Monday 21 March 2016

Right Now

I came here to work on some poems and catch some Canada-Sweden Women's Worlds in an hour. Here = Vic's Tavern in downtown Regina. Leafs-Flames in front of me right now, but I'm not paying attention.
So far, not much of an entry! I promise it will get better.
I've committed to a "my brain on poetry" talk for the Saskatchewan Writers' Guild, (dang that apostrophe). My default on that topic would be either or both of (a) Jean Piaget's notions about the building (assimilation) and revising (accommodation) of cognitive structures in the brain, and (b) Glen Gould's "the function of art is to increase our capacity for wonder" (in which wonder is not just curiosity, useful as that is, but something like awe, in the older sense of the word). My story from the Gould quote is that if we're not careful in our lives we restrict ourselves to a narrow band of experiences, perceptions, and other less-than-scintillating Latinish words. Cutting across a basic horizontal timeline, in this scenario, are the slashes of the wonder axes, as I call them, or "art" for short. These axes take us, if we let them, to the wilds in every sense--to the extremes of terror and beauty, sanity, consciousness, darkness and light, and so on. Not a great idea to stay out there, probably. But we need to visit once in a while.
Where was I. So, what (a) and (b) have in common, I suppose I need hardly point out, is that we have to stay new somehow. We have to challenge ourselves not to settle for the already known. 
The already intended. 
After that I might show a study of some text over time, what I've done with it.

Later: That all seems a tad pompous worded that way. I'm doing the un-stated option (c) anyway. Why not tune in on April 4!

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