Making poetry a spiritual practice

https://magmapoetry.com/archive/magma-51/articles/13-ways-of-making-poetry-a-spiritual-practice/

“4. Engage with Primary Experience. Engage with direct experience through the physical senses – sight, sound, touch, and taste. Secure yourself in that. Keep coming back to that. In Buddhism this means the systematic cultivation of mindfulness. So, feel the sensations of your body as you walk to the tube, taste your tea, listen to music or birdsong. Consciously drop beneath the racket of thought – the repetitive mental chatter, the worry and flurry – into direct, unmediated sensation. Then the richness of life, rather than the hubbub of thought, will find it’s way into your poems.

5. Develop Imagination. Imagination is the synthesis and transcendence of reason and emotion. It develops out of our engagement with primary experience and is leached away by the alienations of distracted thought. So often we think one thing and feel another; or we don’t know what we feel; or our thoughts are really nothing but the half-baked views of the marketplace and the media. Imagination brings the whole person together – thought, feeling, volition, perception – into a single act of creation. You have to discover imagination, uncover it, find the place where the poem takes off and leaves you behind. Imagination always goes beyond you.

6. Beware ‘Fancy’. Coleridge contrasts imagination or the ‘imaginal faculty’ with ‘fancy’. Fancy is the same old thing – the same old you – arranged in bizarre, arbitrary combinations. Nothing genuinely new comes into being with fancy; no deeper perception has been unearthed; there has been no discovery, no realization of the thought the poem is trying to think. Fancy is characterised by ‘empty images’ and/or ‘empty thought’ – either the poet’s images have no internal necessity or purpose, or the poet’s thought has no emotional commitment or foundation in experience. Fancy can be brilliant, even virtuosic, but it is incapable of moving us. Imagination unifies reason and emotion: thought finds its place in immediately loved images, while images are underpinned by genuine thought. This unification of thought and feeling is experienced as having value – we feel that that something both meaningful and pleasurable is being communicated, and this is inherently satisfying. Fancy, on the other hand, is a kind of showing off.”