on which I am excited to begin work.
I am planning to work abstractly, with no objective subject matter. It is basically about developing composition without depending on realistic material. But to work in collage for a period of time, my studio needs to be reorganized so I can work efficiently.

However, in the meantime, the available storage space on my computer has gradually filled up, so it is necessary to back up a lot of information on CDs in a fashion that the content is still easily accessible.

Also on March I must begin yard work, pruning, clearing, and numerous other tasks. I love doing it, and it is a great way to exercise, but it is time and energy consuming.

The conclusion of this is that I will not have as much time to devote to blogging as I did over the past six months. At times I have posted some images or poems I did not feel were complete. I want to be able to post quality material on my blogs when I feel it is ready to be presented.

I thought about deleting a site or two, but I am not going to do that, right away. I really like the missions of each of these topics. So I plan to blog periodically and see what is a natural rhythm for sharing my quality creative work, while still keeping life in balance and continuing to be productive in each area of my interests.

If anyone reads this, I would appreciate any insights or encouragement from you related to this topic.

COURTING YOUR MUSE

Channel to Crooked Lake. By Ruth Zachary.

COURTING YOUR MUSE
and/or Foiling Your WRITE -Brained Creative Blocks

Sometimes you write like an obsessed demon. Then later, mysteriously, the words you just wrote appear to be drivel. You can’t even muster the start of an idea. Worse, you can’t remember who you were when you wrote those great pieces you turned in one semester two years ago. Your muse appears to have wandered away to spend time with someone whose writing is more worthy. It’s easy to feel that way during a dry spell.

As a creative person working in the visual arts as well as writing, I have many years of paying attention to the times when creativity seems to flow from some miraculous source. Others have said words or images seemed channeled into their mind and spirit, and to flow out through their hand on the page as if they were the instrument of the Muse Herself.

Often the real answer to blocks is a positive approach, steps taken to create the conditions which nurture your creativity.

I have talked to many other writers about this. Many list the tangible barriers preventing them from being creative, and they set about removing the blocks. Some say just writing regularly helps a great deal. Few, however, have linked right-brained activity with creativity.

Few are even aware of how to tap into an altered state to enhance their art work, or Play. Keeping an attitude that your art form is for you a privilege, a source of joy, and your time to play will help you nurture the process which for your will be most productive.

The Right Brain
Several years ago, I read Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards, for visual artists. It emphasizes the functions of the brain which can encourage creativity, if cultivated. In fact, flipping through it, I see renewed ideas there, and think I must read it again.

Since the first time, though, I have identified many situations which I believe are directly tied to right-brained functions. Creativity can be stimulated by identifying your own personal right-brained states, and learning to prolong those states during the period of play devoted to your personal art form.

Here are some situations that put me into a creative place:

√ Sleep and Dream States – often ideas come for art. Write them down.
√ Darkness at dawn or dusk – also write these thoughts down.
√ Waking slowly, stimulated by coffee, and letting thoughts wander freely
within the areas of your art expression. Write or sketch your ideas.
√ Showering. Record your ideas as soon as possible.
√ Driving through beautiful scenery. Have you noticed how you are able to do your
driving functions and still think of something else at the same time? That is your right brain working, but don’t do this if you might endanger yourself or others, and do pull off the road to record your ideas.
√ Riding on a bus or train.
√ Meditation.- images and writing may come automatically or unconsciously.
√ Listening to music. Pay attention to which kind of music stimulates you. I prefer non-vocal
music when focused on writing.
√ While doing routine exercise.
√ Dance.
√ Sex- afterglow. (Hold that thought til later)
√ Gardening.
√ Repetitive chores.
√ Laying on the beach.
√ Under the Influence – light alcohol, only. You can’t be creative or productive when wiped out.

I don’t claim that my creative space is the same as yours. But do pay attention to what works for you, and do set up the conditions to encourage your own creativity!


Another excellent book for all sorts of artists and writers is The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, which encourages the artist’s spirit and discusses the issues plaguing many artists, and how to overcome them.


All images and writing are the Copyright of Ruth Zachary.

MUSIC AND RHYTHM IN POETRY

The Enchanted Forest. Painting by Ruth Zachary

Music and Rhythm in Poetry.

Speech uses unique rhythms and patterns. Speakers who consciously and unconsciously use these rhythms and patterns well are easier to listen to. In the written form of language, the longer the phrase and sentence stucture, the harder it is to translate it into spoken form.

Poetry often breaks up these phrases and structures into shorter sections, separated by line breaks, whereas prose uses punctuation to indicate pauses, stops, intonations, etc.

The goal is to create rhythms by structuring the lines so that they follow the familiar patterns of speech, and yet cause the reader to hear them internally.

Many of the formal forms of poetry from the past were based on these structures, which were often strictly observed, right down to the number of syllables, and words with the accent on a particular order in the wording. These structures can exhaust a beginner, or they can limit creativity with language because the structure is given more importance than what is being said, in that the beauty and music of the language is subjugated.

My belief is that although these traditional forms can be mastered so that language retains its beauty, it is still better to begin with the simple idea of the poem, and to adjust toward the classic form, rather than the other way around.

Beginners can write exquisite poetry by beginning with a subject that stimulates emotion, and expressing it by using sensate impressions (sight, sound, sense, taste, smell, etc) The next enrichment might be inclusion of metaphor and figures of speech.

It is important to read the poem aloud, again and again, revising until it flows naturally.

The writer might next pay attention to the rhythm of the words, changing line breaks, and resorting to different words which enhance the rhythm, and create sounds with a more musical quality.

Often vowel sounds will be repeated within a phrase, or repeating consonants may be used. If the sounds are gutteral, the effect can project a harsh feeling. If they are soft, the effect may enhance the imagery in the writing. These can be used purposely to convey a particular tone around the subject. At time, these words also may contain their own music and their own reason for writing them down:

“Children like the wildflowers come,
each in their own season.”

Rhymes help create music, but end rhymes can quickly sound sing-song or contrived.
Internal rhymes not used within a rigid rhythm can contribute to the musical quality of the writing, or a piece of poetry, as an alternative to the traditional approach to rhyming.

There are technical terms for these devices, but the best way to become aware of them is simply to write, and to read aloud, and then to be willing to shift the order of words, the exact uses of words, or to substitute shorter or longer words, and so on.

A refrain is a phrase which is repeated two or three and sometimes more times for emphasis… to stress an idea, or to create the magic of music in a poem. Sometimes the words are presented in a different order each time. The Bells, by Edgar Allen Poe is a well known example of a repeating refrain.

First Love

Early One Evening
in late summer,
we held hands.

Your arm went around
my shoulders, lightly
embracing my back.

That late summer
Evening, in the back seat
of your cousin’s car.

We were thirteen.
The movie flickered
in black and white,

a background refrain
for our timid first kiss,
late one summer night.

Exercise:
Have fun with words. Don’t plan on a great poem at the end.
Create a series of phrases using the dictionary or a thesaurus, which
begin with the same sounds of the alphabet, like snake, slither, shuffle, shiver.

Write down several more phrases which use the same internal sounds such as moon, soothing, toothless, ruse, choose, raccoon, tomb.

Come up with some words which rhyme. They don’t have to have the same spelling, only the same sounds, for instance, right, fight, bright, height, sight, etc.
Add associated words to make rhyming phrases.

Reorder some of the words in the rhyming phrases, and then in your previously created phrases.

You may be pleasantly surprised. Consider keeping several reordered versions of these phrases, and using them in one poem. When repeated in a reordered fashion, they can become an intriguing refrain.

Take the best rhythmic or musical lines and phrases and string them together.
It is not necessary to use all of them. You might find you love what results from this process.

Writing and Art Images by Ruth Zachary are Copyrighted, and require permission to reproduce any portion.

CREATIVITY CAN'T BE CONTAINED IN ONE CUP

Focused

This morning, as always,
she pours creamer,
instant coffee and then sugar
into the precise center of her cup,
forming a bullseye in the bottom,
before stirring it all into a morning brew.
This is her cauldron, her ritual
for keeping her life on target.

by Ruth Zachary

The process of creating art, for me, whether
expressed in visual forms or in words, is an intuitive process,
in which connections between different images
are noticed, and demand to be recorded.
The connections between diverse images seem to
convey meanings beyond those of single images
viewed alone. They become visual metaphors. Often
similar ideas spill over from one medium to
another, as here, in a photo montage to a poem.

Above Image -My Muse Takes Me
Out to a Sidewalk Cafe

To see more of Ruth Zachary's Art work, visit www.rzachary.com and ruthzacharyart.blogspot.com