RASHID MUGHAL

FAMILY OF THE HEART POETRY & MUSIC RECITAL

Rashid Mughal

¢ FAMILY OF THE HEART POETRY & MUSIC RECITAL

Erin Mills United Church, Mississauga, June 17, 2006

The Creative Process

Since we are all gathered here in a Christian church, allow me to tell you what Jesus had to say about The Creative Process. According to the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus said, If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

This is almost exactly what Shakespeare said in Measure for Measure: Go to your bosom: knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.

Now, without much ado, let me share with you what I came up with concerning THE CREATIVE PROCESS:

 

In the arena of thought,

That barren workshop of the mind,

A poem’s a serious joke,

Like a truth schooled in the martial arts.

Anyone who breathes can enter the zone,

And, like a samurai, blend the rhythm,

the imminences, doubts of heart and mind,

With the triumphant certainty of poetry.

 

Poetry’s the kind of thing you see

From the corner of your eye.

It’s like a very faint star out there:

Look straight at it and you can’t see it,

Look a little to one side and there it is.

 

The act of poetry demands commitment:

You write what you know, what you see.

Write what comes naturally in goosing the Muse.

Do not analyze it away; you don’t boil

A watch to see what makes it tick.

 

Go with the flow, let your thought dance and play,

Turn things in your head this way and that,

Look for liveliness, alternatives, new views,

The possibility of another world—or create one.

 

For when language breaks loose,

When it rambles along with words and pictures

Homogenized in the mind’s blender,

Strange things happen and a poem is born.

 

Our language may start experiences

That resonate with the self,

With the being we have become

Amidst our apparently random encounters

With this alien world

When we submit to the creative process.

 

For poems don’t just happen;

Luckily or stealthily, they are related

To a readiness within ourselves

To see what the eye does not see.

 

Lines on the page may blunder

Into each other’s sound as when

The ordinary language we use every day

Has in it a hidden set of signals, a secret code

That can touch into life a pattern in our feelings

Not roused by events that just happen,

Events too random to arouse sustained feelings.

 

When you read or hear the words of the Muse,

Do not react or respond (unless you have to).

Record, write on, let your pen do the talking,

Trust yourself when you are in the process

Go with the flow trusting what you see as true.

 

A poem’s but the beginning of an excursion,

Back and forth we go—scenes, impressions, ideas.

All sorts of quick glimpses occur to a scribe at work.

Some of those glimpses are quickly dismissed

As random, uninteresting; but some lead richly onward.

 

In all this tossing back and forth

Against a live backboard in the mind

It’s a delicate thing, a quest, an inner process,

To find what the world is trying to be.

 

In that zone, alone with your Muse or God,

Everything you invent is true;

What you remember becomes reality.

—Rashid Mughal

© June 2006

·         Freelance editor and writer Rashid Mughal is a Kenya-born journalist who has worked as a senior editor and writer on the Daily Nation, worked as editor-in-chief of the award-winning women’s magazine Viva, worked as editor-in-chief of a publishing house with six monthlies, three bimonthlies and a quarterly under his charge, and worked as Copy Editor for two of the leading newspapers in Canada, the Toronto Star and The Record. Since 2001, he has also taught part-time courses in Copy Editing, Substantive Editing, and Content Editing at George Brown College in Toronto.

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