And Then a Plank in Reason Broke: Poetry, Uncertainty, and the Creative Process (Mar/CC)

And Then a Plank in Reason Broke: Poetry, Uncertainty, and the Creative Process
Sunday, March 4, 2012
10 am - 5 pm with Genine Lentine Conference Center, 308 Page Street A writing workshop cultivating curiosity, receptivity, and flexibility. We often think of uncertainty as a problematic state, something we have to endure until we’ve managed to figure everything out and write it all down. Maybe we think we alone are beset by the sometimes persuasive doubt and fear that can attend any stage of the writing process. But what if we reconsider uncertainty as an exhilarating ground of possibility and generativity? What if the feeling of being lost is in fact a signpost that can encourage us we’re where we need to be? What is the role of accident, and chance? The hallmark trait of the poet, for John Keats, is the capacity for “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” The uncertainty Keats speaks of is not a blandly passive “what-ev-er,” but rather an actively curious posture of being, an empathic flexibility, opening up space for receptivity, discovery, and innovation. How do we stay in this uncomfortable position of not knowing long enough to allow new work to come into being? What the painter Robert Motherwell said of painting is perhaps true of tolerating uncertainty as well: it cannot be taught, but it can be learned. And it can be practiced. We will write poems and explore process issues, paying attention to generative strategies. And we’ll cultivate a practice of keeping a process journal and assembling a commonplace book, a resource for ideas, sparks, and provocations. Prose writers are also very welcome. Over the course of the day, we’ll read short passages on the creative process, including excerpts from the journals and letters of John Keats, Edward Munch, Agnes Martin, John Cage, Theodore Roethke, Rainer Maria Rilke, Emily Dickinson, Theodore Roethke, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and others.