Each single factor we make, even the smallest, we make with the entire of who we’re and what we’ve lived — with each impression and each reminiscence, each love and each loss, consciously and unconsciously constellated into the artistic act. A tune encodes its maker’s whole historical past of feeling. An equation can’t describe why an apple falls with out its maker’s whole understanding of how the universe works. The poetry of personhood — which we’d name soul — is the uncooked materials for all artistic work. To listen to its voice requires a fragile harmonizing of what we consciously know and what we unconsciously are — a syncopation of mind and instinct.
Excited about this within the context of Virginia Woolf’s meditation on how to hear your soul and Nick Cave’s insistence on the creative power of trusting yourself, I used to be reminded of some fantastic passages I had saved from varied interviews Lucille Clifton (June 27, 1936–February 13, 2010) gave over the course of her lengthy and luminous life.
A century after the polymathic Nobel laureate Henri Bergson thought-about the interplay of intuition and the intellect in the creative work of science, Clifton takes up the query as associated to artwork in a Rattle journal interview from the winter of 2002, reflecting on the place a poem comes from:
You may homicide poems, I imply, I’ve achieved it, once you begin pondering too onerous in your personal manner and also you begin intellectualizing, as a result of I believe a poem has to come back from mind and instinct. In case you get an excessive amount of instinct you’ve gotten sentimentality, which isn’t good, and with an excessive amount of mind, it has a complete lot of stuff that no person is aware of nor cares. However a poem, it’s about a complete human and speaks to the entire human and it has to come back from a complete human, so that you contain all of your self.
Within the last years of her life, in another interview, Clifton revisits the topic of this built-in totality of being and methods to hear its voice:
A human will not be sections, will not be elements. Stanley Kunitz says that poetry is the story of what it means to be human on this place, at the moment… If one thing needs to be stated — the poem — the poem is aware of that I’ll settle for it… You enable it in your self. You enable it to do its work in you.
Poetry could be so therapeutic exactly as a result of it springs from that deepest place of reckoning with what it means to be human — the place we search with the mind however contact with the instinct. And down there within the depths, we don’t a lot differ from each other, sharing the identical primary longings, the identical primary fears. Clifton displays:
Poetry can heal. As a result of it comes from a coronary heart, it could possibly communicate to a different coronary heart.
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Any individual requested me why is it that I need to heal the world. I need to heal Lucille Clifton! And luckily, I’m very human similar to all the opposite ones, all the opposite people.
With an eye fixed to what it means to be a poet, she provides a sentiment equally true of any artistic endeavor:
I didn’t graduate from faculty, which isn’t essential to be a poet. It is just essential to be enthusiastic about people and to be in contact with your self as a human.
Complement with Clifton’s traditional “won’t you celebrate with me” — a residing testomony to this poetry of personhood turned artwork — and her spare, gorgeous ode to the common ground of being, then revisit Wendell Berry on how to be a poet and a complete human being and Anne Gilchrist — Whitman’s most beloved pal — on inner wholeness and the key to a flourishing soul.
