keep your mind on your driving and your eyes on the wheel

So this is Tata's 1 lakh car. I have been talking to people about the poetry project and this morning I found myself on Skype messaging with Andrew Rixon about the creative process.



More specifically, the creative process as applied to poetry. The way I have been conceptualising this is like a car (hey I'm a bloke, I have a Y chromosome and I'm not afraid to use it). Maybe not quite like Tata's little baby here but something similar. Every halfway decent poem I have written has an emotional engine in it - fear, love, regret. Without this motor, the poem goes nowhere. Then there is the steering (structure & conceit) and bodywork (language). If I encounter problems in the writing process, it's rarely with the structure or the language. It's often at the level of the emotional engine (the libidinal drive?) powering the piece.

Which is where the tricky bit with the poetry project comes in. When I am writing off my own idea or experience, I have direct access the emotions driving the poem. When I am writing off someone else's experience, it's a lot harder. So I'm deploying some techniques to give a voice to the emotions of the commissioners. I'll write more about these once we've actually done them but I think it's impossible to overstress the importance of the emotional aspects of experience in creative endeavour. And I'd also like to warn potential commissioners that we may be opening a whole nother can of worms in this process.