"I am trying to check my habits of seeing, to counter them for the sake of greater freshness. I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I'm doing." - John Cage


Sunday, April 20, 2014

Day 22: Rikki Ducornet: Rational Rooted in the Imagination

The beautiful Rikki Ducornet began her week here at Vermont Studio Center by reading to us rapt writers from her imaginative book of little prose pieces titled One Marvelous Thing.  Read an interview with her and read the title story of her book at the links above. At her craft talk, she shared her writing process, a deeply intuitive process that listens to her dreams and her memory.  She taps into places that give her a power source – accessed through meditation, imagination, primal memories, and creatures in their world.  These places of power are where dreams and the hot material for her writing come from; this explains why a sudden idea can dissipate so quickly, as dreams do once we wake.  She urged us to take a great leap, to work on what catches fire, and to leave something behind.
She said we are the dreamers - and there is a great deal of rational rooted in the imagination.  
This idea of nesting the irrational in the rational, the imagination with the concrete, is the play and tension that I want to develop in my own writing this week.  Now, with 6 days left, I’m cutting up, line by line, poems of similar subject matter or imagery and exploring wild new combinations of phrasing and idea that question the definitions of irrationality and meaning. How can recombining lines from different poems access a place of intuition and the subconscious? Try it yourself and see -


1 comment:

Unknown said...

very interesting post! i liked it very much! thanks for sharing your thoughts and for your efforts!


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