Motivationally Speaking

The last Tree Seed Workshop was facilitated by Roland Provost who led a round table on why we write. What are the motivations and goals?
He gave 3 pages of quotes of people of various poets from Wordsworth’s “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, Eliot’s “escape from personality” to contemporaries such as Rhonda Douglas who said “Name everything that’s wrong and draw large screaming arrows in the direction of all the rightness you find” and Stephen Brockwell’s “I’m deeply curious about how we know things[…] exploring how poetry makes meaning and explores uncertainty”.
I like the oddness of Sandburg’s “Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly.” Interesting how Basho translates so well to now even in this “It is spirit, such as it is, that lead me to poetry, at first little more than a pastime, then the full business of my life […]never finding peace with itself, always doubting the worth of what it makes.”
In considering what we want to get out of the practice, we understand our practice better since our goals inform our poetics and our outcomes and satisfaction. If the aim is the exhilaration of play, the outcome of form and content will be different than if you want to change the world a little or prove yourself an artiste.
He gave out 26 statements of what motivates some people from expressing perceptions to impressing people. Where were we in the spectrum of what one could get out of composition? Some others included: to converse with culture, to testify to a truth, to escape, to decompress, to explore language, breath, visual forms, sounds, etc, to play, to immortalize, to invest your strength in something subtle enough to be worthwhile, to scratch an unavoidable itch, or to connect with another. A couple people added to the list with the idea that poetry composition is a way not to express emotions so much as a way of thinking on the page, processing.
There was a certain amount of surprise as people (“I thought it was just me”) heard others confess that without writing there’s less wellness. People get beyond grumpy, tired, headachy, physically sick if they don’t make the chance to write. A couple of people quipped in tandem that “writing is like an antibiotic” “– or an anti-psychotic.”
Roland described writing as being another physical sense, as a way of perceiving the world as much as sight or hearing. Without being able to write, it’s hard to perceive. It’s like being blindfolded.
What does writing do for you? Is it doing different things, coming from different sparks than in the past? Does your action meet your goals? What would you do differently to get closer to your goals?
There was discussion of how is it that writing does what to a person? Is it an addiction or a dependency? I think I’m showing signs of poetry tolerance in the chemical sense. At that link Jennifer Schneider “What causes a buzz is the rate of increase — rate of change — in the brain.” So there has to be a tilt in poetry. Constancy may be relief but not buzz or shock-scalp-off. Anyhew,
Somewhere among the talk, A.M. Benoit in the discussion pointed out that it is a skill to think critically and to feel intensely at the same time and to cultivate that helps editing without losing the spirit of the piece.
There was 10 or so people for the workshop. (I’m unsure whether to count people who sit at the edge, listen but don’t come to the table.)
The last Tree was a full house for the 8pm show.

It was around 40, including people behind here.
The Schrodinger’s poet was Valzhyna Mort, stories from dark days in Belarus.
Some of the open mic is now up in the video section.
The feature reader was a double-bill:

Sandra Ridley and Christine McNair doing their Ottawa readings of Post-Apothocary and Conflict and some newer material. Videos: Sandra’s reading and Christine’s

The book table.
Susan Gillis is the next featured reader on July 10. The next few workshops will be on translating poetry, Joe Brainard and radical revision by Lesley Strutt, Stuart Ross and myself.