As recounted in part two of “Embrace Your Creative Demon’s Rhythm,” the poet Amy Lowell once compared poets to radio antennas. The poet, she said, is someone who “is capable of receiving messages on waves of some sort; but he is more than an aërial, for he is capable of transmuting these messages into those patterns of words we call poems.”
Lately, if you consciously fashion yourself into a different kind of antenna — specifically, one that’s set to detect references to the daimon/daemon, the genius, and the creative muse in current cultural discourse — you’ll find that you receive a lot of signals indeed. There’s a diffuse conversation afoot about this ancient view of creativity and selfhood, and paying attention to it can reap some serious rewards in terms of clarifying your crucial relationship to your own inner partner.
Here are some choice items from the past few weeks, months, and years. Read the rest of this entry »
