What are you inspired by?
In every season, it's something new. These days I try to be inspired by anything other than writing about writing. I'll even read art criticism over literary criticism. The languages of each world are so interior and self-referential that sometimes they need to hear each other out. In particular, I like to read the Bible a lot. Both for its spiritual and creative life. Since I'm a Christian, everything I write or think about writing is affected by the Bible.
Some writers are inspired by other writing. The discourse of poems with poems.
And so, sometimes I go through phases where I read from within the critical culture of poetry. Inevitably, this ends up sterilizing my writing or my thinking. I'm not sure why, because there is a great benefit in knowing what people who read and think a lot about the same things I do have to say about poetry. Poets know every bar and chord of poetry, they know the meta-narratives by heart. And they know when you are cheating.
But, and exactly because they know so much about poetry, the critical culture is rarely surprised. And there is something nice about being surprised, about coming to something with the feeling that you have discovered it outside of anyone telling you it has been discovered. This is why I worried about going to grad school to study writing. I don't regret it for a minute, and loved having for the first time a real community of writers who argued about poems as if the end of the world depended on their opinion.
I have gone now five years without a single poet friend, not a person to read poems with, share poems with, except my husband (who knows when I'm cheating or not being myself). I have not been writing poetry very much, nor have I been reading and writing a lot of creative literature. It has been a season of different things. So here are some of the things I've been thinking about... or doing, which will probably find their way into poems:
1. Fathers. I had a dream with my father last night. I laid my head on his chest and told him how much I loved him. I felt like a little girl. Like many women of my generation I grew up with an absent father, and then struggled through many hurtful relationships to find my place as a woman. I never knew the meaning of trust. I have been thinking a lot for these four years about how fathers figure so indifferently in art. And how much we live without this big strong chest of love and acceptance. And artists, especially of my generation, reflect this: we throw words and images out into the world like little children, groping to find their boundaries, lacking trust, meaning, order, safety.
2. The emotional language of art. My husband, an art therapist and dancer, brought to me this whole world of thinking about art physically and spiritually. He can approach something physically and know if its boundaries have been violated, if the person who made art is angry or sad. And so I started to look at things with feeling, and judge it based on motivation. It is a very tangled thing to look at art and judge it on its interior motivations--it may be good on the outside but irresponsible on the inside. This is how, for example, I understand Quentin Tarantino films--slick and clever on the outside, but superficial on the inside.
3. Gardening. For the past year, it was not writing or exercising that got me up in the morning, it was my garden. A year ago, I had no idea how to plant anything, I'd never even owned house plants. But nearly every day for a year, I've obsessively labored in my garden, planting, digging, tearing up everything from grass seed, to trees, bushes, wildflowers, bulbs. A year ago i couldn't tell you what lavender looked like. Now I've watched the coming and going of 3 different types of rose bushes and know the success rate of bluebonnets. There are strange spiritual joys in chopping something down only to watch it spread itself further in a few months.
4. Travel. Since I left Cincinnati 5 years ago, I have visited almost every nation in Europe, and travelled back and forth on the American continent several times. I lived in Prague, and Antwerp. I've struggled to communicate, not just in language but in cultural differences. I arrived in Europe just weeks after 9/11, and watched the slow change of war and world opinion shift in Europe. I felt the sting of being American and then suddenly had this insatiable love for America. I used to hate patriots, but then suddenly I saw personalities in these places we call nations--they're like people, they have their good days and bad days. They don't always know how to talk to each other. But there is a great joy in seeing something being proud to be "Polish" or "German" or "English". I literally cried when I saw Germans waving their flags on the final day of the World Cup (I was in Berlin during the WC). They have been scared to do so since you-know-who. I am happy that they are happy to be German. I am happy to be American. The world is not borderless, no matter what they tell you. There are borders between you and me, and they are good. We are not all one blob, and that is the foundation of my theology.
5. I can tell you more about Alexander McQueen's Fall 2005 runway show than I can about the latest Pulitzer Prize. I bought my first designer dress two years ago (no, I won't tell you how much I paid for it!). I love the language of fashion. Shape, color, texture, expression, proportion--fashion IS the language of personal identity.
