While I resonate quite a bit with the critiques of this chapter Gina offered in her reading response to it about a month back (excess “psychobabble,” tiny sample pool, all of the writers interviewed being white, etc), and agree that drawing conclusions about creativity in general from so small a group of individuals whose experiences may not parallel those of the vast majority of writers or artists across the globe is a questionable move at best, I want to share some thoughts on what I find worthwhile/useful about the comments the interviewed writers, and the author himself, put forth in this section of the book, in part because I’m trying to push past my well-trained readiness to fiercely critique texts with which I take issue, and instead cull something useful from even those I probably wouldn’t pick up were it not for assigned readings in academic contexts.
To begin, I appreciated the validation of writing Csikszentmihalyi offered early on, framing the act as a means by which people with access to stories in book form can push past the limits of “knowing only what happened to us or to those whom we have met.” It’s an obvious truth he’s naming, but in some ways, one that often gets overlooked. Were people dependent only on mass media in the form of televised news program, Hollywood films, and the oftentimes skewed reporting of corporate newspapers for information on the world beyond their fingertips, it’s frightening to think about how much less informed our planet would actually be. Beyond mere pleasure, literature serves a profound social role, namely by making tangible and noteworthy that which readers in one geographical area of a country, a continent, or the world, would have limited access to without the presence of books. I found this assertion a powerful jumping-off point for the discussion that followed on how writers actually go about crafting their work.
While I’m not especially familiar with the writings of most of the authors Csikszentmihalyi cited, I thought each had something to say about how they write that I could apply to my own creative process. Madeleine L’Engle’s remarks on “intuition and intellect working together… making love,” as prerequisite to effective writing, read like a gem of a quote, and had me thinking back on both some rewarding and some frustrating creative writing experiments I’ve engaged with this semester. Not surprisingly, it seemed, in reflection, that the more gratifying of the bunch were created with that balance L’Engle hints to, whereas the more stalled of the projects were (and remain) stuck on using either intuition or intellect alone.
Though I’m not a big fan of his work, Mark Strand’s comments on poetry being “about feeling one syllable rubbing against another, one word giving way to another, and sensing the justice of that relationship between one word, the next, the next…” rang very true for me. I enjoy and prioritize the music of poetry, both written and verbal, and sometimes feel as though the primacy I afford the sound and musicality of writing endeavors is regarded as elementary or immature, especially so by authority figures in academic settings. So, though Strand wasn’t necessarily speaking about the sonic qualities of poetry in this quote, I read into his words an appreciation for the musicality born of close attention to the rapport between words and syllables in any text, and appreciated garnering some sense of this consideration as important to a widely canonized writer whose poetics and politics I’d previously all but dismissed. (Here reappears the idea of garnering something useful from even artists whose creative output doesn’t do much for me.) Strand’s cited “constant alternation between a highly concentrated critical assessment and a relaxed, receptive, nonjudgmental openness to experience,” as required balance for cultivating “good new work,” along with his comments on “something always going on [in the back of his mind]… always working, even if it’s sort of unconsciously, even though I’m carrying on conversations with people and doing other things,” sounded very familiar to me, as I read my own creative processes mirrored in those words. Finding that connection, I was able to open myself up to some of Strand’s sentiments that didn’t seem as recognizable, namely that of sitting down to write “without anything specific in mind.” I found myself wondering why my impetus to write is and has so often been because I feel like I have something very specific to explore, and what I might gain from pushing myself to write, even if there’s no concrete “point” or “purpose” to the project.
Hilde Domin’s emphasis on needing to write when she felt most “alone and helpless,” following her mother’s death, and “[flying] into language,” when such tragedy struck, spoke volumes about the utility of writing as a form of personal (and, potentially, collective) healing or therapy. I imagine this is one of the key reasons our psychoanalyst Csikszentmihalyi included her comments here. Additionally, I found Domin’s take on tuning out the world of critics, and the priority placed in writing circles on big names or recognizable personalities—instead learning how to be her own critic, by cultivating a blend of closeness to and distance from her craft—hugely relevant to my, and probably many other emerging writers’, struggles for validation, and attempts to maintain integrity in the course of cultivating creativity and promoting one’s work. “While you are doing it, you are in it,” she states. “But you must always keep also a distance. And evidently the more you have the skill, the craft, the more you are able to at the same time be in it and also keep the distance and know what you are doing.” I would imagine this quote could apply to artists working across multiple disciplines, and I think it connects well to Csikszentmihalyi’s earlier stated notions about “inhabiting the field” you aim to make art in; that is, if your aim is to excel as a poet, you need be immersed in reading, listening to, and engaging in constant dialogue with other poets. To the extent that one is engrossed in her/his field of interest, clarifying what schools of thought s/he most aligns with, most runs counter to, etc, one can likely nurture an inner critic capable of honestly determining what’s working, and what’s not, in any given project. I appreciate this perspective, in large part because I find the idea of relying on the feedback of peers who may not know one’s creative work over the course of an extended period of time, or may not grasp the aims and purposes of a creative project to the same extent as the creator her/himself does, to be a fault-riddled paradigm for generating useful criticism or evaluation. This is not to say external feedback doesn’t have an important role to play in developing or editing any creative work, just that Domin’s emphasis on being able to nurture your own inner critic, and not growing entirely reliant on assessment from without, feels to me an important endeavor for any self-proclaimed artist.
Lastly, I though the discussion of internalizing rules and limitations in one’s creative pursuits, as related to Anthony Hecht’s work as a lyric poet, offered some essential insights on the role of discipline and clarity of intentions, specifically in achieving success (not commercial success, but personal fulfillment). Hecht’s emphasis on putting order, or crafting a “formal structure,” to “the stuff I get out of the unconscious,” as distinguished from Allen Ginsberg’s project of “annotating the activity of his mind,” seemed to highlight the role revision, editing, “fussing and fiddling,” play in his own creative process. Since I’m also often invested in communicating some idea, or perspective on a social issue, clearly and effectively to a readership or listening audience (though, like Hecht, also find great value and pleasure in that “Ginsberg-ian” ethos of documenting the mind’s moment-to-moment workings, even if it’s not a pursuit with which I align myself), I found in Hecht’s perspectives validation for what, at my most self-critical moments, I can deem an excessively scrupulous attention to detail, structure, and lucidity of conveyed ideas in my own written work. Though my and Hecht’s poetry are probably galaxies away from each other in terms of content or even physical appearance on a page, his inclination towards discipline, as a precondition for liberation “from the jumbled onslaught of raw experience,” left me affirmed in and with my own such propensities.
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