The Mystery of Life, Poetry and Imagination by Julie Wright

A Country Girl

I was a country kid brought up in Ceduna on the Far West Coast. I have always said I was born with my feet facing the highway, yet my poem, ‘Going Home for Christmas,’ shows that my idyllic childhood has remained with me and has had a lasting impact on my identity.

• 

• 

• 

I am writing this post in Ceduna. On Monday, I will be doing a poetry reading here at the local library. It means a lot to me to share my poems with the people who watched me grow up and who have taken an interest in my life, even though I went to boarding school in Port Lincoln at the age of 14 and haven’t lived in Ceduna since.

My Early Career

When I finished school, I became a keyboard operator in the Army. Those who know me are picking themselves up off the floor right now! Even to me, it seems somewhat surreal, but it was one of the many experiences that shaped me. It was intended as my way to escape country life, but life in the green beret was not for me. ‘Growing Pains’ really encapsulates my life up to that point.

And, Family

My marriage ended after 19 years. A couple of years later, I decided to make the most of my freedom by living and working in Italy for a year. (Italian was my sub-major at uni.) A short time after I returned to Adelaide, in 1997, I signed a contract with a Thai school and ended up in Thailand for three years.

Today, I am back at my old school, Temple Christian College, investing in students. I now teach many children of former 1990s students. In two stints, I have clocked up 20 years with this school.

OId Fascinations, New Life

On December 10, 2020, I decided to start my own publishing house, Benedictus Publishing.

Months earlier, I put together my first poetry collection, Infinite Connections. As I did that, I realised how many times I had written about the creative process.

Although I have composed poems and songs for most of my life, I remain fascinated to this day by words, ideas and the mysterious creative impulse that drives us to capture and wrestle with them until they resemble something close to our truest thoughts.

In the following poem, I have used an extended metaphor of a journey that reveals, in turns, both the daring and desperation that drives us, capturing that sense of being out of control, as the words go in unexpected directions to unexpected places.

After living with an active imagination all my life, one would think that such fears would have dissipated long ago. But how do we have confidence in something we don’t understand? Something inexplicable. Paradoxically, the art of arranging ‘the best words in the best order’ (as Coleridge described it) seems to be beyond words. Beyond our capacity to explain. In my collection, I have a series of poems that are memos to myself. One addresses the ease with which we slip into self-doubt as writers.

This poem arose despite the epiphany alluded to in the last line; God revealed that I was a poet. I had the experience at a hillside cemetery in Le Cinque Terre during a year I spent teaching in Italy. In that breathtakingly beautiful landscape, I wrote as many as three poems a day. In fact, during my year in Italy, I used my poetry as ‘snapshots.’ I wanted a record of my inner journey, rather than a mere photographic record of the things I saw.

Writers seem to live in a tension between a strong self-belief that they have something worthwhile to say, on the one hand, and the other, the niggling fear that the magic of creativity will, like a pocketful of silk handkerchiefs, suddenly disappear forever. They live in fear that their inspiration will dry up. Words will no longer jostle for attention and urge them to the finish line. They fight with the fear that no one is interested in what they have to say: their unique story, their unique style of delivering it. That surfaced when I was attending a webinar by the poet Leeza von Alpen. As a brain-strain activity, she gave us five minutes to write a poem about being lost in a vast forest. To my surprise, it turned out to be another extended metaphor poem about creativity.

In response to the debilitating doubt expressed in Memo to Self — Fear came Memo to Self — Thoughts, a reminder that imagination will continue to bloom and may even bloom best in the ashes of dead ideas.

One of my favourites is a poetic distillation that never fails to put a big smile on my face. It spurs me on when I think no one cares about the poetic endeavours that are the fulcrum of my days. I offer it as encouragement on those days when being a poet seems like a lonely walk on the highway with everyone sailing past in their big rigs, not even glancing at your upturned thumb.

Sometimes, we poets need to be our own cheer squad! But, even without encouragement, we keep going. We have no choice because it is worth all the hard labour, effort, and pain when we birth a poem. That is the message captured in ‘Gestation Zone.’

I am also fascinated by the sounds of words – perhaps because I am a musician and songwriter. The following poem combines my love of languages’ musicality and imagination’s mystique. Together, they permeate everything I do, including walks, conversations, visits to art galleries, reading, exam supervisions, dreams; it is crouched in the corner of my mind at all times, ready to spring forth at the slightest stimulation.

In this post, I have barely scratched the surface of my ruminations on the imagination contained in my poetry. If you are a writer, I hope you have recognised something of your journey in the poems here that will encourage or sustain you in your work. May they settle the watery world of your mind, to splash in the background, until the next wave of inspiration wells up and crashes into your consciousness, and you begin the wild ride to shore. Ride it again and again and again.

Last but not Least

I thank Lindy for asking me to contribute to her website. I have known Lindy ever since I joined TramsEnd Poets a few years ago. It has been a great privilege to be part of the group and to benefit from their critical appraisals of my poems each month. It was and remains a welcome change to be on the receiving end of the critiques to help me hone my writing skills after giving feedback on my students’ writing for over thirty years.

AUTHOR BIO

• 

• 

Julie’s Books can be purchased here with poems from this page and more.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: All photographs, poems and text remain the property of the author..