Take Back Your Life!

I’ve been jumping around The Art of Recklessness: Poetry As Assertive Force And Contradiction. It’s due in two days and despite renewing it once I waited until almost the last minute to crack the cover. (Deadlines can be great motivators.)

The author Dean Young says, “We are all trying in the writing of poetry to bring about something that doesn’t exist, that will surprise us, delight us, perhaps, but we must always be prepared for its initial unrecognizability. The imagination is that which will not be subservient to so-called reality, so-called duty, not to expectation, requirement, prerequisite, obligation.”

Those lines remind me of the times people said to my ideas, “You’re not living in the real world.” What is the real world anyways and who defines it? I’m a big “what” person. I go for the what and worry about the “how” later. That philosophy has enabled me to do some terrific things I would not have done had I focused on the “howness” of it.

The other day I tried to get a ridiculously miniscule amount of funding for the creativity off-center in my town. I wanted to determine if a long vacant historic home had enough structural integrity to sustain a restoration, my what. I kept being asked, but “how” are you going to fund the restoration if it is sound? My attempts to start were squelched by thoughts that had barreled out-of-control down the avenue of the future.

It made me realize how a worldwide entrenched “how” brigade makes it difficult for folks with good ideas to get started. And many folks do it to themselves. They get an idea and talk themselves out of attempting it because they get bogged down with the how.

All the “big” things I’ve done in my life required me to embrace uncertainty. To just begin and trust that whatever I need will be sent my way. Creative acts are new by their definition. Like a daring poem, they are unrecognizable. They need to be unrecognizable.

Take some creative writing I did a few years back. I wrote a spoken word poem and read it to a group of women. They loved it. I sent it to an on-line magazine and got this rejection response, “The form isn’t recognizable.”

Yes, it didn’t look like any other poem I’ve seen. But it had its own rhythm. It spoke to women. It talked about wildness. It talked about transformation. It talked about jumping up to the moon. It talked about things that don’t normally happen in the real world.

Something new will not be recognizable. It will invoke feelings of uncertainty. It may even invoke feelings of anger because it dares to deviate from that which has been.

I can’t tell the funding folks the details of my how because my mind hasn’t invented it yet …

Thanks for the read. G.

p.s. Are you more of a “what” or a “how” junkie?