poem – Process Peace

“I like the way we make our dreams happen.” Lori Richards

I’m delighting in the astonishing culmination of a collaborative art venture with my friend, artist, Lori Richards. Our creative works—Lori’s paintings and my writing—are exhibiting together for a short time at Wall Space Gallery in Ottawa. She generously invited me to write prose poem (like) pieces towards her paintings and I leapt at the opportunity[1].

The vernissage (new word for me, it means a preview of an art exhibition) was last weekend but we dreamed the idea—a wish—to combine and show our art works many many years ago. The exhibit is called Seedbed.

Lori and I walk together almost every week. As our feet pound the leaf and petalled paths, the sidewalks, the pavement or the snow, we recount, gesturing to the winds, drawing models in the air with our fingers, the celebrations, the frustrations, the lamentations and the longings of creative process. Despite working in different mediums, our practices are very much aligned. Lori is a professional artist. She has been, and continues to be, a steady champion of my creative writing as I squeeze it in as best I can round my day job[2].

Leaping is the right description for the approach I used for Seedbed. I’ve written ad nauseum (emphasis on nausea) about how crippled I am when it comes to pushing my creative writing out into the world (submitting for publication). I didn’t have this issue in the past…it developed over the last few years …I don’t really know what it’s about, but I feel like I’m about to break through my own barriers[3]. I think I’ve been saying that for a year or so. Sigh.

For this project, writing prose poem-ish pieces for each of Lori’s seventeen different paintings, I wanted to practice less preciousness with my writing. And I wanted to experience (force myself) to let go of them as is. I created a few rules for myself to keep the creativity light and fun:

Gaze at the painting, but only for a short time
Use stream of consciousness writing (I wrote freehand for most of these in my notebook, and the pieces, as they were being written, often included arrows and connecting lines)
Adhere to first instincts (as in, whatever words or images pop up, write them down and don’t tinker very much or at all)
As soon as a piece feels finished, send it to Lori as “done”

This phase of development and creation worked relatively well, though I was surprised by the writing emerging. The pieces are whimsical and, in several cases, nonsensical. But, adhering to my own rules, I let them be.

Do look at the paintings at the gallery website – my reproduction here fails (dreadfully) to capture the vibrancy of colours.

There was only one pairing of works where the process was reversed, where my writing inspired Lori’s painting. Interestingly, (or maybe the better word is fortuitously), this became the title pairing in the exhibition: Lori’s seedbed painting and a breathy paragraph of my own that floated to me the week I made the decision to leave my marriage. Though Lori thinks of the Seedbed series as beginning January 2024, I feel it began closer to the creation of that garden focused paragraph in the fall of 2023. It was then Lori created her first “bed painting” (several paintings in Seedbed include an image of a bed). This first painting felt (feels) emblematic for me, for what I was/am moving through. That painting now hangs in my bedroom.

It has been wonderful experiencing the generative iterations of the series since. There have been additional bed paintings created beyond the exhibition submissions…they continue. I feel magically connected—in a way I can’t articulate—with each painting as they appear. The closest I can come to explaining my feelings is with the word blossoming.

And I wasn’t nervous in the days or hours leading up to the vernissage. The gallery’s curator displayed the works beautifully. She and the staff also produced a lovely brochure of a selection of paintings with their ekphrastic accompaniments. Both Lori and I were expected to speak briefly about our process and collaboration, and I planned to read two very short pieces[4]. But when I arrived at the gallery a cold panic sloshed in my stomach[5]. The gallery space filled quickly, bodies tumbling inside from the frozen February afternoon. I’m told there were 80 people but they all sort of blurred together blobbing round while I smiled and nodded and prayed the wine I was drinking would kick in. It didn’t.

When it was my turn to speak, I accepted the microphone with grace. I stumbled on the word ekphrastic (it is very hard to say)….garbled gravel in my mouth…my heart thrashed against my rib cage and leapt the base of my throat, but then, deep breath, pause. Reading my own words, my body calmed and settled from the very first sentence. My voice steadied and held. I’m told I was poised. I wish I could say I recovered soon after the short performance, but I felt rather sick with the adrenalin hangover for the remainder of the day and into the evening.

Still, it has been an accomplishment. And a progression. In the days since, I’ve felt delighted with the experience. And (perhaps?) even a little awe for the courage it took to leap.

[1] Ekphrasis is a written description, real or imagined, of a work of art. Another dear friend, Barbara Ponomareff, who I met years ago when I offered to carpool us to a wonderful (and remote) writer’s retreat, has published several exquisite ekphrastic works in The Ekphrastic Review.

[2] I’m blessed with continuing encouragement from so many people; you know who you are, I sing your adorations for sticking around, thank you.

[3] Intend to write about “next level writing” in the March blog post, so, stay tuned. Also, I promise to curtail the whining and actually get some pieces submitted.

[4] Another dear friend, also a weekly creative-conversation-while-walking companion, Carolyn Smart, very kindly suggested which work to read. And I’m tickled to learn that painting, Pink Room with Moon, sold to another Canadian poet on the strength of an Instagram promotional post even before the show was launched. So many collaborators throughout the whole process… why do we ever believe we work in isolation?

[5] Threatened a colonic…wholly inelegant I know. Vomiting might have been preferable. But the body chooses its own exit strategies. I managed to keep uh everything intact (emphasis on in).

Seedbed introduction (Lori in the background and Tiffany, gallery curator, to the let).

Seedbed reading

Pink Room with Moon reading

Poems float to me again. This hasn’t happened in a number of years. I’ve had phrases arrive but then it’s like the valve shuts off and word flow stops. If I force a phrase toward a poem, I butcher it. Poems feel ethereal, fragile. I choose the word float intentionally…it’s as if the words butterfly by, out the corner of my eye, or rather, my ear. I think I hear them instead of see them. Perhaps this varies because sometimes I visualize an image. I’ll have to pay closer attention to this experience to describe the process accurately here. Regardless, if not caught and written to the page the poem keeps moving and leaves me behind.

So, three poems in the last two weeks or so. The relief accompanying them, that they float to me at all, is palpable; I hadn’t realised how much I miss them. These latest poems arrived when I felt most depleted, when I was most physically and emotionally exhausted…not so much in a state that I’d given up, more that I’d given in…surrendered. I worry about this. How to invite the conditions of open receiving without the physical and emotional exhaustion[1]? I don’t know.

The following poem arrived during a lunch break last week…the first lines always feel the strongest, the most tangible, then I wrote the lines spooling from there until I could tell I was twisting my own meaning into them. Instead of forcing my own thoughts into the piece, and because I needed to return to the office, I left it alone. A couple of days later, an image, tangentially related, kept entering my mind when I thought about the piece. I interpreted this as a sign the two aspects/concepts wanted to be woven together in the one poem. I completed the following draft over the weekend[2].

Here’s where it gets interesting. This poem, I discovered, also communicates information about my long form writing project (and process) I hadn’t quite understood prior to writing the poem. I’ll try to explain. Last month I printed out the long form project (a book length work, very much in progress) and promised myself I’d read it. I haven’t. Instead, energized by the idea of working physically with pen and highlighters and paper instead of messing around in digital files on my computer, I used index cards to list different scenes associated with different characters. One side of each card listed scenes from the distant past, the other side listed scenes from a recent past. The long form project is, for the most part, creative nonfiction with several people. Sitting there, looking at all the characters on the desk in front in me, I realised I don’t have a card for myself[3]. One could (I have) dismiss this discovery, subsume the idea I’m the persona, the narrator, in this work, so, naturally, I’ll find my way into each of the scenes…somehow. But I’m fooling myself. Sitting there with all the cards on the desk I realised (duh) two things. One, this project is more about my own experiences and thoughts and reflections, and these aspects aren’t integrated (much) in the current draft[4]. Two, the voice I wish to narrate this project requires what I refer to as my audacious voice …and that voice my friends has taken a fucking vacation. And despair, despondency, desperation—all the dis- words of negation—set in fast. I put the project aside. Again.

Then this poem floated to the page with its battle cry of a title and emphatic last line to confirm, with a flood of relief, my audacious self will revive.

[1] I’ve also received poems in states of extreme emotion.

[2] It’s important to express my gratitude here. In my last blog post I’d lamented missing the spring chorus of frogs I don’t hear living in the city. A few days after publishing that post, a friend messaged to offer me his cottage for the weekend. Serendipity. I spent the glorious gift of a solo weekend in the woods reading (The Forty Rules of Love by Eilf Shafak, a romance toggling back and forth between Rumi, a chorus of characters, multiple POVs, in the 1200s, and a current day woman who falls in love with a writer (who is writing about the relationship between Rumi and Shams of Tabriz, also Sufism) then leaves her “perfect” marriage of twenty years for true love.) It rained most of the weekend which was also a gift because it provided the excuse to lounge in the screened in porch (which felt like a treehouse) and just read (and sleep) instead of canoeing my way round the lake. Unfortunately, I only heard a single peeper and a bullfrog; mating season suspended at this point of spring becoming summer. Instead, I endured the chainsaw to the eardrum that is the “song” Waterloo by ABBA blasting from a cottage across the lake. The universe does have a sense of humour. I prefer this song. I did enjoy the loons and the whip-poor-will night calls and the rose-breasted grosbeak’s day song. I did not manage to see those birds (I really wanted to see the rose-breasted grosbeak as I haven’t before) but did trace the phoebes and vireos amidst the wet leaves.

[3] When I first wrote this sentence I inadvertently wrote “cared” instead of “card”.

[4] The crazy thing is, I know I’ve discovered this before and even written about it here…and here…and then, I guess, I just…forget? Frustrating …and embarrassing…but also, human. Process is not linear and, apparently, the learning doesn’t build upwards from any previous achieved foundation….the whole thing seems more like dancing across quicksand.

Tag: poem

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