Martha Graham

 

 

THE OPEN ROAD

peace, love, happiness & understanding

 

April 4, 2024

 

Creativity!

 

Kim sent some helpful words on the subject of creativity by Martha Graham, a couple of poems, and an essay:

 

Letter from Martha Graham to Agnes deMille

 

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.

And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. 

It is not your business to determine how good it is; nor how valuable it is; nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you.

Keep the channel open…

No artist is pleased…

There is no satisfaction whatever at any time.
There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction; a blessed unrest.

 

(Martha Graham was a revolutionary dancer and choreographer in New York in the mid-twentieth century, here writing a letter to her friend Agnes deMille)

*

 

                       Wild Visioning

 

They say her name is Susan, and she holds these 

“Why not?” sessions somewhere east, up the Gorge. 

She’ll ask, Why should we believe only one can say, 

“I have a dream…”? She says, “Why have freedom 

if we don’t sing out loud the best we could ever say?”

 

So they practice wild imagining. People get fierce 

and joyful, saying, “What if I…What if we…?” 

They start with dark news, and turn it inside out. 

They vision, then they plan, and then they act. 

Once they shake things up, they’re hard to stop.

They summon mayors. Then city councils catch

the fever. Then voters start to see things otherwise.

Some friends went to learn what it’s all about. They 

never came back. Now they’re comets, lighting 

our way across the sky. —And you? And I?

 

*

 

           How to Make a Poem

 

Let it open like a flower—but you won’t 

need the bud, blossom, scent, or petals.

 

Let it beat like a heart—without naming

anatomy, blood, valves, counting the pulse.

 

Let it be warm as sunlight fingering 

through storms to find you shivering.

 

And may it address the world of silences, 

of kinship short a few right words.

 

Now take down the scaffold. Let it grow 

by brevity: Open hearts warm the world.

 

*

 

Kim does a good deed every day. He writes a poem. In addition to being a writer, Kim has been a teacher of writing for many years. He is a treasure trove of ideas on this subject. He even sent an essay on someone else’s essay!:

 

Creativity

How Naomi Shihab Nye does it…for example in her essay “Maintenance”

 

She likes eccentrics and she remembers details about them. She looks at her subject—housework, order, maintenance—sideways, while looking directly at people. The essay begins as a catalog of people, with each including observation, location, dialog, and now and then an oblique observation on maintenance, and the deeper meaning of maintenance: keeping a place for the life of the spirit.

 

One trick is to keep changing categories as a way of keeping the range of interest broad, the opportunity to include rich details wide, the essay in the realm of daily life: “Barbara has the best taste of any person I’ve ever known—the best khaki-colored linen clothing, the best books, the name of the best masseuse.”

 

The narrative voice can move from one topic to another—maintenance, feminism: “I never felt women were more doomed to do housework than men; I thought women were lucky. Men had to maintain questionably pleasurable associations with less tangible elements—mortgage payments, fan belts and alternators, the IRS. I preferred songs, and the way people who washed dishes immediately became exempt from after-dinner conversation.”

 

She takes every opportunity to bring detail to her sentences: on Thoreau, “A wealthy woman with a floral breakfast nook once told me I would ‘get over him,’ but I have not—documented here, I have not.”

 

And she lets Marta Alejandro have the last word. “Is your house still as big as it used to be?”

 

—Kim Stafford

 

(If you want a copy of Naomi Shihab Nye’s essay “Maintenance,” let me know and I can mail or email it to you.)—JS

*

 

Actor, writer and director Keith Scales sent a couple of quotes and a poem on the subject of creativity:

 

Here’s from William Faulkner’s Nobel prize acceptance speech:

 

(His output was the result of) “a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something that did not exist before.”  

 

The Choice

 

The intellect of man is forced to choose

perfection of the life, or of the work,

And if it take the second must refuse

A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

When all that story’s finished, what’s the news?

In luck or out the toil has left its mark:

That old perplexity an empty purse,

Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.

 

—W.B. Yeats

 

And:

 

“Don’t talk about it or you’ll lose it:”

 

—Ernest Hemingway, from The Sun Also Rises

 

—Keith Scales

 

*

 

Deborah Buchanan wrote about her creative process:

 

My Process of Creativity

 

I waste a lot of time. I do the laundry. I cook something. I procrastinate—I’m a champion at waiting for another hour, another day, maybe another lifetime. All the while I am pondering, turning ideas and phrases over in my head. Or maybe I turn my attention aside and let whatever the idea is gestate in darkness. Many, many slips of paper with little notes on them. Look at my kitchen counter right now—phrases, words, topics, the beginnings of poems. Some I come back to and a flash happens. Other times I wonder, What could I have been thinking? I listen for a dream. In fact, some of my best poems began as a dream, a voice that spoke to me. In all this, time doesn’t matter. Some poems wait for years, others die on the vine. All of that is okay. I remind myself that Stanley Kunitz wasn’t particularly prolific—he said he only wrote a poem that spoke to him, he didn’t force things. There is also a quote from Theodore Roethke that I have repeated to myself countless times. It goes something like this: “A poet spends his life standing outside in the rain, waiting for the lightning to strike.” A perfect image in the Northwest. 

 

Here is one poem I wrote about the process.

 

Her Gaze Never Drops

 

The muse is angry,

her words sting,

she wants to be inside you, 

a deep place you rarely find.

It is like a seed, the shell broken.

Through the cracks, words.

Here, this is yours, 

see the clear tunnel.

Where have you been?

 

The fist can be hot, the sound hard.

We stand in the open, 

crackling vibrations around us,

listening our only option.

 

Another poem, which comes with a story. Many years ago I was at the Gurukula Botanical Reserve in India’s Western Ghats. Wolfgang was showing me around, plant lover to plant lover. When we were in the orchid area he pointed to some dirt and said, “This is where the underground white orchid flower blooms.” Well, as an earth sign I went wild. I tried and tried to write a poem about that. Only nine years later as I was at a workshop and learning about the fungus on plant roots did an idea come. This is the result.

 

white orchid

 

waxy petals unfurl slowly against the tropical earth pale insects burrow in

drawn by fragrance escaping molecule by molecule through soft loam

surrounding the tendril of whitened stem piercing soil branching off

a flower then another creeping underground this life unseen unheeded

above ground our life drawing sustenance from the dark explosion

 

And a final story and poem. One summer I spent a week camping out on the Zumwalt Prairie as part of Fishtrap’s annual workshop. In a discussion I used the phrase retroactive prayers. A friend said, What a great poem idea. Again, many years passed and I couldn’t think of any way to use those two words. Then this last winter I wrote the following poem as part of a song cycle.

 

So my advice: Pay attention to suggestions, forget time, let the world offer itself to you.  And delete, delete, delete.

 

Retroactive Prayers

 

Moist pads on frog feet turn leathery, 

streams and ponds evaporate,

water’s flow drains, then vanishes.

 

     We didn’t think of them, we turn trying to see

 

Ants and beetles, roaches and worms too numerous 

to count, all refugees from untallied worlds, wander this

damaged landscape—habitats scorched, flooded—buried.

 

     We turn, we turn trying to see

 

Flocks of birds drawn to the sky, called by season’s 

change, by earth’s magnetic lines— overcome 

by heat and ash countless bodies drop to earth.

 

    We didn’t think of them, we didn’t think

 

Wanting what is lost, our prayers reach out 

to these abandoned lives, reach to recover and embrace, 

to become each other’s prayer of remembrance.

 

—Deborah Buchanan

*

 

Andy Larkin shared some thoughts about creativity from the ancient Mexicans:

 

Here through art I shall live forever…
A singer, from my heart I strew my songs
I carve a great stone, I paint thick wood
My song is in them…
I shall leave my song-image on earth

 

Toltecayootl a ycaya ninemiz ye nicã ayyo.
Ac ya nechcuiliz ac ye nohuan oyaz onicas a anniihcuihuana ayayyan cuica-nitl y yehetl y noxochiuh nõcuicayhuitequi on teixpã ayyo.
Hueyn tetl nictequin Tomahuac quahuitl nic ycuiloa yã cuicatl ytech aya oncan no mitoz in quemanõ in can niyaz nocuicamachio nicyacauhtiaz in tlpc

 

–Nahuatl poem (circa 1570)
Cantares Mexicanos, fol. 27r-27v

 

The Cantares Mexicanos is a collection of lyrical poetry from the courts of the Triple Alliance (Aztec). I think the poet was the philosopher-king of Texcoco, Nezahualcoyotl (Fasting Coyote). He’s the tough-looking guy on the Mexican 100 peso note.

 

Also:

 

The Artist

 

The artist: disciple, abundant, multiple, restless.
The true artist, capable, practicing, skillful;
maintains dialogue with his heart, meets things with his mind.

 

The true artist: draws out all from his heart;
works with delight, makes things with calm, with sagacity,
works like a true Toltec, composes his objects, works dexterously, invents; arranges material, adorns them, makes them adjust.

 

The carrion artist: works at random, sneers at the people,
makes things opaque, brushes across the surface of the face of things, works without care, defrauds people, is a thief.

 

-Nahuatl poem from the Codex Matritensis,
fol. 115 v. (208), ca. 1540—1585

 

—Andy Larkin

*

 

Elizabeth Domike is a poet and yoga teacher:

 

Sisters

 

We’ve talked about boundaries as sisters to creativity. These days I lean on them heavily. Not teaching yoga for an institution, but for the specific students who have been drawn to the material I share, some of the boundaries I have are defined. Say for time.

 

Every week I send a reminder with a theme for the next five days. And I head that with a photograph, one I have (most often) taken during the previous week. This is something I hold close when out and about it the world. What would work, what would set the tone, represent the world here and now in this place.

 

Every weekday morning I choose a poem to read at the end of class. I’ve tried doing this in advance and it doesn’t work as well as those spontaneous moments reading poems in the early dark. It is a kind of meditative practice after writing 750 Words and exploring the nature of my thoughts and emotions there so close to the dream state. For the poem I choose a key word or words, like relief, or old trees, or hyacinth. And then I read what comes up and choose one that has the length and tone that I think might work and might inspire an image or thoughtfulness to carry us all through the day… a tiny bit richer.

 

Then during the class, although I do prepare, (sometimes for hours, depending on the material), I let go, responding to who is there and what their needs might be. Each practice, an all-consuming creative act. This took years for me to be confident enough to do. It is a kind of free fall, with the invisible ropes being the structure I have spent time revisiting again and again.  

 

These practices have taught me that everything I do, can in some way, be expressed creatively. And most times is, without me even trying. Any experience of connecting to the sources we carry within and translating them into the language of the present moment is, in my opinion, an offering, a gift, a blessing for us all.  

 

—Elizabeth Domike

*

 

Here are a few of my poems that might relate to the subject of creativity in some way:

 

The trick of a poem is:

Don’t say too much.

If you do

*

 

i want to go to the place where poems come from

*

 

the unwritten poem

is completely useless

*

 

if i could put into words what i see out this window

i would do with language what no one has yet done

if i could say what this bean plant means

everyone would fall down and worship my poem

well, probably not

because, as it is, we don’t kneel before the bean plant

and water its roots with our tears

 

holy holy holy is the bean plant

the cup of coffee

the stuffed animals on the window sill 

that have been loved unto baldness

the song sparrow

the sunlight

and even the man sitting with his laptop

failing once again to say the unsayable

*

 

Like all good topics, the subject of “creativity” is endless. Many creative people have written about what they do, but most of the inspiration we get from them comes directly from the poems they’ve written, the paintings they’ve painted, the music they’ve played, the dances they’ve danced, the meals they’ve cooked, the gardens they’ve grown, the films they’ve made. A couple inspiring documentaries about artists at work are “Rivers and Tides” (2001) and “Shangri-La” (2019).

 

On Saturday, March 23rd, there was a wonderful book launch for my first book, The Nonstop Love-In: poems, stories, essays & other writings. It was a Love-In! The Multnomah County Library has ordered some copies. Check it out! You can get a copy at Belmont Books in Portland. You can order a copy by emailing me at: stallingsjohnny@gmail.com. It’s also available from the websites of Powell’s, Barnes & Noble, Amazon & IngramSpark. Coming soon to Powell’s Books on Hawthorne!

 

 

peace, love & happiness

—Johnny Stallings