Friday Quote: On Imagination

"With all my ideas and follies I could one day found a corporate company for the propagation of beautiful but unreliable imaginings."

--Robert Walser

Corvus Moon

The artists I admired most last year at White Hart Renaissance Faire were from Corvus Moon Ceramic Arts. They made various pots, vases, pipkins and other pieces on site; everything from shaping the clay to firing was done before one's eyes.



I fell in love with several pieces, of course, but one had to come home with me. Its glaze gleams with coppers, blues, golds, greens and purples, and the ginko leaf is the perfect finishing touch. Full of Queen Anne's lace, it makes a perfect centerpiece.

Publication: Goblin Fruit

This morning a wonderful email waited impatiently in my inbox to be discovered. The Winter '08 issue of Goblin Fruit (which I wrote about earlier) is out at last, and in it, "Night Augur", a poem of my "own pure brain." To my surprise and deep pleasure, the Editors Who Shall Be Adored have even used it as a prologue to the issue, may-their-names-be-praised-forever.

Seriously, I am very happy and very grateful.

(There's even audio!)

Someday You'll Have Children Just Like You...

The Younger Daughter is the liviliest of our bunch. Great Scott and I are, as The Older Daughter likes to remind us, aged and slow, and her sister, as Great Scott and I like to remind her, is energy conservative (save her father prefers the briefer, 4 letter word in all its simplicity). This means that The Younger Daughter often finds herself wandering about the house forlornly looking for something interesting to do while the other three members of the family are preoccupied. Christmas break has evidently been especially hard on her, but ever the innovative child, she managed to entertain herself with pen and pencil. The results are telling.

Once upon a time there was a little dragon. Now she was a good little dragon. Her family hoarded not gems but books. The little dragon got on nerves a lot. Though she tried her best she always got on other dragons' nerves.

One day she was bored, and she'd read all her Humanology books. So she went to her sister who was reading.

"Leave me alone. I don't have any ideas. Now go away!" her sister snapped. Then she burned the little dragon's backside very fiercely, and the little dragon left her sister to the book.

So the little dragon went to her mother who was also reading.

"I'm bored. Do you have any ideas of what to do?"

Her mom was not in a good mood. "Youngling, you are taking your life into your claws. The only things that stands between you and my snapping sanity is this book!" her mother answered and gave her a good whack with it.

Sadly the little dragon left to find her father. Suddenly her father flew in the lair and removed the umbrella from over the book he brought.

"Daddy..." the little dragon began.

"I'm reading. Leave me alone, Child!" and he lashed her with his tail.

By now the little dragon's backside was hurting miserably, so she made an ice pack and lay down. Then she drew. She drew dragons killing with flame, diamond spear and tail. The her parents came in with her sister and saw the painting and realized the suffering they had caused her and asked for forgiveness, and the little dragon gave them just that, and her family learned to think before they acted.

Green Garnets and Silver

I am inordinately proud of finishing this. I've been alternately fiddling with it and ignoring it since last winter. Completion! Huzzah!

Marian Jordan Lewanowski and MJL Photography

Last week I received an email from Jordan unexpectedly. I've still no idea how he stumbled across Quotidian Light or what about it caught his eye, but whatever the cause, I'm grateful. He sent me a link to his website, and while you're visiting there, I strongly recommend that you explore his gallery. Light holds an inexplicably strong fascination for me, and Jordan's photographs are to Thomas Kincade's (the "painter of light"'s) paintings what Oliver, Kenyon or Nye's poems are to Hallmark's. We're talking no comparison, here, people.

When Jordan asked if I'd be interested in linking to his site, I replied that I would but that I wanted to be able to give my readers more than just a link. He very kindly consented to letting me post an introduction to him and his work, for which I'm very grateful. You'll find it below. Enjoy!

Marian Jordan Lewandowski (MJL) is a freelance photographer based in Europe whose work has been published in various places including the April 2003 centerfold of the internationally recognized American periodical Popular Photography. Jordan describes the photos he strives to take as, “Uncommon, difficult to categorize, on the point of poetry, expressing deepest spiritual values, depicting the coexistence of a man and nature as well as mysticism.”

Because of the high esteem he holds for the natural strength and beauty of reality, the confidence and respect he holds for the viewers of his work, and his trust in and respect for his own talent and skill, almost no PS manipulation is used in Jordan's work . Some of the highlights and reoccurring themes that characterize photos from MJL Photography are as follows:

Italy-the beauty of this Mediterranean country.
Poland-and thestrength of wonderful uncontaminated nature.
New York, Manhattan - energetic places
Van Gogh - his madness in colour
Old Dutch Masters of 16th century - their use of light and tone,
Poetry - notably the English Romantics

Jordan also has a solid appreciation of universal Christian values and has involved himself in numerous voluntary organizations as well as Students' Christian Societies. He writes, "...I consider life to be a meeting - a meeting with God, with other people--Christians and non-Christians, with God present in nature ..The most beautiful thing that a human being can experience is the possibility of true dialogue; my website is such an attempt--my private but open dialogue with the world, with other open-minded, sensitive people ..."

JML is the author of a book of poetry and photos dedicated the mystic Rome, entitled Roma--Citta Aperta (Rome--The Open City).

One question for you, Jordan, when you read this: where can we find your book?

Friday Quote: On Spilling Over

"We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out." ---Ray Bradbury

Usually I let the Friday quote stand alone, but today some thoughts on Bradbury's words are chasing themselves around in my head. I have not been writing much of late. Here on the blog, yes, but not poetry, and not on topics of particularly deep concern. Call it a period of gestation; call it laziness; call it writer's block; call it what you will. I know its truest nature is my own unwillingness to see with "poet-vision".

Beth at Inscapes asked me on her latest meme, "When do you *see* the things you *show* us in your poems? Do your eyes ever just pass over the world as mine do, or do you always see things the way I always narrate events?"

I recognize the things that spill into my work only when I've come to a point of surrender, usually through physical exaustion or emotional despair. The cup, though, is always filling, always filling, always filling somewhere underneath the surface, deep beneath my desperate attempts to block its subterranean source with trivialities: compulsive reading, eating, internet perusing, cleaning closets, mopping floors--anything to block its flow. I can tell you why so many writers have been alcoholics and suicides: it hurts to "*see*". The vision is unquestionable, definitive, certain and strong, both in intensity of light and in depth of darkness, and for the poet, often it isn't just a matter of seeing (as in witnessing) these things, but a even more a matter of becoming at once both the light and darkness within the poem, especially during the writing process. There is beautiful stuff within the cup, yes, but it is so exquisitely lovely because its beginning was unlovliness. A poet is an alchemist who transforms not lead, but dung, usually his or her own, with no guarantee of gold as the end result of the process.

So, to answer your question, Beth, yes, the deepest part of me does continually interpret the world around me through transformative vision, but it's too painful to live a daily life from this place, so I "block" its insight purposefully (and too often compulsively) in order to be able to function like I think a "normal" person should. Not doing this would be the emotional and spiritual equivalent of walking around having had one's skin flayed from the flesh.

The blocking itself is problematic in other ways, of course. A guard can only be on watch so long before weariness decreases his or her effectiveness. That's what happened last night. I'd been blocking to the point of sleeplessness, and Teri's post yesterday on Bo of the Bales contained an unintentional challenge, one that an intrinsically contrary person such as myself could hardly pass up: to turn an unwelcome and somewhat bizzare phone call about menstruation and irritable bowel syndrome into something of literary value. My full intent in posting my reply (draft-y though it was) in the comments was to be satirical and above all, clever. Instead the cup tipped, and I got broadsided with not entirely comfortable observations on the human condition. Good insights, but not particularly warm fuzzy ones. Granted, this poem wasn't especially painful to write, but years of guarding the cup have made it harder to tip and made me more cautious about allowing it to do so, since I've no idea from poem to poem whether the "beautiful stuff" inside will be in its raw or refined form.

Kay Redfield Jamison Interview

Sunday after church, as I headed out to pick up the girls at their grandmother's house, I stumbled across an interview with Kay Redfield Jamison on NPR concerning her new book, Exuberance. Jamison is the author of An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (her personal experience with bipolar disorder), Touched with Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (on the link between the two), and Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide. She's a psychiatrist and professor at John Hopkins Medical School and one of the world's foremost authorities on manic depression. She's also a writer who will take your breath away and knock your socks off.

Jamison has been researching the emotional state of exuberance for some time now, gathering information from a variety of sources. She says there is a surprising lack of words from the fields of medicine and psychiatry with which to describe exuberance . Surprisingly enough, she finally found the vocabulary she was looking for primaily in the field of theology. The arts--literature, visual arts, dance--were the next best source.

The link between creativity and joy, creativity and despair, creativity and emotions, period, gnaws at me. And now, to throw theology into the mix. Hmmm. . . Methinks Exuberance is a book to procure, peruse and ponder postehaste.

Black Friday

A most decided introvert, I shudder at the mere approaching, even only in thought, of the Temple of Mammon (the mall) on the busiest shopping day of the year. No holiday bargains for me, sadly, but the day was a rousing success, nonetheless!

I spent Friday untangling phone line, snipping wires from a defunct security system and crawling through the attic, my elbows and knees balanced precariously on the joists to keep from falling through the ceiling, in order to run a wire from our existing phone line to my computer downstairs.

I love playing with electricians tape and wires and electricity and getting everything all hooked up and ready to go and the phone still works and you're covered in isulation with your hair looking like Nicholas Cage's in Raising Arizona and you don't even get shocked this time because you remember not to lick your fingers to twist the little copper wires together after you've stripped the plastic insulation off them without turning off the current at the outside box and then at last you're standing with the phone line in one hand and you put the little pluggy dohickey into your computer and. . .

it won't work.

And you do a little checking and then discover that your computer has no modem.

And you feel a bit foolish.

And your phone won't work for some reason, either, with this little pluggy do-hickey plugged in. Hmmmmmm. . .

So you call up your computer genius father who is smarter even than Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or any of those guys, the computer genius father who built a computer from pieces-parts when you were little and taught you to count in binary when you were eight and how to solder circut boards when you were twelve and how to play Hunt the Wumpus back when computers used cassette tapes instead of floppy's or CD's. . .and you call him up and he says he's probably got a modem lying around somewhere, so you run errands to get movies and groceries and swing by to see him while you're at it and he shows you a thingy a lot like the little pluggy do-hickey that goes on the end of a phone cord but is just a little bigger, and you say, "Yes!!! That looks more like the size of the hole I plugged the phone line thingy in, but it didn't work!" And he raises one eyebrow and grins and tells you you plugged the internet line into the networking hookup place and then he finds a modem and gives it to you and says the phone should work a lot better if you put THIS in your computer and THEN hook up the phone line to it, and you go home and do that and. . .

Voila!! It works!!!

And you go watch really cool movies with Great Scott and The Princess and The Fairy for the rest of the evening and are very, very, very happy.

The end.

Your After-lives

Supposedly, after you've scribbled down five alternate lives, you're supposed to go out and do something related to one of them. (For example, go to some stables and do a trail ride if one of your lives was a cowboy.) The idea isn't to chuck your own life out the window, but to play. So this morning I wrote thirty minutes worth of fantasy fiction before I got out of bed.

And something happened.

I have energy. Frenetic energy. I'm trying to eat everything in the house (insert picture of large Muppet, somewhere between Sweetums and Animal, stomping through the forest chanting, "Sugar! Sugar! Sugar! MEEEEEEAAAAAT!!!"). It's only 10 a.m. and I've got three loads of laundry done and have tormented the cat. I want to write MORE, but I can't sit still, have to get up and walk around restlessly. I want to run. Run through the woods. Lope like the wind! Rob a bear of its kill and howwwwwwwlll!!!

Ahem. Yes. Well.

So. What will you do with your one wild and precious life?

If You Had Five Other Lives . . .

I've been working my way through a book on creativity. A sort of writer's block therapy between covers. One of the exercises last week was to quickly think of five other lives you'd lead besides this one. Examples given were painter, cowboy, policeman, teacher (for crazy and/or the really dedicated among you!), dancer, etc. . . You're not supposed to put too much thought into it--just do it, then look at it. One of the main purposes of the book is to get uptight people like me to remember how to PLAY and then dare to DO it!

I was intrigued with my results. I chose

Watercolor painter
Fantasy/sci-fi book writer
Web-page designer (I know NOTHING about this, but it "feels" like it could be fun.)
Dancer
Sorceress/Prophetess (Yeah, it's going beyond the scope of what the book intends, but hey, it's creative!)

It made me curious to know what other people might say, so I'm going to go post a link to Randy's website and see if anyone else wants to volunteer a little self-disclosure.