Trying consciously to make art is probably the hardest and most fruitless endeavor a human can undertake. As a writer of words that occasionally take shapes that could be called poems, I constantly find myself frustrated with the spontaneity of my own creative process. For the life of me, I can't just sit down and write a poem whenever I feel like it. If I decide to write a poem and the poem doesn't want to be written, all that will come out us a sticky grey sludge of words in sequence. Sometimes I feel as though the poems that come out of my brain have brains of their own, their own little wills, and they only show their faces when they feel like it. But really, I've found that they're most like seeds. You can't instruct them to grow on command, but put them in the right place and give them enough water and they will eventually emerge seemingly by magic.

 

Of course, poems aren't always obvious in what they need to grow. You can't always water them with the same stuff. But over the years I've generally found that a few things help me get into the correct mindset for making poems happen. Certain activities stir the brain cells around in productive ways. Certain decisions can set the non-decision of poetry writing in motion.

 

Traveling is the big one. I'm not talking about setting out and seeing the whole world, although that would probably result in a lot of writing. But even just taking the bus instead of driving can be enough of a shift to get my juices flowing. Something about watching the scenery flit by sets my brain in a creative order. I once wrote a three-page prose poem while sitting on an eight-hour train ride. None of it felt forced; I just couldn't stop the word flow. If your surroundings are stale and inhibiting you from turning over fresh psychic spaces, change your surroundings. Leave for a day or a week. Stimulate the word core.

 

And stay up too late. Drink too much coffee. Invoke that trance, like an oracle in Greece. Anything to knock you out of the rut of day to day living. I find routine numbs the parts of me that like to create. In order to generate I need to change. I need to read, too--like eating words only to regurgitate them in a different order. Sometimes reading a single poem can set off a new--and entirely different--poem of my own. Songs can do this, too. I'll start from a misheard lyric and go. 

 

What I've discovered, essentially, is that creating new things requires the intake of new things. If you're going to write words in a shape that they've never been written in before, expose yourself to states you've never existed in before. Shake up those neurons and go.