Writing anything original is art whether it is a review, a letter, an email, a cover letter, a presentation, a poem … Everything is art because it is a singular assembly of words never written before.
“Author James Elkins writes of the three components necessary for someone to become an artist: seeing, making and the tabula rasa.
First, students need to learn to see. They have to see the world as it is without labels, without knowing the name of what is seen.
Second, they are taught how to make. How to use hands or voice or body to take what they see and reflect it back to the world.
And third, and most difficult, the artist starts with a blank slate. Art must be done for the first time, not repeated, and that first stroke, those first words – this is the source of our fear.”
–Seth Godin – The Icarus Deception
First, you are leaving your corporeal body and seeing with inverted eyes to “quiet your cleverness”. Seeing what could be, and not what it is, as in Samuel Butler’s study of hypothetics at the Colleges of Unreason (Erewhon). Turning our own good poetry of the seen into the hypothetical language or the poetry of the unseen.
Second, as in learning how to use our imagination and the words of the unseen to create something first taking shape in ink from your pen.
The last, the most painful and fearsome act, the blank sheet of paper awaiting to be filled by you, by your drawing of new sounds and thoughts. You do not know if it is good, but if you do not know, then it is good.
Have words drop numb at your touch and arrange them in easy-to-carry-in-the-heart images.
The unique magic of Michael Cheval’s imagination is always a source of inspiration.
© Iulia Halatz
I am delighted that five of my poems were included in the Sudden Denouement Anthology Volume I. The anthology is now available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.
