In follow up to Rick’s wonderful question, I can’t think of poems as cast off moments of text working the room for a laugh or a cry. Our lives provide a myriad of events that juxtapose with staying alive. Everyday is filled with puns, pathos and revelry enough to accompany the ride. It is discovery of what I haven’t felt, what I do not know, what I could never imagine that trips the light in the alley of my sleep. If painters were content in mimicking the world, if writers were restricted to recording events, then life would be the antithesis of the definition of its signs.

Memoir is all the rage and always has been. It is the grist for much of story. But to uncover the sense of a thing beyond its view, its scent, touch and feel, that is the stuff, that as Marianne Moore said, can blow away the top of a head.

An upshot of this for me is the damn awkwardness of the way inspiration for poetry comes to one.   I might be drifting off into gorgeous sleep, or downing a frothy one and bang! - a line hits you.  I have to rummage around for a beer mat to write it down or barter a good night's sleep for a nocturnal scribble.  The inspiration for a poem can come at the most inopportune moments!  One might be in the attempt of lovemaking, or even taking a dump and bang!  (I have a notebook now in the carsey for such eventualities!).  But sometimes while walking, notebookless, in the country or if I'm paragliding, I just have to let the lines go - the poem is lost for ever! 

Although the spark for a poem may come to me much as Peter describes, what is more important is the train of reactions that ensues. These are sometimes violent, leading to strange adventures, in which the past may well provide backdrops and characters in the story. Others are much muted and minor, rather like going out into one's garden, but even there the adventure is to see it in some new, even startling, light. Even a more direct memory only really serves me if I can discover something fresh and new there. To do this I find making a collage of related experience can be an assist. All of such examples involve 'creation' taking precedence over precise recall. I suppose to put it simply I might say that if I can't find adventure, surprise myself, it's unlikely to have much of value for anyone else. Here I'm endeavouring to verabalise my own feelings on writing, not in any way laying a course for others to steer. The wind is ever fickle, and that will dictate the outcome of my personal voyage.

Cheers

milner

Interesting. We have generally a commonality regarding inspiration, but I am wondering if the conduit for inspiration is similar. It seems that inspiration can be event driven, memory driven, driven by the emotion of a circumstance. I think too, inspiration is driven by intellectual curiosity, driven to by the propositions of language. Note how we often think of poems stemming from a line that comes to us. A line that generally is language under stress.

If ones general inspiration is triggered by the events of one's life, will the poetry be significantly different from the work developed from intellectual curiosity? If so, is one type of inspiration any more effective than another? Can we learn to initiate /practice one more than another. I am reminded of a comment that I once heard at a lecture. An audience member commented that he had nothing intersting in his life to write about and that, consequently, he chose to write about nature. I remember thinking to myself that I may not be interested in reading either.

larry

Larry,  The above makes me think of a quote from Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet (had to go dig out my copy from high school lol )      -"If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches......" - M