Happenstance and the Surrealists

Surrealism is an art movement that began in the 1920s and is known for the creation of hybrids of words and images often generated through the experiences of happenstance, a circumstance especially due to chance. Tangible and intangible materials acquired in this way and used within the creative making process include 3-D objects, words/images found in printed material (i.e. collage) and even random thoughts (i.e. automatism writing and art making) are often juxtaposed and thrown into the mix.

The surrealists' use of ‘objective chance’ was driven by a belief in the existence of an unconscious state of mind which could only be accessed obliquely. The surrealists believed the key to finding universal truth was the unconscious mind as defined by the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud (1836-1939).

               …the store of feelings, urges, memories, and thoughts,
               outside a person’s conscious realisation.

Within my own work I most closely identify with the surrealists. I’m fascinated with creatively unlocking the unconscious and I have had a life-long appetite to collect objects as a result of happenstance.

As I recall, my first 3-D artwork created out of found objects was a sculpture made in Mr Plunkett’s eighth grade art class constructed out of rusty metal bits picked up along the nearby railway tracks. It wasn’t very big, stood about 18 inches high and was fixed to a wood base. It looked rather like a flat metal leaning tower with gap-toothed featured edges.

This set the precedence for decades of collecting random objects discovered by chance in the dirt, in the street, in second-hand shops or gifted to me (anonymous people have left things on my doorstep). I have been inspired to creatively rearrange these various serendipities transforming them into something new that sparks child-like curiosity inviting one to creatively explore – the more you look, the more you see.

A good example of this is Swell to Great that explores in a surrealistic manner the influence WW II had on the painters who formed the School of Fantastic Realism in Vienna.

Swell to Great © 2012 KEW
Artwork for Society for Art of Imagination’s 50 Anniversary Exhibition Phantesten Museum, Vienna, 2012 

Serendipitous words and images found in newspapers or magazines also become objects of creativity too such as this collage Can You See Me?

Can You See Me?  © 2011 KEW
October 2011 Exhibition Türe Sanat Galerisi, Konya Turkey

Images put onto a surface through an automatic process, without any preconceived notion is relished and according to the Metropolitan Museum in New York is a way of… unleashing the mind and challenging the rationalism of the modern world.

I have worked in this spontaneous unconscious way for many years creating drawings using white gel pen on black paper then manipulating the images on the computer in a more conscious way. I  have discussed this process in a previous blog Image (July 29, 2024).

For this article I thought I’d have a crack at unconscious automatic writing. I first tried doing it in one minute (too short), then two minutes and finally a five minute exercise. I then consciously attempted to craft the two minute piece – interesting.

Two Minute Automatic Writing Exercise © 2025 KEW

 

in the jungle

elephants waltz
within the tangled vines
managed by humans caught
in concrete nothingness

worms dig, moles dig
into the dry then damp
make tunnels, burrowing
underground, away from

white noise, loud bangs
tranquillity welcome


Thank you for reading, Kate J

Sources:
Cambridge Dictionary, 2025. Happenstance. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/happenstance#google_vignette Accessed 1 March.
Libquotes, 2025. Sigmund Freud – Unconscious Quotes. https://libquotes.com/sigmund-freud/quotes/unconscious Accessed 2 March.
Rank, M.R., 2024. How the surrealists used randomness as a catalyst for creative expression. https://theconversation.com/how-the-surrealists-used-randomness-as-a-catalyst-for-creative-expression-226908 Accessed 1 March 2025.
Watson, K., 2020. Surrealism, Chance and the Extended Mind. Chapter 10, pages 171 – 188 Distributed Cognition in Victorian Culture and Modernism. https://academic.oup.com/edinburgh-scholarship-online/book/37693/chapter-abstract/332025472?redirectedFrom=fulltext Accessed 1 March 2025.
The Met, 2025. Surrealism Beyond Borders. https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/surrealism-beyond-borders/visiting-guide Accessed 1 March.
Study.com, 2025. Freud and the Unconscious Mind/Definition and Theory. https://study.com/learn/lesson/unconscious-mind-psychology.html#:~:text=Sigmund%20Freud%20believed%20that%20the,memories%20in%20the%20unconscious%20mind Accessed 3 March.

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Weird: The strange, unusual and surreal

There’s a lot of weirdness that has shaped my life, ultimately influencing the creative work I produce: Dad constructing non-conventional furniture, Psychology Today and National Geographic magazines and last but not least the Surrealists.

I have written about my father before. My blog Luggage had a photo of him strapping a pile of furniture four feet high onto the roof of the blue Buick during our family vacation. This in and of itself was weird and almost could have been likened to a mobile assemblage artwork. Much of the furniture that he brought home from that trip was eventually transformed. Wood was stripped, revarnished or painted and chairs were caned with loving hands.

About ten years later, Dad (a Presbyterian minister) went above and beyond, and decided to dismantle a church organ (not from our church) with all its bells and whistles and reassemble it in a spare bedroom in our house. My guess is he had caught wind of the instrument in need of a home through his professional connections.

Now this activity could have been deemed a bit weird, it was certainly unusual – none of my friends had a church organ in their bedrooms but it was ‘normal’ in our household and I revel in that memory.

With the leftover wooden pipes, he made two coffee tables. One of them graced our lounge where the latest issues of Psychology Today and National Geographic were carefully placed for leisurely light reading. Both of these publications I would regularly peruse. I found Jung’s philosophy to be particularly interesting and the photographs that appeared on the pages of both magazines were serious eye candy.

The creation of the pipe organ tables showed me how to use objects in a way not originally intended. Add this to an interest in unusual old objects (thanks to my parents), the inspirational imagery from the magazines as highlighted above along with an introduction to Jungian theory focusing on the unconscious, made for my own unconscious gravitational pull towards the Surrealists when I was doing my undergraduate study in Art.

We have André Breton and his colleagues (i.e. Dalí, Duchamp, Man Ray) to thank for the Surrealist movement established in the early 20th century. The Surrealists are known for their juxtaposition of diverse imagery, influenced by the unconscious often from dreams manifesting in various imaginative creative outputs including: paintings, sculpture using the found object (objet trouvé), collage, film and of course poetry.

Sarane Alexandrian writes:

the surrealists set out…to create new demands on reality…to liberate the workings of the subconscious, disrupting conscious thought….creat[ing] a new form of sensibility….it set poetry at the centre of everything, and used art to make poetry into something which could be seen and touched…

Michel mentions that if one takes surrealist imagery/poetry at face value, that the creative works appear to be weird and random. He also puts forward how these types of artworks resist simple meanings and concrete interpretations. The Surrealists he says:

confronted viewers and readers with bizarre imagery that avoided no fixed cultural meaning or else subverted established meanings….One might argue many don’t accept that life doesn’t make sense…

Thus, it seems that the Surrealists’ audience back in the day and perhaps today as well, had issues with the works because of their weirdness and non-depiction of a known reality - a fear of the weird, Fear of the Surreal, as Michel’s blog post title is called. I got lost in further reading about the Surrealists for this article, definite food for thought, however I became distracted as I began to reflect on my own work, my own weirdness and creative development.

Untitled (Alarm Clock Case) 1983

In my first drawing class at university I was making juxtaposed images such as a cigarette metamorphosing into a pencil. Later in my third year I used a box full of alarm clock cases found at a local thrift store as foundations to create a series of 15 artworks (see example above). These were to be a pivotal series. I continue to use clocks today in my work.

Insect Hotel (Grandfather Clock Case)Manchester Museum 2020

My later assemblage works purposefully make connections between different elements, like visual poetry. They often tell non-linear stories focusing on place and identity. In the case of the Insect Hotel, created during my Artist in Residence at Manchester Museum in 2020, I also incorporated poetry into the work as well and created a collection of insect themed poems.

Insect Hotel Detail Manchester Museum 2020

Often with surrealist art and my own assemblages because the viewer can’t read the works with immediate recognition other than a main object/s (i.e. clock shape) they will not take time to explore and discover the many layers of meaning and connections within them – this also goes for some types of poetry. It’s taking time with a creative piece. There’s no wrong or right way to read something no matter how weird, although one might think there is. Everything is open for interpretation and each viewer brings their personal experience when engaging.

Enough rambling - to finish off, I thought I’d have a go at creating more weirdness, surrendering to the unconscious through automatic writing, one of the Surrealists’ methods of creating poetry. I found this not as enjoyable and more difficult than other Surrealists’ methods I have experimented with (collage and blackout poetry). It was an interesting exercise and quicker to do than the other types. I set a timer for two minutes, with the first two, and three minutes for the last. Here are the results:

1)
what moon bright star
giraffe feet clumsy
sink into soil a sandpit
a dark hole swallow
whole and grains like
timer oh the flowers arched
droop stems petals are
gone as dust flies into the
wind my eyes pop out roll
along the hill on a journey beyond
the horizon

2)
homeward bound dogs run past
the prairie dogs on grass by
trees alone she stands among
men who circle the feet with
dogs barking cars racing down the
long straight road to nowhere
somewhere another she lights a
fire to keep warm opening a tin
of beans

3)
onto the shore seaweed slime
open eyes diamonds shine
red or white at night and day
squint moon squint
can you see through black abyss
the owl fluffs its wings
brown speckled feathers
one is lost floating free
to land in moss and fungi
ants crawl spiders weave
squirrels climb the cat stalks
rodents hide

Thank you for reading, 

Kate J

Sources
Alexandrian, S. 1989. Surrealist Art. 2nd Edition. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd Cambridge Dictionary, 2024
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/weird Accessed 14 April
Language is a virus, 2024. Automatic Writing.
https://www.languageisavirus.com/creative-writing-techniques/automatic-writing.php 
Accessed 14 April
Michel, L., 2023. Fear of the Surreal.
https://countercraft.substack.com/p/fear-of-the-surreal Accessed 15 April 2024

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Colonies

Over the last few months, I've read quite a few books about an ex-patriate international colony of artists who made the Greek island of Hydra their home in the 1950s and 1960s. I suppose the fascination with those people, their lives and the works they produced was in part compensation for my not being able to make a customary visit to Greece last summer, not that I would have chosen Hydra as a destination, for it lacks both antiquities and decent beaches, although it has a beautiful harbour and encircling town.

the harbour and 'amphitheatre' of Hydra town, 1955

It is also just a couple of hours by ferry from Athens, quite a lot of Athenians have second homes there, and it also has an extension of the Athenian School of Art, which might explain why it became a hub for international artists and writers after the second world war, people looking to 'get away from' the rat race and the crushing social conservatism of those immediate post war/cold war years, to 'get away to' somewhere they could be a little more bohemian, where there was good light, plenty of sunny days, and where house rents and the cost of living were cheap by comparison - an out of the way but still accessible idyll where they could pursue their unconventional lifestyles and creative calling - cue Hydra.

The Australian couple George Johnston and Charmian Clift along with their children were the first to establish a long-term presence and they lived on the island from 1955 to 1964. Their writings and network of friends attracted others from the antipodes to live and write or paint on Hydra, but other nationalities discovered it as well; American beats like Gregory Corso, northern Europeans such as Axel Jensen and his wife Marianne Ihlen, Paolo and Magda Tilche, David and Angela Goschen and Klaus Merkel. Perhaps the most famous of all, and the main reason for Hydra's lasting fame as an artistic colony, was Leonard Cohen who arrived there at the beginning of 1960. He swapped cold, snowy Montreal for a Greek island on a whim, but fell in love with the place and so when  he was left a sum of money by a relative, Cohen was able to buy a dilapidated house on Hydra, not just rent it. He had it refurbished simply in the local style and his family owns it to this day.

The artistic colony of ex-pats in Hydra town lived hand-to-mouth and in each others pockets, houses, beds, novels. They were close-knit but not always harmonious. In summer the living was easy, lots of sun, sex, olives, retsina and a little writing (though occasionally the water supply and the electricity failed). In winter it was tough-going, cold and cut off from the world on their rock in the Aegean. The novelists would bash away on their typewriters before sending their manuscripts off into the world via the ferry, then wait anxious weeks for a cheque, or more likely another rejection slip. The artists would paint when the light and their cold fingers allowed, storing up canvases they hoped to sell to summer visitors. And always there was intrigue and infighting. 

It was on Hydra that Axel Jensen ran off with an American painter and Marianne Ihlen fell into Leonard Cohen's arms, moving in with him as his muse and lover for some considerable time (check out the back cover of Cohen's second LP 'Songs From A Room'). It was on Hydra that Cohen finished his first novel 'The Favourite Game' and wrote his second, 'Beautiful Losers'. It was also on Hydra, outside the local tavernas on long, hot summer evenings, that Cohen armed with his guitar gradually made the transformation from poet and novelist to song-writer and singer extraordinaire.

Leonard Cohen (with guitar) entertaining outside Douskos taverna, Hydra 1960

He  never made a living from his poetry or novels and though he claimed he never had faith in the sound of his voice, it was on that island that he was persuaded he had a talent for writing and singing from the heart - and the cliched rest is history. In fact his sojourn on Hydra was the catalyst for many of his great early songs (from a room), including 'So Long, Marianne' and 'Bird On A Wire' - which only became possible the year the Greek telephone company installed telephone lines on the island, connecting Hydra with mainland Greece and the wider world.

By the mid-1960s most of the core of artists on Hydra realised that the only way to properly further their careers was to follow their work out into that wider world, which by then was becoming more bohemian like them anyway. And then came the military coup of 1967. But with the deaths of Marianne Ihlen and Leonard Cohen within weeks of each other in 2016, interest in their tangled lives and those of their colony of Hydra friends has been reawakened, and it is a revisiting that I found pays dividends - see the bibliography later on.

I offer two poems again this week. The first is by one of finest Greek poets of the 20th century, Konstantinos Kavafis. Although written in 1924, it could almost be about Leonard and Marianne, so prescient does it sound.

Before Time Altered Them

They were full of sadness at their parting.

They hadn't wanted it: circumstances made it necessary.

The need to earn a living forced one of them

to go far away - New York or Canada.

The love they felt wasn't, of course, what it once had been;

the attraction between them had gradually diminished,

the attraction had diminished a great deal.

But to be separated, that wasn't what they wanted.

It was circumstances. Or maybe Fate

appeared as an artist and decided to part them now,

before their feeling died out completely,

before Time altered them:

the one seeming to remain for the other what he always was,

the good-looking young man of twenty-four.

The second is the latest from the imaginarium. It touches on the darker explanation behind the original 'fashion' for the predominance of white and that special blue, colours that many Greek island houses display to this day. It also supposes an act of civil disobedience. 

Incidentally, the original reason that houses were decked in colours was because most were built of stone, usually volcanic and dark. In order to keep them cooler in the very hot summers, they were plastered and lime-washed (ground limestone mixed with water - paint being either expensive of simply unavailable). Sometimes they were white-washed but often other pigments were mixed in with the lime, permitting a palette of pale, sun-reflecting colours: ochre houses as well as pink, green, lilac and sky-blue. Then came the military coups of 1935 and 1967.

Loulaki Blues

The King is fled, long live the Crown,

though don't let anyone connected to the

Ministry of Public Order hear you saying so.

Whites over time tend to yellow or grey.

We restored the illusion in the laundering

by adding a washing blue, Loulaki on Hydra.

Blue and yellow are complementaries

in the subtractive colour model, for that is

how the science works. But now a new edict

is being enforced across the islands such

that only white and blue must be the hues

of every house: white walls, blue woodwork,

roofs of the same cerulean, to be attained

by mixing our Loulaki washing powder in

with standard calcimine slaked whitewash.

It is regimentation designed to signal

resurgence of a nation, the Third Hellenic

uniform, pretty as a picture to all appearances

but our souls within, ferric with mute fury,

so we wilfully allow our shirts and blouses

to fade to yellow or grey. They'll stay that way

until the moment we are free from this

monstrous tyranny of Generals. Our clothes 

become us, symbols of resistance and of hurt,

degrading as months of heat and poverty

roll by. No mojo hands will deliver us from

uncivil prying of their eyes but iron will win.

The King is fled, long live the Crown.

Oppression struts in white as well as brown;

these days, we don't trust men in brilliant shirts.

loulaki powder 

If you're interested in following up on any of the Hydra creatives or the story of their time in Greece half a century or more ago, I can recommend the following:

'Marianne & Leonard: Words Of Love' is a 90 minute documentary film by Nick Broomfield about Leonard Cohen, Marianne Ihlen, featuring much archive footage and interviews down the years.

'Half The Perfect World' (sub-titled 'Writers, Dreamers and Drifters on Hydra 1955-1964') is an in-depth account of the people and the times by a couple of Australian academics, Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziel, and is the go-to factual account of that ex-pat colony. It also includes many of James Burke's contemporary photographs.

'Mermaid Singing' and 'Peel Me A Lotus' are Charmian Clift's immensely readable accounts of life on Kalymnos and Hydra respectively and are due to be reissued in April.

'The Water and the Wine' by Tamar Hodes is one of a number of fictionalised accounts of that artistic community, this time by someone who had lived on Hydra as a child at the time.

'A Theatre For Dreamers' by Polly Samson is the latest in the line of novels based around the cast of artists and their friends living on Hydra in the early 1960s. Currently available in hardback, it is due for its paperback release in April (tying in with the Clift re-issues, for which Samson has written introductions.

The last words (sung in this case) should probably go to Leonard Cohen himself. Click on song title to activate the link through to: So Long, Marianne

Thanks for reading, S ;-)

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Growing Pains

Plant a seed. Nurture it. It will grow. 

How I came to write as a guest writer on this poets’ blog is somewhat miraculous and frankly a result of a lifetime of growing pains. ‘Growing Pains’ takes me back to childhood. Its innocence replaced by a wiser knowingness through pitfalls of uncertainty, the failures embedded within the joys of achievement as I slowly ‘matured’. What I hadn’t banked on back then, was how growing pains remain with us throughout our lives.

I’ve learnt resilience whilst working through fear, rejection and loss, and found with persistence the strength to move forward.  I strive to grab every moment with passion, to live creatively and authentically whilst connecting, embracing and sharing with others making it all worthwhile. I learnt early on that one cannot go it alone.

In today’s quickly changing, rather disturbing world we are being bombarded with serious challenges. We are being forced to get to grips with letting go of the old, embracing the new and moving through the malaise hoping to come out the other side better for it. I am experiencing growing pains as never before and my guess is that I’m not alone in this.

I have made things throughout my life as a way of processing my experiences. It is a way of making my thoughts and feelings real, tangible. Sometimes I do it for sheer amusement (nonsensical drawings and poetry). Sometimes I do it to escape from real life. Sometimes I create things as a way of working through some of my growing pains. No matter the reason, creating something makes me feel better.

Moleskine Sketchbook - Ink and Coloured Pencil, January 2020

In reflecting on my childhood,  I have my parents to thank for being here. I am the seed they planted, nurtured and helped grow into who I am. However, I have my mother to thank for emotional sentimentality. She remarkably kept intact two large boxes of drawings, writing and other school materials as evidence to the child I was and a testament to the process of becoming; the learning, growing, changing, discovering the essence of what makes me, me. She recognised and valued this ‘becoming’ and her way to hold on was to keep physical hardcopies.

 

This sentiment for nostalgia was passed down and amazingly many of these artefacts have survived at least a dozen house moves over five decades and across two continents. My mother was one of many in a long list of very special people who have provided safety and security for me over the years, people who I fondly call my teachers. Those who fed and continue to feed my hunger to learn, explore and encourage the creative processing of my discoveries through different visual and textual means with a focus on storytelling.
 

Published in The Tower, a primary school publications - written age 6

 

Shammy - waxed crayon, created age 5

I grew up loving to draw and making up stories. The Shammy drawing is a prime example.

Here we have an interesting blend of reality versus magic. Katy is flying through the air being pulled by grandma’s rather large miniature poodle lunging at a cat that seemingly has been surprised. As a result, it has launched itself upwards in front of some distorted blue building. The red hair and pony tails add to Katy’s tidy hair style (mom was a real stickler about hair). The blue jeans have a decorative pattern which could be flowers, typical of the 1960s. The dog’s cropped tail clearly has a puff at the end.

 

I drew all the time. I also spent a lot of time alone. My sister and brother were much older and moved away when I was quite young. When I was a teenager, my parents separated and I drew and wrote even more. This helped me focus and to escape from the growing pains. It was good for my mental health and wellbeing. My creative work helped me through many difficult experiences throughout my life including the loss of my brother to Aids in 1990. As a way of dealing with these emotions I did a series of drawings illustrating journal extracts.

AIDS series - Scraperboard 1990

Moving countries was a massive change and one of insurmountable growth, and it has not always been easy. After living in the UK for over two decades I continue to grow and develop. I have always said that England gave me the gift of poetry.  Living in this country, so rich in literature history, has inspired me to write more and integrate my poetry into my creative work. I practice and experiment and through all the rejections and failures I hold onto those small morsels of success.

Illustrated ABCs - waxed crayon, created age 5

 

66 Years and Counting - Multi-media on paper 2013 (West Ox Arts Gallery Exhibition)

I thought I would leave you with this. It is something written nearly four decades after creating 'The Story Writer' and the drawing of my grandmother’s dog pulling on its lead. A lot of living and creating has gone on in between.  I have never shared any part of this poem before, as it is too long a poem to read on an open mic night. It is 191-lines and written when I did not have the confidence to share much of my creative writing work.

It is an excerpt from ‘The Poet’s Pen’.  Not only is there a hint of déjà vu from the Shammy drawing but in it I feel depicts the frustration and hope that goes along with the growing pains and struggle of the creative maker within.

…The Poet’s eye as dog pulled taught

The lead to arm and tipping man

Who pulled back dog and gave command,

“Sit,” and dog he sat, he did

Whilst Master scanned the ghostly grid

Of papered floorboards, chequerboard

That captured men and captured sword

His blasted pen that he had thrown

Across the room to where, unknown

Until he saw it laying there

The Poet sighed and smiled aware

That soon he would return again

Like boomerang with fingered men

That flung the weapon, sword now resting

On the floor in spider’s nest and

Would remain till cobwebs cleared

Inside his head between the ears

Once he’d finished basking in

The sunshine washing o’er his skin

As oiled pistons plugged to sparking

Energy for brain embarking

On new paths to bath in writing                                                                          

Something worthy and exciting…

 

Thank you for reading.

Kate Eggleston-Wirtz

www.eggwirtz.com

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Data Overload

There are weeks when the blog's theme causes a vast blank space to enter my mind, and then there are weeks - like this week - when an idea arrives almost instantly. And (because great minds think alike) it connects with Vicky's post from yesterday.

*             *             *

I've written a lot about the Sundays of my childhood. I guess they are the easiest days to recall because they followed a pattern: activity, Sunday Lunch, activity, bath and an episode of a 1960s television programme. When my sister and I offered up grumbles about there being no colour in those programmes, or laughed at the terrible special effects, my Dad would simply state, "It's  a classic. They don't make them like this anymore."  Whether it was Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Land of the Giants or Star Trek: The Original Series, his response was always the same.

That same sound bite now spills from my mouth when I'm watching one of the 'classics' of my generation - almost impossible for the vocal cords to resist the sentiments of nostalgia.

*             *             *

Just over a year ago, after searching Netflix for a new TV series to watch, I decided (without intention of watching past episode one) to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation. This was the start of what my boyfriend calls "an addiction" - working my way through each available series before starting from the beginning again. Currently, stuck on a cliff-hanger at the end of Season Six, I estimate I've probably watched all episodes up to this point at least four times. I can recite the opening monologue in time with Patrick Stewart and bore Shaun (who has only inadvertently watched occasional episodes) with analysis of characters, plots and themes.

Among the many episodes there are a few which a return to more frequently. Usually these episodes centre around Data as he explores and attempts to be more human. There are many human behaviours and characteristics that Data experiments with. From writing himself a new (and rather amusing) subroutine for small talk to attempting to learn about humour on the holodeck, Data forces us to re-examine and question what it actually means to be human.

One of the more central aspects of human identity that Data explores extensively throughout the series is creativity. Through the playing of music, acting, painting and even the writing of poetry, Data (the android incapable of feeling) engages with (sometimes more successfully than others)the very activities that enable us to express.

My favourite Data moment has to be from "Schisms" (Season Six, Episode Five) where Data gives a poetry recital to other members of  Enterprise crew.

Throughout the ages, from Keats to Giacomo, poets have composed odes to individuals who have had a profound effect upon their lives. 

In keeping with that tradition, I have written my next poem in honor of my cat. I call it, "Ode to Spot." 

                Felis Catus is your taxonomic nomenclature, 
                An endothermic quadruped carnivorous by nature. 
                Your visual, olfactory and auditory senses 
                Contribute to your hunting skills and natural defences. 

                I find myself intrigued by your sub-vocal oscillations, 
                A singular development of cat communications 
                That obviates your basic hedonistic predilection 
                For a rhythmic stroking of your fur to demonstrate affection. 

               
                A tail is quite essential for your acrobatic talents: 
                You would not be so agile if you lacked its counter-balance. 
                And when not being utilized to aid in locomotion 
                It often serves to illustrate the state of your emotion. 

                Oh Spot, the complex levels of behaviour you display 
                Connote a fairly well-developed cognitive array, 
                And though you are not sentient, Spot, and do not comprehend 
                I none-the-less consider you a true and valued friend. 

              

                Lieutenant Commander Data

Thank you for reading,
Lara

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Readdressing Creative Processes

At times I think it can be helpful to have several mediums in which to express creativity. That way, when one outlet fails or becomes too stressful, there is always another. For me, I quite like the rewards of baking, the extra spoonful of love that seems to be included with a handmade card, the sense of 'achievement' that comes with building an Andy Warhol Campbell's soup can on Minecraft, or taking a photograph which manages to capture how you see the world / feel about it. The latter is something I've always had a liking for, and yet is one I've never really taken beyond my 'click and point' camera.

Over the years, I've been absorbed and inspired by many wonderful photography exhibitions (one of the luxuries of having lived in London) and I enjoy flicking through books of photographs for those images that make me think 'wow'.

Anyway, as a result of my writing being slow (and slightly painful at times) I decided to make an effort to take more photographs. To learn more about the technical side of photography. To teach myself something new. To have a different creative hobby which might in turn release the poetry from my head. To take images without the pressure there seems to be to write a line or stanza.

Below is one of the photographs that resulted from an early morning Sunday walk on the beach...

...and below is the poem which resulted from the above photograph.

Re- Focus

I slowed the shutter speed, increased the ISO.

By the time the image appeared on the camera's display

there was nothing left - a world bleached into obscurity.

The receding tide, wet sand and resting gulls

now lost in a thick, glaring white.

A whiteness like that I imagine in death, in the middle ground,

in the space between this place and the next.

Later, when I downloaded the photographs, they looked like errors:

The missing subjects, the lack of colour and contrast.

But as I began to edit, dragging the 'brightness' slider

backwards into negative figures,

I watched as a faded grey structure pulled itself from the absence,

sharpening, gradually becoming darker - its iron legs

lifting from the fog, as if refusing to disappear.  

Thank you for reading,

Lara

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The Difficulty of Finding...

I have been struggling to write for too many months now. I can just about manage a few sentences, a list of observations, the odd scribble about last night's dream, but the voice of poetry evades me.

I did find it for a moment - the early hours of Saturday morning brought poetic chorus through the darkness, as if morning was finally going to dawn. I wrote the first nine words of a line and they felt like poetry, tasted like poetry. Those nine words - which seemed to be just the right words, in the right order - were like a fix. My boyfriend watched as my eyes lit and my fingers tapped out rhythm on the air. My lips made the shapes of those nine words over and over again, producing a whisper to coax my ear and mind into uncovering another line.

On parts of the track the rain has gathered,

clear and still in mud hollows

clear and still and deep in the mud dirt.

Lakes that give the forest to us again

again. As if a dream, we are giants

as if it were a dream and we were giants

able to pick hundred year old

able to pluck ancient oaks firs from the water like reeds.

Eventually all gained momentum ceased as the stanza found its end. It had ended where I hadn't anticipated or expected. This stanza, which had been thought of as an opening, now felt more like a dead-end, like I had written myself into a corner and couldn't quite figure out how to write myself back out.

I left the poetry puzzle attached to the pad. Occasionally, throughout Saturday afternoon, I glanced at the words to check if I still liked them.

As night approached, my cat came fumbling in from the window, patrolled the perimeter of the lounge before circling inwards and stepping his damp paws across the laptop and then the paper pad.            I liked the way he caused a few of the words to have inky atmospheres - as if each were a solitary planet within a universe I still fail to truly comprehend.

*          *          *

There is a turbulence between mind and creativity. At some point the poetry puzzle was torn from the pad, squeezed between clenched hands until it was compact and circular.

I thought it had been taken by the bin men.          But it hadn't.

This morning when I found the yellow paper orb tucked behind a bookend it made me think how love will always try its hardest to preserve. I wondered how much else might have been saved if love had been there longer - imagined a mountain built from thrown away paper.

Over time, something begins to accumulate - like mercury within the bodies of hat makers - and the challenge is in remembering

                                                                       who

                                                                              am

                                                                                     I

Thank you for reading,

Lara 

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Bumbling by day...

...leaping by night.

Hello language lovers.  It's been a while since I wrote for the blog and I am, as usual, writing under the influence of too little sleep.  I think my subconscious prefers it that way.  I suspect that when I'm tired and closer to sleep it finds it easier to whisper to my bumbling consicous mind, making the obscure connections which some call creativity.

The theme this week is Mad Hatter.  It's a leap, appropriately, from the 'mad as a March hare' phrase to the Mad Hatter from Lewis Carroll's Alice stories.  It's that leap from one element of language to another that I think ties poetry to its original culture and means that poems in translation must be reinterpreted rather than simply translated word for word. 

These leaps are also the foundations of figurative language.  If we're thinking in colour we might leap from the word hatter to the bright orange hair of Tim Burton's Hatter in his film adaptation.  If we're thinking in sound we could leap from hatter to tatters, smatters and batter.  If I think personally, hatter makes me think of tea cups and songs, a large nose and a bit of paper with a price in old money.  It also makes me think of tailors/Taylors and coopers/Coopers and dyers/Dyer whose names recall old and current trades. 

In Carroll's fantastical linguistic, mathamatical novels, his Hatter is an enigmatic, eccentric fellow who sits alongside similary incomprehensible friends.  These characters seem as confused as our dreams, speaking in rhyme and riddle:

`If you knew Time as well as I do,' said the Hatter, `you wouldn't talk about wasting IT. It's HIM.'
`I don't know what you mean,' said Alice.
`Of course you don't!' the Hatter said, tossing his head contemptuously. `I dare say you never even spoke to Time!'
`Perhaps not,' Alice cautiously replied: `but I know I have to beat time when I learn music.'
`Ah! that accounts for it,' said the Hatter. `He won't stand beating. Now, if you only kept on good terms with him, he'd do almost anything you liked with the clock. For instance, suppose it were nine o'clock in the morning, just time to begin lessons: you'd only have to whisper a hint to Time, and round goes the clock in a twinkling! Half-past one, time for dinner!' 

I think that when we make creative leaps in our poetry, we are not only trying to communicate as fresh an image as possible, we also emulating the strange associations that our dreams and subconscious mind throw at us when our conscious mind isn't looking.  The conscious mind can only understand the huge web of experience in terms and images that it can recall.  When a poet creates a series of images strung together that ring true to us, and the degree of recognition surely must differ for each one of us,they seem to be speaking to us in the language of the subconsious, that larger, smarter part of ourselves which controls much of our actions but which we do not control.

With that thought looming in the in your ridiculously facile conscious mind, here is a snippet of a poem which speaks to my own creative leaps.  It's an excerpt from Poor Fish by V A Sola Smith which can be found in the Sculpted: Poetry of the North West anthology, edited by Lindsey Holland and Angela Topping:

...a whisper

between the isles of bargain basement food stuff stores,
stealing from the ginnells and cobbled snickets, the not-yet
ghouls, tripping unseen about their fate like the helter
                                                                            skelter
fun house stairs, we rode along the promenade as kids,

waiting for the night to tear across the shore line, faceless
and fearless and one against the jetstream of the whole
                                                                               North
Atlantic...


If you want to buy Sculpted, it's available direct from the website.

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How do you like them apples?

How many apples?

Well? Do you know? I don't. There might be three, or four. Probably just one though. Apples are good.

One apple hit Isaac Newton on the bonce which caused the inspiration for the theory of gravity.

Sometimes ideas are hidden deep in the subconscious and need a jolt to get them out, sometimes they need a workshop to tease them out, and sometimes they jump out and slap you when you're in the shower all naked and vulnerable and don't have a pen and paper. Unless you do and water drips all over it and makes it splodgy.  Can't take the laptop in there, oh no that's asking for trouble with their electric funny business.

There are probably lots of different ways to generate good ideas, each working differently for everyone. I use a couple, a prompt or a challenge is always good.

Such as this week's theme, how many apples? Hey it might not be very good but I got a blog post out of it.

For a much better way of generating ideas come along to this week's LDGP workshop on Saturday morning at Blackpool Central Library, I'm sure you can do better than I have.

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