All Writing Is Creative Writing

http://rss.artsusa.org/~r/afta/blog/~3/dcgiTQbOlA0/

BJ Buckley

What is thinking? Are there different modes of thought? How do we learn? Why do we respond so powerfully and intensely to the world’s beauty and to the beauty of things made by humans in response, to art in all its forms? What are the connections between our responses to paintings, music, dance, theater, poetry, and stories, our own impulses to make and create, and learning?

As a practicing poet/writer and teaching artist, exploring those big questions is a crucial and ongoing process. I want to bring the exciting and pleasurable kind of learning I experience when I make a poem or story into the classroom for my students when they write. I want to open for them the sheer beauty of words. I want them to look at a word or phrase or sentence as a painter looks at color or as sculptor experiences clay.

This is not as easy as it might seem. Do the faces of your students fall when you ask them to get their pencils out and prepare to write? When given the opportunity to write a story, do they stare at the blank page and say, “I can’t think of anything?” When the word poetry is mentioned, do they roll their eyes and say “Poetry is boring”? Such was my experience in many classes early on; it was clear that I needed an approach as compelling as a work of art.

My wake-up call came fairly quickly via a fourth-grade boy who was my escort to his classroom. As we walked, he asked me if he could ask me a question, and be honest, and not get in trouble. I replied of course. He said, “We were supposed to get an artist this week, and instead we got you. You’re a writer, not an artist.” I answered that writing poetry and stories was a kind of art, and he replied, “No, it’s not. I hate writing. Writing is boring. You just get pencils and paper, and you have to sit at your desk. There’s no colors or paint. You don’t get to make anything!”

You can probably imagine how I felt. It was as if I had failed before I had a chance to start, because my savvy student was absolutely correct about his experience of writing; and it wasn’t too far off the mark of my planned lesson. But my answer to him was, “Of course there will be colors! We’ll use markers when we start! We’ll draw something to go with our poems and stories. We’ll make little books. We’ll definitely move around. We might even sing!”

The smile on his face almost mitigated my rising panic that I had prepared nothing of what I hade just promised I was going to do in 5 minutes. But his truth knocked me off the horse I was riding in mid-stream, and I had to change right then to another.

I was a poet, and I should have known: Poets have always known that it’s Beauty which compels us. John Keats concludes his poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn, written out of his awe and wonder about this ancient artifact, with these words:

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

A TED talk by Denis Dutton, A Darwinian Theory of Beauty, partially and a bit provocatively echoes Keats:

“… the experience of beauty is one of the ways evolution has of arousing and sustaining interest or fascination, even obsession, in order to encourage us towards making the most adaptive decisions for survival . . .”

The exquisite artifact compelled Keats and fed his impulse to create a beautiful poem in response. In his effort Keats used ALL of his senses: sight, touch, the imagined taste and scent of the wine the urn had once contained, the music of the words that emerged in his poem. Keats’ poem wasn’t MADE by a pencil on paper. It was made in the world, via his senses, his knowledge of history, his empathy with an ancient artist, his experience of tasting wine. When he wrote, he wasn’t at his desk, coughing his life away from tuberculosis. He was in another world and time.

My own poems begin outside, in wind and weather, among plants and animals and people, with sounds and scents and tastes. They begin in museums as I look at paintings, in the music that fills my room when I write, in the dinner I cook, in the touch of bodies, the meeting of eyes in silence, the words I read and hear during the course of a day – poetry, newscasts, conversations.

That young student’s words were true in more ways than he knew, and he forever changed the way I teach. I had somehow forgotten that even inside a classroom, poetry is born of our bodies and our senses. It is a visual art. We can write the words in different colors that reflect the colors of the world and of our feelings as we write. It is musical and rhythmic. We can listen to music as we write, we can sing the words we put down. Poetry is kinetic. We can dance it. Scent and touch and taste feed it, as much as do our many sources of words. Why not eat a snack and drink something to feed our bodies while we try to express our souls?

Our brains evolved to learn in environments that were rich in stimuli for all of our senses: diverse, complex, perhaps dangerous, beautiful environments where problem-solving was a necessity for our survival. No modern endeavor re-creates for us that sort of environment as effectively as participating as makers and observers of some form of art.

Modern research on the arts, learning, and cognition has clearly documented causal links between exposure to multiple forms of the arts and crucial aspects of cognitive development. (http://www.nasaa-arts.org/Research/Key-Topics/Arts-Education/rbc-toolkit-section3.pdf )

Exposure to and participation in the arts sustain many aspects crucial to effective learning: Beauty and pleasure are strong motives for the sustained attention and focus. Acting leads to improved memory and increasing agility in semantic manipulation. Music-making strengthens spatial reasoning skills crucial to math and science education.

But I always come back to this: Making words, or paint, or clay, or how your body moves match an image of beauty you carry inside you demands many skills that are essential to every kind of learning: exploring multiple perspectives, being open to failure as you try different approaches until one works or satisfies you, making critical judgments and analyses. By these means we truly become artists, alive in the awareness of the whole selves we all are.

In thinking about, researching, and writing this blog, the following were important sources: