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the poetic process

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I'd like to share some of the poetic processes I have used/dicovered in my journey as a writer. Most people are familiar with the idea of 'inspiration' but how does it arise and how can one cultivate it?
A 'muse' has particular historical connotations for English poetry. The poet in celtic times worshipped the feminine principle as personified by nature and all it contains, and represented by his love, who may be his actual lover or some one yearned for, even, in Wordsworth's case his sister. The muse represents the divine female creative principle as wife, mother and wise old woman ( or witch) all aspects have both positive and negative aspects hence the poetry and experence inspired by the muse can be loving, wonderful and happy or sad, frightening and disastrous.
This was seen as the main theme of poetry, the relationship of man with woman and by extension man (mankind) with nature. It made no difference if the poet was a woman since the roles were simply reversed and a poetess still worshipped nature as the divine feminine.
This poetic 'field' remains with us still, although the natural world or our knowledge of it is limited by urban living and the religious and mythic substructure to poetry is lessened although still there.
Myth has been replaced by philosopy and science, organized religious belief by individual spirituality but the basic idea still holds; most poetry is about relationships and emotions. Other themes, satire, humour and purely intellectual poems are around but poetry about relationships to another or to nature predominate.
Does that mean one has to be in love to write poems, hardly. But it does mean one is emotionally engaged with the world.
How to cultivate inspiration? Sometimes it comes unbidden, especially as the result of falling in love or losing love, one joyous, the other tragic, but either way the poet is at its mercy and writes without needing to do anything except have paper and pen handy. But what about other times?
Inspiration is a heightened sense of being, many poets use drugs /alcohol to achieve this state. It's dangerous but lets face it a lot of poets do/did it. It is not the only way of course, going out into nature itself and experiencing its power is a fine way to be inspired. Also the trance like state of being intoxicated is availabe at night in the hynogogic state between waking and sleeping when the mind is freed from rational thought but still using words to create. Joni Mitchell in a tv interview called this state 'the blarney' and said she got many of her lyrics this way. Keep pen and paper by your bed and force yourself to wake up and write down what's run through your mind. Don't think you'll remember it in the morning, you won't, it will be gone forever. That's the discipline.
The other main area of inspiration is dreams. This is true not just for poetry, many ideas or solutions come to people in dreams and its also been a major source of prophetic power.
For me dreams have often been a source of inspiration for poems, usually it is a visual scene of great clarity.
This can occur to anyone and may come without the poet doing anything (except sleeping) but I have found that solitude and creating a quiet, studious/contemplative lifestyle over a period of days or even weeks enhances my dreams enormously. Its as if the more unpeopled my day is the more peopled my dreams become. People appear in my dreams and talk to me or interect in some emotional way, animals, even insects may appear and relay telepathic messages that can be both intellectually meaningful and/or deeply emotional. These experiences are wonderful in themeselves and remain as clear memories and often have prophetic value when they actually occur years later. It's as if the prophetic dream has prepared me for the reality and given me a better ability to cope. Some dreams can thus be poetic, in my case only on a personal scale, I leave Nostradamus quatrains to others.
These dreams are not chaotic, they have narrative, occur over time (although brief) and have a setting in the same way a real meeting or situation would. They are valuable because they take me where I normally would not go, I met all sorts of people in all sorts of places, some incredibly frightening or weird, others joyous or deeply moving. They can invole spiritual learning, emotional comfort or are just plain interesting.
I often use them in my writng, they seem to spark off a poem or perhaps lurk behind a poem as an unstated theme. Are these people I met real? I don't know, I think they are and we are meeting in dreams that we share. A psycholgist who denies the supernatural would say its all a product of my subconscious. It doesn't matter either way they are valuablebecause they are not mundane and jolt me out of everyday reactive thought.
The only other tools you need to be 'inspired' is the knowledge and literary skills to put your inspiration into poetry. But that's another subject.

Like a lot of important writing, reading this felt more like remembering than learning.

Some of it I consciously apply in my life, some I have forgotten to, all I intend to.

cheers,
Jess
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