Who Is Driving The Work?

One of my favourite poets, Ella Frears asks who is driving the poem?

I remember being taught by Mimi Khalvati at the Poetry School
and her talking about the magic of a poem and the magic of form
that sometimes you have to let the poem go the way it wants to.
At the time I thought, what a weird idea - poem as an autonomous being, but the more I write the more I feel it.
I love that moment of letting go of the destination I'm writing towards and allowing the poem to swerve off.
Also the way a draft can tell you the form it wants to take if you look and listen hard enough.
And form has its own way of setting a poem's course
in my experience you can't fight it.

— Ella Frears

I find similarities when I’m creating photo projects. I often don’t know where I’m going and what the project is about until later, and I try and let myself be guided by the pictures.

This letting go and enabling the work to flow through you is something I’ve come across a number of times in books such as Art & Fear by David Bayles & Ted Orland, The Creative Act by Rick Rubin and The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.

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