We’re with two poets who are exploring the creative process and the poetry of transformation by looking more deeply at attitudes or uncertainties – such as ego and worry about criticism – that can block or interrupt the inner creative space.
Another self-limiting notion is the viewpoint that creativity is somehow the province only of people who are artists, or writers, or musicians. It’s an artificial separation most of us learn in school - that art and science are on disconnected tracks - instead of being different facets of the same creative or universal impulse.
When the creative impulse expresses itself as poetry, it would be a mistake to compare one poem to another; each is a universe unto itself. What we’re discovering here is the poetry of who we are becoming. The poetry that is the Golden Gate Bridge, on
which there is the traffic of life that is forever in transit from who we were to who we are becoming, to who we will be tomorrow, and, later, on the other side of the veil… the poetry of transformation.
There's the impulse, the idea of ‘Okay, I want to create something,’ or I have a question, or I have a niggle, or I got smacked upside the head. There's an initiation first of the creative process, then there's the actual creation. So now we're in it, and we're bringing everything we have to bear on it.
Libby Wagner
One of my favorite ways of being is in wonder and curiosity. What if? What about? Why? I’m drawn to conversations and contemplations about the Beautiful Questions in human life. As a poet, I walk about trying to name things, to use my sensory experience in the world to make sense of it, even when I know that I’m trying to say the "unsayable." This doesn’t deter me from trying to connect, express, reveal. In my organizational work, I create spaces and places where people can connect with their artistry to arrive transformed by their conversations and their creations.
Holly Thomas
The right poem at the right time can loosen, trigger, or buttress almost anything. As intimate catalysts, poems distill and extend our experience—sharing everything from fear to relief, and from dismay to benediction.
As an editor, poet, and painter, I often teeter between creation and critique—with the risk of stifling creation by prematurely attempting to interpret or refine it. But when I find my balance and trust what is emerging, something with a life and agency of its own seems to enter the world. What happens next depends on those it touches.
Aviv Shahar
Aviv is the Founder of Aviv Consulting, helping leaders unleash strategic innovation, and is the author of Create New Futures: How Leaders Produce Breakthroughs and Transform the World Through Conversation.
