By Joe Ortiz
“Freedom is only truly freedom when it appears against some arbitrary confinement”
— T.S. Eliot (top photo)
Many artists would agree that a search for creative inspiration without some form of structure — whether it be in painting, drawing, music, or writing — might be a risky practice.
John Ruskin, in The Elements of Drawing points out that it’s easy to draw what appears to be a good line with a sweep of the hand with freedom; the real difficulty and mastery according to Ruskin, is in never letting the hand be free but keeping it under control at every part of the line. In other words, “You must never, therefore aim at freedom.”
Joe Ortiz
Poet Ezra Pound said that once a fixed element is set in place, the artist creates a safe zone in which to create, and a groundwork for freedom.
My search for the secrets of creativity began in a poetry class taught by Nils Peterson at San Jose State College in 1968. A Prosody Handbook, by Robert Beum and Karl Shapiro, describes the “heuristic function” of rhyme, which propels our minds into a search for a solution to a creative problem, leading the poet “to discoveries he would not otherwise have made.”
“Heuristic” can be defined as, 1) a means of furthering investigation, or 2) a way to encourage discoveries or problem solving by experimenting, exploring solutions, or trial and error.
Many of us search for rhymes by running the original word through the alphabet (e.g.: Aisle, Dial, File, Guile). As the mind seeks out a new word to rhyme with the original word, a conscious effort starts the process, but the quest somehow shifts to the unconscious, causing the inspiration to feel as if it “arrived out of nowhere”—especially if the new expression comes as a surprise.
In The Physical Basis of Rhyme, Henry Lanz writes that “rime precedes and produces the idea. . . . The poet often roams in darkness until an ingenious rime helps him out into the light.”
Many poets would agree that a limit on our choice of words requires the mind to search for “hidden likenesses”—freeing the mind from the near-infinity of vocabulary leading the poet into discoveries—which often times may even heighten the meaning of a verse or stanza.
What We Can Learn
In writing or any art, it’s not a cop out to rely on some fixed system, form or structure to be the vessel of our creative journey. Set structures help focus the mind, giving it a compression-chamber effect so the mind can “bounce off walls,” so to speak. Limitation such as rhyme, rhythm, and line length force us to “search for answers” and break free from confinement.
If our form is fixed, our imagination is free to soar. As T.S. Elliot might explain, this confinement is problem solving in the highest artistic sense. The form, then, is merely a roadmap to help us arrive at our creative destination.
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I’d love to hear your thoughts via email: [email protected].