{ a.k. lame speaks on emerging and beginning, of the poet, the poem, and
when you picture someone reading your poetry, how do you see them? what do they think about, wear, and do? or, maybe a better way to say it: who do you write for? and how do you see your writing nourishing others?
Because most of the world’s wisdom traditions describe the cosmos as a Word, a vibration of silence becoming matter, I see poetry as a devotional act that takes our awareness back, through the Word, to creation’s source. I intend my poems to be used by individuals and groups at sparks of meditation. I cannot do meditation for more than half an hour without writing a poem, as a spontaneous efflux of inner silence. And I cannot read a really juicy poem without falling into silent meditation. So my poems are a celebration of creation through the Word, the Logos.
how do you use poetry as a practice for spiritual exploration, discipline, or growth? can you offer any practical advice or sure-fire practices for folks interested in allowing writing to inform their spiritual discipline?
This is not new. The Christian mystics called it Lectio Divina: Letting a verse or phrase, or even one word, of sacred writing ignite the soul with the same spark that created the universe. And to me all good poetry is sacred writing. So I suggest practicing Lection Divina not only with scripture, but with any poetry you love.
What you love takes you back to your silent energy-source, and that is the root meaning of ‘religion’: ‘re-ligare,’ to bind back.
Poems are maps for getting lost in the wilderness of the heart, where everyone can find you. We need poems to touch other souls, all over the universe. Poems remind us that we are never alone in our solitude. I recommend practicing transcendental deep meditation every morning before dawn, and then letting the whisper of the first breath after meditation create a poem.
when you go to revise work, how do you typically go about it? are there best practices you follow? give some wise instruction for those of us ready to get cracking on revision!
I regard revision as the devil’s work. I cannot tell you how often I over-revise a poem until someone tells me, ‘Please stop! This poem was raw and beautiful when it was first conceived, and now I hardly recognize it!’ If you revise, be sure you always save the original version. Then when it’s all finished, ask someone to read both the original and the finished version. You’ll be amazed how often people like the rough one better, because it carries the fragrance of spontaneity, and it is still wet with the womb of silence, whence it emerged.
what’s the best advice you can give to a person just beginning to write, struggling to write, or feeling stuck? what’s something you wish someone had told you starting out?
For a person ‘just beginning to write’? But that’s just the point: you should always be ‘in the beginning’ when you write. That’s why I recommend contemplative practice – settling awareness in the field of silence – before writing a poem. Always be a beginner. When you stop being a beginning, you become a critic, not a poet. Beginners are never ‘stuck.’
For example, the poem below rose ecstatically from the deliciousness of taking a breath, a beginning in itself. In the raw experience of the breath-miracle, we wipe away the illusory difference between purity and impurity. Our spiritual practice is not to improve ourselves, but to let go of the illusion that there is anything wrong. Then our poem is a celebration of how things are, just so, this ineluctable suchness. And it is a vision of grace. If your poetry is filled with such generosity, such willingness to share what simply IS, just as you see it, your poem will send healing through each atom of creation, whether anyone reads it or not! That is my radical understanding of the creative process, because the universe is an excitation of pure consciousness. I used to write sonnets and complex rhymes; those are nice exercises, but now I want my voice to be the naked moonbeam of breath brushing the empty page. Thank you for this opportunity to share. Anyone who asks such wondrous questions has very lucky students…
Whatever the opposite of bowing is,
that’s what you’ve been doing
too much of.
Get some callouses on your knees.
Stop cooking the world
in ghostly guru-ghee.
It’s not that you attain the goal
but that all the light in the universe,
falling toward you forever,
finally arrives in your body.
Enter the tavern of oblivion
and observe your sleep
with a single glittering eye.
Get drunk on the gin of subtraction.
Learn how sweethearts confess their pain.
Annihilate hope and discover
perfect clumsiness.
After one sip you won’t remember
why you were angry
or what your believed in.
After the second,
which side you’re on won’t matter.
Wherever you thought you’d get
by refraining from what makes
lovers crazy,
you’ll get there quicker
with another cup of this!
+++++
A. K. LaMotte is the author of ‘Wounded Bud: Poems for Meditation,’ published by Saint Julian Press in Houston TX. He is an adjunct professor of world religions and an interfaith college chaplain at The Evergreen State College in Olympia WA. He is a Quaker, with a BA from Yale University and M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary. He has also studied meditation in the Vedic tradition of India with Mahesh Yogi and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar.