Monthly Archives: May 2013

How Do You Enjoy Your Creative Process?

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Recently I’ve been informed by a variety of esoteric sources–tarot cards, stars, and intuition–that the better part of my 59th year isn’t focused on making big projects happen but on “enjoying my creative process.” But what does this mean? Do YOU “enjoy” your creative process? How? Is that different than “working” it? I hope to blog about this–please add your thoughts!

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Russell Miller I enjoy the daydreaming part, coming up with ideas. Executing the work (great verb, huh? — you need to execute the work without actually executing it) is a long, painful struggle. I’m talking about composing and recording an album, but as Michael Kanin said, “I don’t like to write but I love to have written.”
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Jane Hermann-Simons I see all art as a process..I “enjoy” that process from the dreaming stage to gathering materials to creating the piece..I know there’s some angst in there too but if it weren’t enjoyable I probably wouldn’t do it! (speaking of visual art/craft here)

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Sasa Vazic I think we either have it within or not. When time comes, it just pops out. No hard work, no painful struggle. The whole life creates it without towards within.

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Susan Aylward You can definitely enjoy your creative process while making big projects happen! Take esoteric information for what it is.

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Roshan Houshmand i love my process – maybe she means focus on the process without aiming for results…?

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Hope Atterbury I think it’s more that my creative process enjoys me.

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Stella C Reed I absolutely enjoy my creative process and sometimes that is the same as ‘working” it.. But even when it’s hard work I would rather be engaged in that process than just about anything else.

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Cynthia Fusillo My creative process is what my work is about and really what my life is about at this point. …showing up, listening, having faith, getting out of the way, not judging , oh yes and ENJOYIng.

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Wednesday Nelena Sorokin For me, there’s a distinction between painting when I have a specific idea I’m bringing to fruition, and painting that is discovery. The latter is very enjoyable – pure joy, even – the sensuality of oil paint, feeling, smell, and the visual delight of watching color and shape relationships emerge. In the former type of painting all that is mitigated by impatience and frustration with the difficulty of making the painting be something that it might not want to be.

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Peter Frank I enjoy others’ creative process(es). I DEFINITELY work my own.

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Alfred Stanley Hmm … Sounds suspiciously like “to be is to do” …

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Jeanne Simonoff words come to me out of the air. if i make a list of these words then i have something to work with. writing is definitely a very physical activity and sometimes i just want to float on those words: tall blue stem, tigers behind the grass.

We Don’t Need No (Harvard) Education

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I have been having the pleasant experience of drinking a cafe au lait and looking at a manuscript of Joan Logghe’s poems–the ones written when she was poet laureate of Santa Fe.
As I was reading, I came across myself, of all things. Not surprising, as Joanie is my friend, but pleasing nonetheless. The poem is “Visiting Placitas” about an evening we spent at JB and Cirrelda Bryan’s studio. It was a hot night, and I was dancing around to music. Joan wrote:

when she dances you don’t see
her widowhood, her Harvard
education

I can’t wish for anything nicer to be said about me, ever.

3 Questions for Sari Krosinsky

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1. What is your personal/aesthetic relationship to the poetic line? That is, how do you understand it, use it, etc.
My idea of the poetic line is still evolving. It started with “The end of the line is where the rhyme goes” when I was a kid. I like Allen Ginsberg’s idea of the line as being tied to the breath, but I don’t think I’ve ever applied it. For a while I shaped my lines primarily on the principle that the end of one line should pull the reader onto the next. I still follow that idea, but more selectively.
In more recent poetry, I’ve tended to be more intuitive about line breaks. It was useful in developing my craft to study line breaks and other elements of form, to understand different aesthetic perspectives and consider them in relation to my own work. Now I find it most useful to set those considerations in the background, to draw on them when they feel right for a poem and be uninhibited by them when they don’t apply. That’s pretty much how I approach aesthetics in general—more rules to learn the better to break them.
2. Do you find a relationship between words and writing and the human body? Or between your writing and your body?
Writing and body are inseparable. My body is the filter I perceive the world through, the point of view that shapes the worlds of my poems. Readers’ bodies are the medium that connects them to those poems.
The long bout of clinical depression I’m going through makes this an interesting moment to reflect on the connection between my body and my writing. For me, depression is very much a bodily thing, both in origin and expression. I’m not sure yet exactly how that’s influencing my writing (other than supplying the subject of some of it), but my writing certainly has changed. Where I tended to favor subtlety in my earlier work (represented in “god-chaser”), now I tend towards explicitness. Depression has a nakedness about it—being unable sometimes to conceal it, having lesser emotions stripped away. Perhaps I am making my poems as naked as I feel.
3. Is there anything you dislike about being a poet?
It’s hard not to be able to write poems on command. Prose writing I can usually manage with or without inspiration, but poems seem immune to intention—or at least my intentions.
Short bio
Sari Krosinsky writes about the mundane in mythology and the sublime (and sublimely awful) in the ordinary. Her first full-length book, “god-chaser,” is available from CW Books. She received a B.A. in religious studies and M.A. in creative writing from the University of New Mexico. She lives in Albuquerque, N.M., with her partner and cat.
A newish poem
Coloring

First visit to the Locked Ward

Ariel looks on the blue-skinned
“Mulan” characters tacked
to the wall among others

from the stack of Disney color-ins

and says, “At least they’re
the same color.” I think,
“They’re not” and “Did I

make friends with a bluist?” 

Second visit 

I pencil flower patterns in pastel
colors in the stained-glass

coloring book mom brought me.
I gave her the same sort of book

with nativity scenes for her birthday

in May. Despite the pastels

and flowers, drawing fills the minutes 

my hands can’t stay still.

First visit

We share the atrium between the wards
for Taco Day and when musicians
come to tame the wild patients
with flute, piano and drawing supplies.

I select colored pencils to draw the same
comic book dyke I always draw, begin

a starfish, but the dots giving it texture
take too long and I leave off.

Home

The stained-glass coloring book
languishes on a shelf. The sheet of paper

with its dyke and starfish crinkles,

folded in the clear plastic bag 

I took things home in. I don’t try

to color my way back to the safety
of guards and locked doors. I hold on

to you ’til life stops coloring me blue.
 
 

Sestina and Villanelle by Doug Bootes

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Beyond Winter

In order to write a Haiku about spring
Confine the paradigm to real time,
Plum blossoms, cherries and a humming bird
Nectar feeding intent of a flower,
Will seventeen syllables make enough words
In a brain thinking volumes and books?

Kerouac wrote about girls toting books
In short skirts, on sunlit Spanish steps of spring
Using unpunctuated flowing perfect words
In a manner transcending time,
Blowing memories into a roadside flower,
Flitting from thought in the chest of a bird.

Be careful not to crush a trembling bird,
One in the pocket is better than two on the books.
And to capture a moment, a wild flower,
Blooming, running melody, bubbling spring
Into a dew drop golden web spinning time
Might be too many words.

I question the assumption, stumble on with words,
Drunk with the dance of a caged bird,
Pacing the immeasurable floor, marking time
With colored pins on maps and hidden note books;
For now, I am ready, ready to spring,
To capture the moment, to apprehend the essence of a flower.

So why write poems about a flower?
Why articulate thoughts into words?
Why not lie down in the snow blossom spring,
Live life as a song, learning how from any bird,
Experience now what’s been written in books,
For no one’s a hero but time.

Put away memory, put away time
Hold in your mind my holographic flower
Meditate briefly on these three stacks of books
Feed them to your soul slowly, forgetting the words.
Time is the cage, our self is the bird
Fly away in the fall, return in the spring.

Spring time,
Song bird serenades flower,
Words fill up with books.

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Ghost Flower
I remember what we were, wonder why
Fragile rain sun tears, beads on the sill
Lingering scents, orchids under night sky

Floating in lost, unable to fly
Quiet and luminous, fragrant and still
I remember what we were, wonder why

Thrashing in lust, pretend not to die
Succulent, voluminous empty to fill
Lingering scents, orchids under night sky

Never is enough, grasping at the sky
Loving like credit, screwing like the bill
I remember what we were, wonder why

Pull then apart, scream not to cry
Stars shrivel, mercurial balls on the sill
Lingering scents, orchids under night sky

Laundered for future, laying tears out to dry
Glide over the moon, fly past it until
I remember what we were, wonder why
Lingering scents, orchids under night sky.

“He stole your lawn?” she said. At The Land/an art gallery

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“He stole your lawn?” she said.
may 24 – june 22
Opening Reception Fri May 24 5-8pm

THE LAND/ gallery
419 Granite NW • 505-242-1501

hours by appointment

THE LAND/an art gallery presents a reflection of, and on, unsanctioned Albuquerque Art. 3’crows cast shadows on reinterpreted street maps. A wall of documentary photographs leaves the impression of an image, behind the peculiar story of a lawn on the lam. Through photography, sculpture, collage, painting and the word, a group of Albuquerque-based artists tour us through the local-as small, strange spectacle.

biking burque
KATHY CHILTON, LANCE CHILTON, MARSHALL KOVITZ

how i see it
RAY GRAHAM III: THE ARTISTE

he stole your lawn?
ADAM RUBINSTEIN

a block & 1/2
THOMAS CATES

breathing
MARY LAMBERT

crows
YEI EHEKATL