geocreativity

(I didn’t finish my blog yesterday; I left out this data)

I’ve been much more productive since we’ve been back, poetry-wise.

2006 (the year we left the country for 31 months of living out of backpacks in foreign lands) I wrote 13 poems, most before we left the country.

2007, 3 poems;

2008, 8;

2009 (the year we returned to the USA) 24;

2010 = 72 so far; 25 in the past 3 months alone. For me this is way way above average, and some of the poems are even good.

Also did 58 new pieces of art this year.

To counterbalance this, from 1975 to 1985 I wrote zero poems (drank, did art, committed adultery, and had adventures instead — of course once I started writing again I still continued with the drinking, art, adultery and adventures, so it wasn’t their fault I’d stopped writing).

My new productivity comes from being back here in America, living in a language I can understand, in a country I know the basic dynamics of, and being immersed in the local poet/artist communities and their attendant interactions and feedback.

It also comes from having traveled and lived in 10 countries on 3 continents for 31 months amidst languages, cultures and customs I did not understand. One stores up a lot of creative juice potential walking such paths.

Been back here for 20 months now. It is faster, more stressful, colder, and way more expensive living in America, but it do stir the creative juices.

Here is my favorite poem from our travels, one of my three from 2007. . . I still remember the moment of the poem, us walking out of the ancient walled city of Marrakech, the red bougainvillea flowers falling from the trees all around us, the ground covered in already fallen Jacaranda purple flowers — a horse and carriage full of overweight white people driven by an Arab clattered past us and Lady seeing them said disgustedly, “How colonial.” The tourists were amazed we were actually walking alone in such an unsafe neighborhood — of course it wasn’t unsafe at all, merely had a paucity of white skin (meaning zero % except for us).

Marrakech at dusk
Purple petals on the ground
Red flower falling