Revelation Friday : How I Try to Write

Often times, it's hard for me to begin a poem. I would have a sense of the subject-matter or content, but I would have no idea about the first line. What that means to me is that, I am still not situated within the poem yet, my imagination is yet to assume specific details. During those moments, I find myself pro-castinating . No, I don't begin to clean my kitchen or my room when I pro-castinate. Instead, I waste my time on the computer. What gets me going then is, raising my ass from my bed, walking into the kitchen, beginning to brew a cup of tea. There is something in the tea-leaves turning the colorless water into a shade of honey-brown that calms me. It reminds me of the innate creativity of matter to re-create itself, to rejuvenate into different forms. I pour myself a cup of tea, come back to my workspace, begin to scribble, read a poem or two from the poetry books lying around (this morning it was Federico Garcia Lorca and Walt Whitman), and soon I begin to write. Not very good lines, mostly. But lines that normally propel the process forward, lets me get into the thick of things.

For me, it's this process of taking creativity by its horns that works best. A lot of the times I hear and read people write about the deeply "intuitive" nature of creating art. I agree it's intuitive to a large extent. But my own feeling is kind of like this: intuition or creativity doesn't really fall from the sky and settle into one's lap. One has to keep on doing lots of conscious exercise that would work on and develop one's intuition. By reading more, thinking more, analyzing more.

Yesterday, I got an email from the nice folks at UCLA Extension. I am one of the six semi-finalists for their annual Kirkwood Fiction prize. It does feel good to receive this recognition, even though it's very very small.