Yesterday on our walk, my husband pointed out a large bush with shiny green leaves, growing by the side of the road.
“This plant used to grow out in the swamp near the lake,” he said. He meant his family vacation cottage on Webster Lake in Massachusetts. “I saw it a few days ago, and when I looked for it yesterday, I couldn’t find it. But here it is today. I looked it up online. It’s a buttonbush.”
This week I shared a piece with my writing group that didn’t feel successful. I wrote a response to a prompt that was full of false starts and repeated attempts to begin. I finally stumbled on a topic but then ran out of time.
The feedback I got was still valuable. One writer pointed out that the false starts had a coherence I didn’t recognize. Another commended me for showing my struggle with writing, something that happens to all of us.
Particle Collision in LHC (Large Hadron Collider)
Creativity can come from the collision of unrelated things. A poem can be a container to hold these collisions. Sometimes, the combination of ideas is rational. When I wrote “Window to the Bay,” I combined dead vegetable matter and a patient’s necrotic toe into the same poem. The rational mind can see that death connects these two ideas. But often, the combination of ideas is surprising or unexpected.
A poem I wrote for another class began as a semi-logical discussion of the side effects of chemotherapy. It morphed into a poem about the stress of being a physician, in sonnet form. I struggled for a long time with this poem. (more…)
