I produce most and write best when I have no schedule at all, when I’m able to wander where whim carries me—both physically, through a city or a countryside, and mentally, in read­ing, talking, scribbling, thinking, whatever. Poems don’t come to me often when solicited. More usually it’s when I turn my back on them, and become absorbed in some­thing that is not a poem—a thing, a creature, a moment, a face, a fantasy, a memory—that an understanding happens between me and that other, an understanding that brings with it its own words. Then I don’t feel I’m making up the poem; rather my pen has to race to keep up with words that seem to be given. I complain about time.

One can have a lot of time and yet feel one has very little. A person who wants an inner life needs what you might call “open” time—time that hasn’t already been filled before one enters it with minor concerns, little duties. The more conscientious a person is, the more easily small things force themselves into the con­sciousness. Precisely because they are so small one knows one can easily take care of them. I keep finding in my pockets old lists of errands that in hindsight are incredibly trivial. It’s the fact that the items are crossed off that’s so pathetic—the fact that I actually worried about these tasks and actually did them. Tillie Olson has written an essay on the penalties of postponing serious work for the sake of things of this kind. It’s a fine essay. She advocates going straight for the real work and to hell with everything else. And she’s right. The creative drive withers away otherwise.

On the other hand, she mentions how Rilke refused to go to his daughter’s wedding for fear that he would thereby miss writing the poem that might come to him that day were he to re­main in his study. Rilke may be the greatest poet of the century—I happen to think that he is—but some­times when I read one of his poems, I feel it’s exactly the poem a man would write while staying away from his daughter’s wedding—very spiritual so as to transfigure what in lesser spirits might be taken for callousness.

- from an interview published in the book Walking Down the Stairs

Downtime is the basis of creative time. It is important that that time not be filled with trivial things -- errands, doing the dishes, weddings -- but rather time to day dream, to meander through the backwoods, to wander around town, notebood in hand, just in case something bubbles up. 

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Below, the two-page spread of this entry from the upcoming Heron Dance book on living and working as a creative outsider, Nurturing The Song Within.
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