holographics
After our daughter’s arrival, creativity had to assume new forms. It needed to be more playful, piecemeal, and scattershot. Writing is now something that might happen when she’s distracted (momentarily) or asleep (not for long). Concentration and unbroken time isn’t available, nor any pretence to polished finality. Scaling down to writing prompts and games is a way to make it close and manageable. Calisthenic writing, sporadic snatches of 5 minutes in which we’d quickly come up with a prompt, like “list things that should be small” or “rewrite a lullaby homophonic’ly” or "list things you want drawn" or "do one of those drawings from last time" or "write an ekphrastic to this MRIClough spread" something like that. We connect in that space. And at the same time we join our baby in learning and unlearning, like her we're scooping something (language, form, and practice) out of a bowl and tossing it onto the floor to see what it looks like. We'll clean the floor later, there’s no pressure. All we need are a few minutes, paper, pens, and of course the highchair and food or a teether or a toy that lights up. We share what we’ve written right after or we wait and accrue a sheaf. None of them are finished and they never will be, or they're finished after the five minutes, or they’re completely disconnected from any aspiration to completion. But maybe some lines from some of them will re-appear in the future in fair copy. That time feels far, far away. But it rushes at us like a comet.
Nisha Ramayya works across poetry, criticism and collaborative performance, and teaches creative writing. She is the author of States of the Body Produced by Love, and Fantasia, among other works.
Robert Kiely is a writer and editor currently based in London. He was born in Co. Cork, Ireland. He has published three collections of poetry and a book of literary criticism. His essays and book reviews have appeared in the Cambridge Literary Review and the LA Review of Books.
