moving and amalgamating

Hi everyone

I realised I had too many blogs and have decided to amalgamate 'moment by moment' and 'unearthing your creative self' with my Wordygirl one so please check out http://wordygirlpoetry.blogspot.com/ and follow me there ...

Narayani 

heavenly haiku

It has been my pleasure recently to have been introduced to the enchanting form of poetry known as haiku. Only 3 lines long, the lines are formed of 5, 7 and 5 syllables (although this does vary), haiku form very compact little treasures of poetic delight. Almost like a photographic snapshot of a moment the drama of which is tightly packed into a mere 17 syllables. This is a very zen approach to poetry and one which I enjoy both reading and attempting to craft.

The zen-nature of the form is also about the state of mind we need to be in when writing a haiku. We are trying to capture a small moment, a scene, a frame or two in cinematic terms and of course an image can be dense with content and meaning, both obvious and hidden. To then transcribe such a scene we need metaphorically to practically embody the camera and all the equipment needed to manifest a silver print (the type of photograph that is first taken on film, then processed to produced negatives of the image which are then exposed through a photographic enlarger onto photographic paper for just the right amount of time and then chemically induced to birth the image we saw originally through the lens). We need to be acutely aware of when such a moment has been caught on the film of our retina. We then need to "develop" the film by carefully processing the various aspects of the image, digesting the flavour of it and then issuing forth our attempt at conveying the true colour, form and meaning of it with a light touch rather akin to the delicate way that dew rests on rose petals. All this requires great clarity delicacy and free flowing apparent effortlessness. We need to enter the moment we are trying to capture and really let it speak to us so that we can step back out and offer out that moment of magic to others by writing and sharing the haiku.

I have been fortunate in that I have of late been exchanging haiku with a seasoned practitioner of the form and so have been able to sample its delights from a master. It is often by understanding how something works that we are able to produce our own versions is it not?

Joyfully, I have been reminded of this wonderful form at the creative writing class I am attending at Birkbeck with performance poet/ tutor, Anthony Joseph, and it is my pleasure to be asked to create four to five haiku over the next couple of weeks.

So without further ado, here are my latest.


Four legged redness
crosses tarmacked median,
startled in my eyes


Bath water blanket
so neatly encapsulates
traveller's return



Wet platform tactics
eyes darting, spashes abound
so oblivious

(c) Narayani L Guibarra 2010

the joy of new things

Part of being a creative person is to notice with wonder the many small things in life that are wonderful. Here for example is a wonderful design on the back of a new frying pan, beautiful silver segments forming an almost labyrinthical (yes, and create new words too if necessary) design absorbing the colours of its surroundings and reflecting that beauty back out to the viewer.

Alternatively just look inside your coffee cup, best if its the frothy kind or even a hot chocolate and see, when you've finished drinking your chosen hot (or cold) beverage, what the froth, or chocolate, has left behind. There can be all kinds of shapes, symbols, letters even. I do enjoy observing these shapes and though I have trained my eye to see images that perhaps my friends cannot, I do not consider myself to be a professional coffee/ chocolate reader who will assign meaning to the shapes seen in the cup.

Here's the wonderful chocolate picture from today's hot chocolate. At the top there is a lovely heart shape. To the right of this is a suggestion of a paint brush. Below the heart is a smaller heart and then below this can be seen the suggestion of a standing figure rising up out of a crescent chocolate moon where other mysterious figures reside, man or beast who's to say. What can you see?

Anyway, I offer this is a simple suggestion as a playful means of bringing creative observation and fun into your life. Enjoy!! Who knows what you might find in there ...

how to feed the creative urge

Our creative self, like any living thing, needs to be fed. As a plant needs water, light and nutrients, so too our creative self needs to be watered, fed and nurtured and this we can do in a variety of ways:-

• Allow creative thoughts and ideas to come into our mind and take notice of them when this happens.


• Be aware of the myriad ways we may already be allowing our creativity through and this could be through creative cookery, what clothes we choose to put together, how we style our surroundings, house, flat, car, room, what musical tracks we choose to juxtapose on our playlist, how creative we are with our time and resources etc etc etc.

Much of the time we allow our inner critic to come to the fore and fool us that we don’t have the time or resources or talent to be creative. Our job therefore is to talk ourselves up so that the blinkered overly elevated judgments that we impose on ourselves can either be reasoned with or, for the most part, ignored. Yes I am creative, I realise that I use my creativity in my home, my food, my clothes, my music etc. How else can I allow my creativity to come to the fore?

• Jot these thoughts down in some way.


• Talk about ideas with other people and see what bounces off and comes back, be prepared to mould the idea into a slightly new shape.

We can then take the steps to bring our ideas, our musings, our imaginings into the material world by practising our art for the sake of practising it and enjoying the process while in the process as opposed to limiting ourselves in some way perhaps by believing that our creativity can only be measured by some self imposed standard of a successful outcome as in, perhaps, a financially successful way. For example, we can write creatively without necessarily knowing needing to write a book. We can write a song or part of it without having to write an album. We can draw sketches without needing necessarily to transform them into large works of art.

In other words we can enjoy the creative journey and be in the moment or we can crack down on our creative urge and stop before we even begin.

It’s a choice, we have to decide our direction and simply begin.