Damn It Anyhow

The dusty chalk board
has only white residue
of the words I want so badly.
They were, but are no longer.
Out of my reach.

Writers Place Open Mic

David A. Hughes was among the readers last night at the Writers Place open Mic. David read Fire Eaters and Stained Glass Women which is to be featured in Thorny Locust this year. David is also working on a chap book to be released soon.

I read two poems last night... The Dove and My Dachshund Trumps Your Honor Student.

There were 12 who turned out for the readings. The summer months have been tough on turnout.

Currently on the walls at The Writers Place are an exhibit titled Portraits and Poems: A Photographic Testimony. The photographs were taken by Dennis Lowden and accompanying the photos are poems written by Vietnamese poets. The photos and poems tell the story of lives in transition as tens of thousands of Vietnamese citizens pass through Wake Island processing center as they flea their homeland at the end of a tragic war.

Meaningful Escapes Me

I'm hot - sweaty and nearly speechless. Just got off the tread mill - did 30 minutes and I had hoped to blog a bit about some thoughts on something I read earlier today but I haven't the capacity to pull my thoughts together in some meaningful fashion.

Still reading in the Sari Solden book on Adult ADD and trying to process a lot of that... but it was actually thoughts off some material I read by Amy Lowell that had me thinking and I wanted to discuss. I suppose it will have to wait till later.

I did write this weekend. Have a poem that I need to rewrite and maybe workshop with a couple of my writing friends. It is a little different. Doing stuff that is different or I suppose "experimental" always seems to be difficult to reach that level of gut feeling about on your own.

Anyway, it's 10pm and I'm calling it a night.

Boxed In Amy Gets Linked

Ah... see what you get for commenting on one of my posts! I'm adding Living Poetry to my sidebar links. Not because Amy commented, but because she commented and has an interesting blog herself. Check it out!

Last Monday she had a post about Knowing When It Works. Boy could I identify with that post having worked last night on something that seemed to be working and after I shut everything down and came up stairs looking at it again, reading it out loud, I thought not. Now it has some possibility but clearly needs to go through the rewrite process. Likely repeatedly. But it is interesting, the question Amy asks. How do you know when it is right? How does truth hit you? I can't say... but it is funny that we seem to come to realize it. More often than not. Thank God!

OPEN MIC MONDAY - WRITERS PLACE

The Writers Place in Kansas City will host the July Open Mic on Monday July 25th at 8pm.

Writers Place

is located at

3607 Pennsylvania

Kansas City, MO 64111

Local writers will find this venue a pleasing experience. Sometimes the crowd is large and other times it becomes a little more intimate. There is always some quality work presented and the readers vary from quite experienced to first timers. Even if you are not into reading, it is an excellent place because of the exposure to quality work and just to get to know more about the center. It provides a variety of other excellent activities from readings to workshops and exhibits.

The Stick Poet Superhero Coffee Mug

The Stick Poet Superhero Coffee Mug
Originally uploaded by stickpoet.

Have You had your morning coffee in your Stick Poet Superhero mug?

Latent Inhibition & Creativity

In my post on Tuesday - I promised to blog on the creative thought process later in the week. I had been reading of a study published in September of 2003 by Psychologists at the University of Toronto and Harvard University, so this is of course not new material... simply new to me.

According to the published report, the researchers evidently identified at least one of the biological bases of creativity. It finds that the brains of creative people seem to be more open to incoming stimuli from surrounding environment while other people might shut out this same information by what is called "latent inhibition." That process was defined as an animal's unconscious capacity to ignore stimuli that experience has shown to be irrelevant to its needs. Through testing, it was found that creative people seemed to have low levels of latent inhabitation and left them in contact with extra information constantly streaming from their environment. Jordan Peterson a professor at the University of Toronto explained, "The normal person classifies an object, and then forgets about it, even though the object is much more complex and interesting the he or she thinks. The creative person, by contrast, is always open to new possibilities."

Tests administered to Harvard undergraduate students classified as eminent creative achievers with a single area of creative achievement were found to be seven times more likely to have low latent inhabitation scores.

So low levels of latent inhabitation are a good thing? The report suggests that with high intellectual functioning and good working memory it may be a positive thing. The capacity to think about many things at once is good if it can be achieved - but negative otherwise. Professor Patterson put it this way- "If you are open to new information, new ideas, you better be able to intelligently and carefully edit and choose. If you have 50 ideas, only two or three are likely to be good. You have to discriminate or you'll get swamped."

That swamped description that Patterson described is something that I can associate with. I'm sure everyone feels swamped at times. I believe doing so is specifically a denotation of ADD or AD/HD. However, it seems that many of the times that I feel "swamped" there seem to be an abundance of external stimuli. So, from a very personal perspective, I can identify with the aspects of this study.

At the moment I am not on any medication for ADD treatment - though I have previously had limited experience with two medications and I am reassessing medication options. While creativity as it relates to my writing is only a portion of my life, I do think about the impact of medication on my creative thought process. I also have to think about the impact of medication or non-medication on the other aspects of my life, such as family, work, etc.


creativity mental health writing


Source:
Biological basis for creativity linked to mental illness.