Leonard Cohen on Creativity

From Brain Pickings - Leonard Cohen on Creativity:

Considering his ongoing interest in the process itself rather than the outcome, Leonard Cohen makes a case for the art of self-renewal by exploring the deeper rewards and gratifications that have kept him going for half a century:

It [has] to do with two things. One is economic urgency. I just never made enough money to say, “Oh, man, I think I’m gonna get a yacht now and scuba-dive.” I never had those kinds of funds available to me to make radical decisions about what I might do in life. Besides that, I was trained in what later became known as the Montreal School of Poetry. Before there were prizes, before there were grants, before there were even girls who cared about what I did. We would meet, a loosely defined group of people. There were no prizes, as I said, no rewards other than the work itself. We would read each other poems. We were passionately involved with poems and our lives were involved with this occupation…
We had in our minds the examples of poets who continued to work their whole lives. There was never any sense of a raid on the marketplace, that you should come up with a hit and get out. That kind of sensibility simply did not take root in my mind until very recently…
So I always had the sense of being in this for keeps, if your health lasts you. And you’re fortunate enough to have the days at your disposal so you can keep on doing this. I never had the sense that there was an end. 

Mary Oliver - On Being

I come back to this over and over again. Interview with Mary Oliver (by Krista Tippett of On Being), transcribed. 

And also when you write about that — the discipline that creates space for something quite mysterious to happen. You talk about that "wild, silky part of ourselves." You talk about the “part of the psyche that works in concert with consciousness and supplies a necessary part of the poem—a heart of the star as opposed to the shape of the star, let us say—exists in a mysterious, unmapped zone: not unconscious, not subconscious, but cautious.”

 

"In Celebration of the Citizenry of All Things Within One World"

Enjoyed reading this post written by Sandy Stotts: "In Celebration of the Citizenry of All Things Within One World" where he celebrates Henry David Thoreau and Mary Oliver, "two voices that I turn to when I want to hear from and of the earth, which is another way of saying every day."

Who then can resist “sailing
in the rain” on April 22, 1856
or sailing with today’s rain coming

on, or the rippling east wind
and finding that even Henry
tried as he held the tiller

to hold too an umbrella
to keep himself dry? Or
knowing that a sudden

“seizure of happiness”
can come on at walk’s end
on this quietest of mornings?

 

To live in this world

To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.

― Mary Oliver

a life that is fraught with poetry

Suddenly you realize that only what you have put into poems can be considered lived through. That is how you become a poet. And at that point you begin, consciously or otherwise, living the kind of life that is fraught with poetry. That is how you cease being human. The former happens abruptly, the latter gradually, both irrevocably.

― Vera Pavlova