What is “creative”? As in “creative nonfiction,” an oxymoron, as many have pointed out. Is it creative when I write anything that doesn’t sound like a robot, or isn’t actually written by a robot. Or can a robot be creative? Apparently, it can, although it can’t fool another robot. It’s like we imagine some baseline of absolute fact where the truth lives. Yet everything we say is our take on things and so is creative in that way. Nothing is not creative. The bones of truth are seen through our eyes, are formed through our eyes, right?
[An aside from “The Origins of Creativity” in the new New Yorker: “Creating things today seems to be as cool as it ever was. Fewer college students may be taking literature courses, but creative-writing courses are oversubscribed. And what do those students want to write? Creative nonfiction.”]
I’ve written what I call a diary. And I keep writing poems. All filtered through my mind, all created and creative. The only thing changing genre does is change the angle of vision while the shape of the waters always in motion.
Traveling back and forth, poetry to prose, I’m noticing the shifts. Like when I write this blog, what is its point A and will it arrive at point B? It may be the most “creative” thing I do in the sense that it’s utterly free form. I depend on you to be interested in the unspooling of my mind.
Yesterday, Jerry was in a short readers’ theater presentation called “The Rehearsal.” In it, a group of people attempt to rehearse a melodrama, misreading the script because of the poor handwriting of the director. It was hysterical, but not because of the words on the page. It was that we knew the readers; we were hearing through their personalities—the one who’s always late, who speaks Spanish better than English, the one who can barely hear, the one who used to be a preacher, and two who used to be distinguished professors. Used to be, in each case, with the scent, the quality, still attached, filtered through the audience’s mind.
Hysterical, because we have this information. Hysterical because we’re all old and know it. Hysterical because the play is completely useless, made up of a cowboy hat, one-off lines and facial expressions. Comedy is useless, and that’s why it’s worth so much, right? Poems are useless, all movement of thought that doesn’t follow a trajectory from A to B is useless, right? But that’s where all the excitement is. In the fillagree, the dance, the song. It is also where the truth is.
Getting directly from point A to point B never happens in real life. The train takes a thousand side trips in our minds. It passes through the valley of despair, the mountains of aspiration, the fog of memory. It forgets where it was going. What was point B? Did I imagine it? Then what is the actual, scientific truth? Among the quarks, leptons, antiquarks, and bosons, try finding what doesn’t move. When we give names to the shadows of the shadows of what we think we’ve found, this is creative. No such thing as not creative.
At the moment my mind seems to have unleashed itself. It doesn’t want to be concerned with form. I deeply appreciate the sonnet, the villanelle, the sestina, the wild creativity that can sometimes come from a writer’s submission to these received forms. I’ve written a number of poems in form. But not at the moment. I wonder if age causes the mind to unspool. I suspect it does. I don’t mean losing your mind. I mean loosening its strictures.
It’s true that I am like the poet Maggie Smith, who says, "I enter every writing project as a poet." Smith thinks of poetry as a "sort of a sweet spot for holding seemingly oppositional emotions or impulses in the same compact space. It's sometimes more painful to live with that in life than it is on the page.”
Mary Delaney made this flower and hundreds others from paper.
Speaking of poets writing prose, I’m reading Molly Peacock’s The Paper Garden, the story of Mary Delaney, her life and the intricate, amazingly exact and detailed cut-out paper flowers she started making at age 72. It’s a story of an eighteenth century woman beginning her creative life at that age. It’s a tour de force, with Molly’s own life intertwined. I think sometimes we have to shed the strictures of our expectations to begin our work. Sometimes that happens early, sometimes late, but it’s always about shedding. I think all writers should pray for shedding.
The P.S. . . .
You may be interested in this: Kate Morgan, as her MFA thesis, wrote a lovely interview with me about The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives (Carnegie Mellon, 2004). that was just published in the AWP Chronicle. There’s a short video at the end. https://www.mydigitalpublication.com/article/Women+Who+Love+Musicians+All+Their+Lives%3A+An+Interview+with+Fleda+Brown/4556207/788628/article.html
Another note: It’s true, I’m a bit of a hermit (hence my sitting at home writing this blog), but it’s time I read some of my new work out loud in front of an audience. Please let me know if you’d like to help me set up a reading, or if you’d like to read with me. I’d appreciate it.