It's an early Spring morning in Northern California and I found myself preoccupied with the idea of iconoclasm and the role it plays in our lives as artists, poets, writers etc.
Nature is itself iconoclastic and continually breaking up all patterns and formal designs. A friend has been complaining about bamboo ruthlessly taking over her garden and there is no artistic force as great as a blackberry patch.
I can feel myself getting ready to break out of old patterns of thought and have no idea of the direction in which I am poised. Inside teutonic plates shift slightly and far away in my dreams last night I heard a faint cracking of an iceberg. The words, Flash, Ink! appeared and disappeared before I was fully awake.
A former poetry teacher, Myung Mi Kim once suggested to me that I was too reserved and not getting "to my real stuff." In her own words "To radicalize anything starts at a point of rupture; naturally, change can't just happen along a continuum that has already established itself ..."
I know this is true but exactly how does a person break away? I imagine it's a manner of putting oneself before the real judge; the self.
What force of change do you detect in your own work these days and how are you breaking out? If you are an artist I would be happy to link to a visual response.
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