personal narrative – Mary Gilliland

Is there any way I can possibly say all this at once? So often when writing a poem, that is the question. What would it take for someone to follow the thought, if indeed a thought has emerged yet? What arrangement of the language or image? What might be the goal, the point of arrival? What might fall by the wayside, be left out, to get there?

No matter how a poem begins, with rhythms or phrases or more, my draft doesn’t really get going until the poem has revealed to me its form.

In 1998 I engineered construction of a permanent 54-foor diameter outdoor grass labyrinth and a series of related arts and cultural events. In the ensuing years a couple of my talks and writing workshops have been title ‘Litanies and Labyrinths’ and ‘Walking Out of Oneself; Poetry and Labyrinths.’ In these I invite the audience to explore ways we can imagine, or invoke, the circumstances for making sense when we are making it with words, especially a complex of words.

Some have come charged up and ready to write. For others, creativity has been hampered by familial situations or social conditioning, by doubt, by hitting the ground of an old topic with no new way to voice it. I have a way of working with the visual of the labyrinth as a correlative to a clear relaxed mind, a mind that’s curious to step along the path that the creative material itself seeks to follow, that enables young and old, novices and published writers, to become inspired and emerge with draft in hand.

Often there’s a circling, circling, circling, then…there’s a circuit! Such a walk usually occurs when one enters deeply enough into one’s own material to go beyond—or below, about, around, or though—one’s self.

A labyrinth has many turns. Rather than being dead-ends, these turns guide us along a unicursal path that leads to the center. A labyrinth is a maze whose form provides the thread that we can follow.

If hesitation rises, take the next step; go a little further.