All the world is movement. The wind sweeps. The hand makes the clock: it ticks. Later the hand makes the machine; begets the machine that can make its own machines. Pieces and parts, all moving. Eyelashes and reeds.
Energy cannot be created nor destroyed, and so life gives no choice but to be lived, and death can do nothing else but produce permanent transformations held under the misnomer of “ends.”
“What moves you?” I would ask this question of almost everyone. I haven’t yet, so instead I travel inward. What moves me?
I still shiver when I hear choirs sing. When I was young, I thought I felt moved for the wrong reasons in church. It wasn’t god, or the idea of god— only the organ, the choir, the soloist, the cymbals, the heat and energy of a packed sanctuary on Sunday morning.
Now, I wonder: why can’t that, too, be god? An energy, unbound by story and tradition yet conveniently associated. A line, a vocalization, a beat, a color, a place, a moment of human connection: all essential and attainable gods.
How else can I explain what happens when I begin to write except by saying that inspiration is not a gift from god: it is God.
Fernando Pessoa described like this his “triumphant day,” when a separate entity rose up in him and began creating:
I wrote thirty some poems in a row, all in a kind of ecstasy, the nature of which I shall never fathom. It was the triumphant day of my life, and I shall never have another like it. I began with a title, The Keeper of Sheep. And what followed was the appearance of someone within me to whom I promptly assigned the name of Alberto Caeiro. Please excuse the absurdity of what I am about to say, but there had appeared within me, then and there, my own master.
I would argue that this differs from “automatic writing,” when a spirit speaks through a mortal medium. Here, the spirit does not come from beyond the grave, but is the purest form of life, aimed deliberately at a willing conductor. A more accurate phrase for the phenomenon is “spontaneous writing.”
In his Essentials of Spontaneous Prose, Jack Kerouac says this:
Begin not from preconceived idea of what to say about image but from jewel center of interest in subject of image at moment of writing, and write outwards swimming in sea of language to peripheral release and exhaustion…
In response to Kerouac’s essay and the technique at large, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) suggests:
The spontaneous writer has to possess a particularly facile and amazingly impressionable mind, one that is able to collect and store […] whole and elaborate associations […] The resultant impression, of course, has been thoroughly incorporated and translated into the supraconsciousness or writing voice of the writer. The external event is now the internal or physical event which is a combination of interpretation and pure reaction.
Inspiration, from the Latin “inspirare,” means to breathe into, to imbue with life. The Transcendentalists and the Romantics before them turned to nature and solitude as a pathway through which to discover interior worlds of the self, creating poetry all the while.
Surrealist technique values imagination so highly that André Breton is quoted as saying that the most ideal time to write poetry is in a state of half-consciousness, or sleepwalking.
Figureheads of the Beat Generation, including Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Michael McClure, and Jack Kerouac, wrote straight from the mind, often in drug-induced trances. Ginsberg’s “magic lines from my real mind” flowed freely after the poet decided to abandon traditional form and write in a jazz-influenced meter of the breath.
For each of these groups, and more, scattered across time, place, and origin, creative spirit (regardless of the means of acquisition) is what moves one to write.
All the world is movement, with no origin and no apparent end. The rhythm of a palm frond dancing whispers to me new combinations of word, of sound. Songs and books and poems of every genre coalesce in me. Pieces and parts reconstructed into whole after whole.
Reading Jack Kerouac gives me ideas. Reading Bob Kaufman gives me ideas. Reading Walt Whitman gives me ideas. Reading Langston Hughes, Lucille Clifton, Henry Dumas, June Jordan, Joseph Ceravolo, Natalie Diaz, Chen Chen, Mary Oliver, Ted Berrigan, Jean Valentine, Anne Carson, Wanda Coleman, John Keats, C. P. Cavafy, Sonia Sanchez, Tyehimba Jess, Terrance Hayes, Bradley Trumpfheller, Nikki Giovanni, Robert Hass, Danez Smith, Ross Gay, Ocean Vuong, Alex Dimitrov, Michael McClure, Xandria Phillips, Sophia Dahlin, Frank O’Hara, Fernando Pessoa, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Robert Creeley, Kenneth Koch, Richard Siken, Rita Dove, Guillaume Apollinaire, Rainer Maria Rilke, and so on, and so on, and so on—
Li-Young Lee: “The whole enterprise of writing absolutely seems to me like a spiritual practice. It’s a yoga. It’s definitely part of my prayer life, my meditation life, my contemplative life.”