A Poetic Risk
In today’s post I share what one uncomfortable poetic experience taught me about taking creative risks. Read what I wrote, then join this week’s Drafters Workshop chat so we can discuss.
July Theme: Creative Courage
Big Question: What does it take to begin, risk, and share what you create?
Week 2: Taking Creative Risks
What I wrote below is based on the following reflective writing prompt included in Saturday’s Taking Creative Risks: Writing Prompts to Build Creative Courage post.
Prompt: When has discomfort helped you grow?
Why did I choose it?
I chose this prompt because I don’t think of discomfort very often. Instead, I tend to prioritize things I want to do and create, then do the work of figuring out how to do them and create them, typically ignoring any discomfort I may feel along the way. Which, sure, has plenty of upsides. But it also has its downsides. Because being aware of any discomfort can also provide some useful insight into what you actually prefer creating and doing in the long run— insight that I have to take extra care to extract sometimes, more so than what I assume is ‘normal’ for creatives who are probably more aware than I of what makes them feel uncomfortable.
So, I’m hoping this prompt will help me better understand the ways discomfort, and taking creative risks in the past, has allowed me to grow both as a writer and human. Typically, I dive right into doing the work and don’t reflect much on how comfortable or uncomfortable it makes me feel as I’m working. I reflect a lot on my writing process and the techniques I want to practice or evolve, and enjoy analyzing the result of my work, but never whether I felt comfortable with the experience itself or not. I intuit this is probably weird or abnormal? If not, please let me know!
Either way, the following is what transpired when I asked myself: When was the last time you felt uncomfortable in a creative setting, and how did that experience allow you to grow?
Keep reading, then let me know what your response to this prompt would be in the comments or chat. Or complete one of the other prompts in Saturday’s post and join the Drafters Workshop chat to tell us about it.
My Response
When I was in grad school, I decided to take a class that covered poetry ‘from the past decade.’ While it’s lost to me now why I decided to take this class, I assume it had something to do with the time of day and week it was offered, as I worked full time and didn’t have the luxury of extending my time in school at that point in my life.
Either way, I signed up for this poetry class not knowing exactly what I was signing up for because, well, at the time I hadn’t read any poetry within the same century, aside from a few beat poets here and there. I had studied epic poetry in undergrad, and scads of Elizabethan works too, Shakespeare among them. And I had studied Wordsworth and the Romantics and Whitman and other US Civil War-era poets over the years in depth.
But poetry created within the past decade? As in poetry by people who still breathed and walked upright on the earth and recited their colorful words from their own crisp, small-scale indie published copies? Nope.
And not because I didn’t like contemporary poetry or care to read it, but mostly because I was sadly ignorant of its existence, as mainstream publishers rarely pick up poets’ works and higher education hardly ever pays any credence to them. Until this class came along apparently. Which actually ended up being a seminar with less than a dozen students in it! Which meant, I came to understand on the first day of our meeting, that I would be required to participate in every single discussion… about something of which I knew zilch.
Yet, being the dedicated student I was, I decided to plow ahead anyway and stay in the seminar. Ignorance and pretentious cohorts be damned! I was there to learn after all, wasn’t I? And I was paying good money, wasn’t I… eventually? Plus, isn’t admitting the limitations of your own knowledge the only way to expand it? I think I read that somewhere…
Anyway, needless to say, over a decade later, I can finally admit what I don’t think I fully realized then, which is also the point of this reflection.
I WAS UNCOMFORTABLE.
And not just because I was still learning about poetry from the past decade, because that was actually pretty interesting (aside from all the rambling side rants about neoliberalism and the commodification of language that went on ad nauseum, etc.) but because I was the one who was elected by my cohort to lead the discussion on poetic embodiment (the practice or theory of using physical, bodily experiences like breath, gesture, rhythm, and sensorial awareness to create, understand, or perform poetry) in the subsection we did on Black poetry… as a white person.
While I could admire the poetry and analyze it from a linguistic, academic yet artistic, partial distance (as the poet was also a woman in body like me at least), the beginning of this entire experience made me feel like a fraud. It felt downright wrong! And I mean that both literally and symbolically.
But… this experience did inevitably also prove beyond an irrevocable doubt to me the extreme power poetry can wield on one’s entire being —mind, body, and soul— in a way that centuries-old poetry never had before. Especially when I realized that my body was not fully able to embody and absorb the words of these poems due to its own limitations and experiences. Which was a life-changing and mind-bending experience all wrapped up in one.
Ironically enough, it wasn’t until I had to parse and write about this embodied poetry and my literally lived yet beautifully frustrating and limited experience with it that I fully understood the limitlessness of poetry and how it was a living and breathing thing that was meant to evolve with us humans and our language and lives, both individually and collectively, not remain only forever in the past under some sort of abstract intellectual plexiglass. This structurally and artistically designed limiting creative experience, in other words, is what set the creative limits I had been placing on poetry and what I thought it should and could do, free.
And this forever changed how I will view and understand poetry and even write poetry. That’s right, until I took this seminar, I was never interested in writing poetry myself. I was only interested in studying it. But after studying the embodied limitations of poetry, I became enthralled and amazed by what it could do, not just amused or intrigued.
Now I see poetry as something that has and will always open up the world to me, as it was and as it can be, and consider it is one of the few creative mediums out there that allow me to express myself and experiment with what I know and feel all at the same time, allowing me to take the best, most meaningful creative risks.
So, I guess I would say that one of the most uncomfortable creative experiences I’ve ever had ended up for the best in the long run, as it opened up a whole new world to me, and a way of understanding it and others in it.
An Invitation
Have you had a similar experience to mine?
Or do you have a life-changing creative experience you’d like to share with us?
Leave a comment or join this week’s Drafters Workshop chat, where we’ll be discussing creative risks and the creative courage they sometimes require.
Whether you join the chat to share your responses, ask questions, or connect with other writers and support their work, we look forward to your contributions as we continue to explore creative courage this month!
Please don’t forget to like and share this post with your network so others can see it too. Thanks in advance. I hope to see you in the comments sometime soon!
Continue Exploring July’s Creative Courage Theme
This week’s Posts: Taking Creative Risks
Taking Creative Risks: Writing Prompts to Build Creative Courage
Should writers prioritize creative risks or readers’ expectations?
20 Books That Prove Creative Risks Are Worth Taking
Week 1: Beginning Before You Feel Ready
Beginning Before You Feel Ready: Writing Prompts
Do writers need to feel ready before they begin a new project?
Beginnings and endings are linked in a lot of ways…
Why Beginning Feels So Difficult, But Doesn’t Have to Be
Books That Made Me Want to Write and Take Creative Risks
Consider going more in depth with this month’s theme with July’s Creative Courage Writing Collection.
The writing collection is designed to help you explore creative courage from different angles: discovering your voice, strengthening your craft, experimenting with new approaches, and reflecting on the writer you are becoming.
The free Drafts and Dialogues posts published this month will explore the outward side of creative courage—beginning, risking, and sharing— and should complement this exclusive writing collection quite well, which invites you to go much deeper into the internal work of creativity with 30 guided writing prompts and craft exercises, reflections, as well as three options for guided monthly writing challenges for those who want to go even further than that.