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Tag Archives: the creative process

Agitating Lace: Advice to a Writer

20 Friday Jun 2014

Posted by elainestirling in Poetry

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

advice for writers, brave new business leadership, Elaine Stirling, poetry, The Corporate Storyteller, the creative process

006

I – Ordinance

You, who chase markets,
predictor of trends, I need you
to give up the ghost of the writer
you tend. I know you don’t know me—
the cut and the grind of your lens
amplifies everything I am not.

If it helps to pretend
I’m a trick of the light from
too many nights at your desk
or the meds to control your attack
of the dreads, I don’t care. Just
for this moment, get out of
the hair of the writer
who’s gone to a shipload
of trouble to summon me here,
where you are old news, though
a headline, the 10 millionth ripple on
a pond where the stone, unaware she’s
a diamond, now sinks all alone to the
silt and the muck, hearing bubbles
of guilt, thinking thoughts like
I’m f*cked, when she ought
to be gleaming the brighter for
all that you’ve stirred, so again,
marketeer, do not lend me
your ear, just GET OUT!

II – Assemblage

Hello, dear writer,
a pleasure to meet you
alone for the very first time
through these inlets of rhyme
where tycoons of business
lack sense and the timing that
comes with the work that you do
to create how we sail from the jetties
and airs of Paul Getty and heirs
to a seamless provoking
of all that impairs.

Though I have no real name,
you may call me Lacy. I’m your
highest ideal, I’m the reason you
came. I’ve been growing like blazes
and making you crazy creative, do you
hear? Never lazy! But you, you’ve been
reared by well-meaning posteriors to agree
that a park bench or stump is the finest
career. Why, look at the endless succession
of buts that have muffled and squashed you,
while you, gifted writer, are plus, plus, & more!
Now, get up off the floor and listen, no buts.
If you hear them creep in, little bums, just
go back to Ordinance and read me again.

III – Agitation

How can I put this?
Agitation is everything.
The discomfort you feel
is a story that’s reeling you
in like a fish—maybe true, may
be wild, a confession, a rant.
What you never must do
is to dribble the story
like a bucket of worms
for approval, attention.
Baiting too soon is
the biggest mistake
of the writers who die,
the flounders, the flakes.

On those days
when the words are
elusive, stay away from
the news of literary markets.
They will only confuse between
dis- and encourage. A writer is
something outside and beyond units
sold, saturation. You’re leading edge,
friend! Best thing you can do is
indulge relaxation.

Start to believe
in those moments
of ease, you’re surrounded
by masters who went on
before you—call them ghosts,
friendly hosts, doesn’t matter,
they’re real. Read the best of the
best of them, never descend, and
address them as if they were here in
the room. “I can be just like you.” Tell
them: “Yes, I might even be better!”

Your writing, I promise, will start up
again. Succumb every dawn to that small
agitation, and soon the whale will turn to
see what is biting him. You will be the splash
you came here to be, the diamond at the center,
and I the lace you have quietly donned.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2014

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Speak to Me of Novels, Mr. Greene

02 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by elainestirling in Narrative poetry

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Elaine Stirling, Graham Greene, imagination without limits, literary cross-discipines, magical realism, narrative poetry, novel writers, poetry, the creative process

Graham Greene (1904-1991)

Graham Greene, novelist, (1904-1991)

Speak to me of novels, Mr. Greene,
those vast terrains you seeded from
misfired sparks and neural floods,
unmitigated impulses that laid out
end to end today, we’d medicate,
eradicate, restoring you to moral
and to level, playing, boring,
disenchanted fields.

I’ve heard it told by one
who knew a clerk who kept
your cover on the western coasts
of Africa that novelists are further
down the road of disingenuous
than spies. We must be without
shame a fugitive, outrunning
fusillades of politic, pretending
faiths until we know the rites by
heart—though yours you never
dropped—refraining from the urge
to boast. There is no greater
theft or flagrant waste, you said,
than stealing from a character
her actions and her words to win
a spate of praise. The glory days
of one who writes long fiction
live within; she radiates.

Speak to me, kind sir, of pace
and plot, the boldness that it takes
for witnessing and laying out
and never stepping in. How do
I plug the holes, endure?
And you explained: let no one
judge, come near the planes
of your terrarium. Their imprints
and their breath will only fog
and kill the shoots; your world
is one apart and must be so,
yet be more real than any
but the truest kiss.

And now I hope
you will not take amiss,
Moiselle, I step again into
the borderlands where first
we met. Remember what to
keep, when to forget, and how
to see anew. I will say this
of your composure, in the hindsight
of our pleasure, you have much
of greater worlds and souls
than mine yet to compose.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2014

Reconstellating Senses

25 Tuesday Jun 2013

Posted by elainestirling in Poetry

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

abundance, deepening, Elaine Stirling, Law of Attraction, love poem, reconciliation, sensuality, shamanic mysteries, the creative process, vibrational reality

IMG_0143

Last night you flowed the taste
of caramel through my waking
dreams, an amber warmth
your words attuned electric
pin pricks at the outermost
the tips of all I slowly plant
along the roads in memory
of our clustered peregrinos.

Golden light is hard
to see when camouflaging
plum shades and sienna fill
the crevices of under-watered
lives, and when I try too hard
to look at you the stripes
of dark and light like jailbirds
scar my eyes, and no one
warned me hornets sleep
in petalled sheets of rose—
so much for smelling you!

New music to my ears
of late, compels, and touching
well requires more than
garbled tongue
and fingertips.

For now, it is enough
that certain gates be closed
the sumac knows which
flavours to admit & hawk
she loves the taste
of fresh caught
prey and gravity.

~~~

© Elaine Stirling, 2013

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