Love and Words: Performance Poet Cassandra Tribe's poetry, spoken word recordings and performance poetry videos. Home of the blog, "Love and Words."

What is that Little Flower?

Donna Morgan: American Painter (video) From the R.I.P. (article)

Over three years ago I began the "love and words" blog because I was looking to combat the loneliness and isolation that seems to be such a given part of the creative process. It is now distributed on over 32 sites and has approximately 65,000 readers per month.

One of the things I quickly learned about blogging is that someone on one site may be talking about something that someone on another site would be very interested in reading, but chances of them leaving their communities and meeting were small. We tend not to participate in a global Internet community but to recreate our own small worlds online with only slight variations.

So I created "the little flower." On the six main sites that host my blog I placed an alternate profile. With this profile I can copy and cross post comments from somewhere else. When people see that "the little flower" has commented, they know it has come from someone on a different site. It has proven to be a really nice way to expand the discussions that go on and broaden people's horizons.

The Little Flower Presents: Artist Feature Series

That idea has grown into The Little Flower Presents, a series of video, text and audio features on artists and venues around the globe. Why artists and venues? It started out of pure selfishness, I am an artist, writer and performer - I need heroes to look up to and I need to be able to see that there are other people out there who are trying just as hard as I am to make a difference. And then, I found out that there are lots of people out there who are looking for the same thing.

I pitched the idea to the Culture Network and a few editors of various literary, art, and poetry magazines. While we all liked it, we all saw the same two problems. One, how would the artists and venues be selected? And two, who would be the "face" of the The Little Flower Presents, and guess who got picked? It took a year to come up with the criteria but it was worth the effort because it is giving the project a real sense of integrity and direction. The second problem was important because who ever became the "face" of it all was also going to bear the brunt of defining (and sometimes defending) the criteria.

I teach from and all of my own work is guided by the principals outlined in the Rules of the Sublime by Longinus. These "rules" were written in 400 BC and what they basically state is that everything has to come from a purpose that is larger then yourself. Yet, it has to do this in a way that doesn't lose its personal meaning. The sublime emphasizes work that transcends the individual and their culture and has the potential to effect the culture of humanity because it never loses what makes it personal.

What we are trying to do is to recognize and highlight artists and efforts that approach their "genre" with a sense of integrity, care, and responsibility. We are trying to find artists who are aware of the impact of what they do and this drives them, in all aspects of their life, to do their best. Artists who know that while inspiration may come from some deeply personal sources, art can speak in a language that is universal and they take care with the message they present.

These are people who see the role of the arts in the community, not as entertainment or solely for personal expression; but as a means to teach, transform and enlighten. The focus of what they choose to present is rooted within not only understanding the human experience, but our relationship to the whole - whether that be our communities or a sense of the universe.

We are trying to do this in a way that even someone who has no interest in painting or sculpture or writing or whatever - is going to stop for a moment, get involved with it, and walk away with a renewed sense of possibility for their own lives. The features, especially the video features, aren't really for the arts community but for everyone else that surrounds it.

To help explain the focus of the selection process, the following is an excerpt from a lecture I gave at the 2^nd Annual U.S. Poets in Mexico Workshop where I was on the faculty with Anne Waldman, Mark Doty, Jonathan Harrington, Pedro Serrano and Martin Espada.

The Rules of the Sublime

Longinus (400 BC - from the workshop "Creating the Sublime" by C. Tribe)

The rules of the Sublime are guidelines for the creation of work that transcends the individual creator and their contemporary culture. These works carry the potential to influence the history of mankind. While the work retains the individual and unique expression of the author, the mastery of craft and symbolism allow the piece to speak universally.

Sublime work fulfills the original role of the artist/writer as being in service to the community. Their original purpose of translating the divine, communicating news, proliferating ideas, marking history and serving as the portal for communication between the waking conscious and the unconscious world (including the collective history of the human species) is fulfilled through the return to the creation of the sublime. Artists who choose to incorporate these rules into their process are aware of the responsibility involved in creating symbolism that is then perceived by others and influences them on several different levels.

Rule #1 - The Power of Grand Conception

Not one thing is done without some form of awareness of the purpose or intent in your life. Each of us is born with a particular role to play in the formation of the future or the reconciliation of the past (and some of us are born to do both). Our individual "gift" is a natural inclination towards the expression of a certain intent. One of the easiest ways to begin to identify what is the grand conception behind your work is to look at your titles or recurrent themes. By doing this you can begin to see a connected motivation.

Once you begin to be aware of the overall intent of your work you can begin to focus yourself by asking whether or not your efforts are in keeping with this grand conception. There are sub-conceptions as well wherein once you are aware of your grand one, you can choose to direct your work to focus and explore smaller pieces of it. For example, my grand conception is Love, some of my sub-conceptions are the loss of love, belief in not being loved, faith, romance, grief - all of these tie back into my grand conception and are fueled by them.

Now, gift and purpose are not so much for us to decide as to be aware of. The more you become aware of your understanding of your grand concept as it applies to your individual experience, the more you will become aware of the purpose of your life as designated by things that involve the universal unconscious. This is inclusive of the entire history and experience of the world as we can understand it and the history and experience of the universe as it is beyond our understanding. Your awareness of your gifts comes through seeking to express your purpose. Talent is merely a consistent practice of skill - a gift combined with practiced and gifted skill can create works of genius. Yet even without the integration of your natural gifts, a talented artist can produce works that are sublime.

The artist plays the role of the shaman and the gatekeeper because we (willingly or not) access the universal unconscious on a regular basis. One of the grandest of concepts is that you will be able to understand enough to communicate what is beyond understanding to your viewer. On a smaller scale, the assumption of any artist that you have something to say that someone else will be interested in seeing or hearing is a kind of mini concept.

Work that is created and executed under the false pre-tense of being "private work" or work not meant to be viewed, is work that exists in contradiction to the will of the universe for the role of the artist. You are setting yourself up to be in conflict with things that have been around before the beginning of time and you will not win. You can bury yourself in this fallacy but you will wind up ceasing to work, getting physically ill, and having many and sundry coincidences come to pass that will attempt to force you to return to your work only on a more open basis. If you are not aware of the role you have been chosen to play, then the act of creating can become one fraught with pain. If you are aware of the role then you realize that the act of creating comes with a terrible responsibility - one you need to begin to accept and work towards being capable of doing.

As much as we like to assume that it is human culture that has created these roles, it is not. Just like how each animal plays a certain role from their birth to the rotting away of their bodies to contribute to the existence of the universe - so do we. The only difference being that our role is meant to also be inclusive of being caretakers of what is around us because we are capable of more adaptations then other species. We are not meant to conquer but to create and nurture. That can only come when we begin to embrace the idea that what we do means something and that often, the totality of that meaning will be understood later, if at all.

Rule #2 - The Inspiration of Vehement Emotion

All creative work is inspired by vehement emotion (emotion that exists on the highest end of the scale, like hate being the higher end of the scale of not liking). Whether you think your work includes an expression of emotion or not - it does. The use of any kind of visual symbol - color, form, or even words (letters are symbols) invokes the involvement of the right side of the brain, which only understands symbols. The right side of the brain is the repository for emotional history - that is event tied to emotion and the event is understood through symbol and emotion and not logical cause and effect.

The initial idea behind any work lies in a vehement response to something, this is how we gain our motivation. If someone has a stroke on the right side of their brain they will lose all motivation, they will not be able to get out of bed or eat, even if they are starving because they cannot access their emotional motivation.

You may be five times removed from understanding your emotional motivation and feel that there is none there, but there is. Vehement emotions exist at the crest of the wave that is built upon smaller emotions that rise from a sea. Depending on the order these emotions rise in is the vehemence you get at the top. As much as we say that there is a linear scale of emotions with a low and high end, all emotions are intertwined and simultaneously triggered. If you begin to understand the emotional inspiration of your work then you can begin to understand what subtler emotions are stacking up to produce it. Whether or not your work expresses the vehemence, you can now work with the subtler emotions so that your work will resonate with a kind of genuine truth for others.

Rule #3 - Proper Construction of Figures, Thought and Speech

Rule #4 - Nobility of Language

Rule #5 - Dignified and Elevated Word Arrangement

I put all three of these together because unless we have hours to go into the nuances of each it is hard to understand the differences.

These last three concern the execution and communication of the first two. One must make sure that the integrity of the vehicle of your purpose matches the purpose itself. Do not choose words or symbols or images or phrases because they are what first pops up into mind. Consider them in relation to the grand concept of the whole. Typically we speak, even internally, in a kind of emotional short hand, the symbols that pop up in our "moments of inspiration" (which, btw, those moments do not exist but I will cover that in the afternoon session). These are common phrases that we understand the full meaning of without having to speak it in full sentences or, fully explore the depth of their reality.

When you then use this shorthand in your work you must be aware of how it can be read. Some of our shorthands are universal and they fit. They use a common symbol that will quickly communicate something but, are also understood by the viewer to convey that the idea is common as well. There is no importance to it, it is the communication of a street sign and not a vision. This may fit in the portion where it is placed. However, if in a phrase or section you are seeking to underscore something - to get people to open up to see or hear something important you need to investigate another means of showing it - frame it between common symbols- and you will emphasize it that much more.

Now, a word about symbols, you must be very aware of the meaning of what you choose to use. For example, I had a man who did not understand why - whenever someone read his small collection of poems - they came away with a small but deep sense of sadness. He kept saying "but I didn't write sad poems, these are not sad to me." In looking at his poems we identified that one of the most common images that he referenced was that of a small bird - specifically, a sparrow. Sparrows, whether you are conscious of it or not, are commonly used in a majority of cultural myths as the harbingers of the dead, they foreshadow that the dead are going to try and communicate. By choosing, inadvertently to use this word, the author tapped into the collective unconscious wherein the universal archetype of these small birds means sorrow and his readers, without understanding why, emotionally responded to it.

That is the subtle nature of symbol and that is why you must be dead sure that the integrity of your words and symbols exactly matches your intent and purpose of your grand conception and inspiration.

Your symbols, your words, your imagery must be constantly weighed to assure their integrity not just to the section they occur in, but to the integrity of the whole and beyond that, to the integrity of the grand concept with fuels your work and life.

What you create is both prayer and jewel to the grand conception. It is a prayer you offer to it and also a jewel that will be placed in its crown. The more jewels in the crown, the more light they will catch and the more clearly your grand concept will be seen.