Stay Cool with Jason Richardson

Project coordinator Jason Richardson led the first of a series of workshops and began with a discussion of creative strategies, particularly how cross-pollination provides fertile ground for developing ideas.

Interdisciplinary is one term for this approach, ekphrasis is another — which is a Greek term for an artwork inspired by another medium.

“I find that creativity can be stimulated from strategies, including rules,” said Mr Richardson. “So I take many of the ideas discussed here as starting points rather than standards.

“One great tip from a poetry workshop I previously attended was to consider all of your senses in describing a scene to give details for a reader.

“I am a believer in there being more than five senses, such as experiencing intuition as a sixth sense, and it can be useful to ponder that interplay of stimulus and your inner response.

“Being in an environment will mean light, sound and smell are entering into us, but one might also ponder what ideas are trying to arise within you as well?

“Landscapes are central to my creative practices and one approach is to write a poem inspired by a photograph, so photography became an analogy used to discuss observation and the role that plays in writing.

“In my experience as a photographer, you learn various techniques that generate a “wow” response and use them to give that effect for viewers.

“A couple of good strategies for night sky images are long shutter speeds and saturating colours in post-production, such as Photoshop.

“These are ideas that a haiku writer might draw inspiration from by spending time in an environment and also finding evocative words to describe it.

“It might be useful to consider yourself as a camera, allowing moments to pass as you absorb the sensations through allowing the time as your slow shutter.

“Then the saturation might be considering the hue of your language, particularly if it evokes complex emotions like the wabi-sabi of Japanese culture.”

Wabi-sabi is a Japanese aesthetic and philosophical worldview centered on finding beauty in impermanence, imperfection, and nature’s natural cycles.

Rooted in Zen Buddhism, it values simplicity, modesty, and authenticity, encouraging appreciation for rustic, weathered, or aged objects (sabi) and unconventional, humble beauty (wabi).”

This is a good point to introduce some other terms related to haiku:

“In my writing I have developed from the 5+7+5 syllable structure that seems to have become popularly known from the American writers who promoted haiku in the 20th Century, such as Ezra Pound and Jack Kerouac.

“I have always been attracted to this structure as a creative constraint, which is one kind of strategy.

“Over time I’ve learned that a lot of what I write are senryu, as haiku is distinguished through containing a seasonal reference (kigo) and a cutting phrase (kireji).

“A seasonal reference can be less obvious than naming a season, but in the workshop I spoke about how various cultures have viewed the year as being split into more than four seasons.

“For example, some of Australia’s First Nations describe six or more seasons, while one Japanese author I read proposed micro-seasons of 10-14 days as a way to characterise parts of the year.

“The kireji is often the line at the end and is sometimes identified with a em dash-style hyphen, which provides a new way to view the scene that came before the dash.”

One of the most influential haiku authors was Matsuo Basho of the 17th Century and, rather than sticking to the formulas of kigo he aspired to reflect his real environment and emotions in his poems.

A famous example is:

You can see the kigo (seasonal reference) in the first line, while the last line is the kireji (cutting phrase) that forces you to reconsider the scene in a new light.

“Aside from photography, one of the creative strategies that I have promoted for generating ideas is the Cut-up Technique and it follows on from the kireji idea as a way to view previous text in a new light.”

The Cut-Up Technique has established itself as a viable technique for making art after being developed by Tristan Tzara in the Dada movement and then being popularised by William S. Burroughs, who became known among the Beat writers and had a long and influential career.

“There’s a story that Tzara was unimpressed with the manifesto writing that Surrealists were engaged in producing and decided he could do better by cutting up a newspaper and selecting words randomly.

“In some tellings of this story, Tzara found himself kicked out of that famous art movement and went on to establish the Dadaists.

“As a creative process these cut-ups predate “remixing” and share similarities in rearranging existing material to create new meaning and potentially new artworks.

“David Bowie promoted using cut-ups to write song lyrics and explored various approaches during his career, such as drafting his own text to cut-up as well as using software to do a similar process.

The Cut-up Technique is seemingly so simple that it likely had other guises earlier in history.

“One reason why I think it’s often overlooked is that it treats art dispassionately as a process and doesn’t respect either the integrity of the source material nor the artist as a genius.

“Given the basis of literature in western culture developed from respect for the Bible, the idea that one would disfigure text to create new meaning must be seen as an affront.

“I combined the cut-up approach with haiku and senryu in my book Earthwords (2019) as a way to engage readers as collaborators, while demonstrating that creative practice is available to anyone with text and a pair of scissors.”

In conclusion, Jason ended the workshop encouraging participants to be receptive to their environment and become observers who allow landscapes to saturate their experiences.

“I ask everyone to take time, mentally use a slow shutter speed and allow observations to reveal the contrasts which can help to frame a cutting phrase in their poems.

“And then you might consider how a Cut-up Technique type of approach can be as simple as swapping around the first and last lines of a poem.”

The workshops continue through February and, if you’d like to join, please email staycoolexhibition@gmail.com

These workshops are supported by Western Riverina Arts and Create NSW through financial assistance from the NSW Government.