Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Pruning A Wild Creativity

Wild creativity where I continually have to prune the excesses, this seems apropos. Slicing, trimming, removing. Articles, connectives, pronouns, prepositional clauses, whatever slows down the immediacy. Sudden leaps from one image to another, something invisible hovering between that connects them, something other than a random placement on the page, that is. Honing while listening to an internal rhythm, the syncopations of an inner aesthetic, what's overdone and weedy, or too sparse, how to. Otherwise I'd overrun, a confusing conglomerate of overgrowth.

Meditate perhaps for the same reason. To hone wildly outbursting thoughts. Clarify an inner terrain. Make it livable within the self. A friend recently said that I had the busiest mind of anyone they knew and no wonder I had to meditate.

Editing oneself. Ah, so.

How about you?

3 comments:

  1. Honing, yes. I'm a natural at it, but I'm surprised when I look back at some of my writing and see how much trimming it needs. (My blog was good training for that.) Too sparse can be a problem too, but not as often.

    Hemingway once bet his friends that none of them could shorten any of his sentences. Whatever you may think of Hemingway, he knew about writing.

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  2. Richard, hi! Nah, Hemingway doesn't appeal to me - too sparse, too 'manly.' (Ooops, is that essentialism?) Aniis Nin, now there's a rich garden (joking, though I've enjoyed her writing). I like rich, sensual, complex writing full of tactility and ideas. Pablo Neruda. Helene Cioux. Clarice Lispector. Almost falling over the edge, a simplicity but teeming with fecundity.

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  3. Trimming - yes, we follow an internal rhythm on what is enough and what is too much. And I'd agree with you, your writing is honed to where its glowing.

    I think that's it - shining the writing until the luminosity.

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A Pulsing Imagination - Ray Clews' Paintings

A video of some of my late brother Ray's paintings and poems I wrote for them. Direct link: https://youtu.be/V8iZyORoU9E ___