There’s a story told by the poet Ruth Stone. While working in the fields in Virginia, she could feel and hear when a poem was traversing the landscape, coming right at her. It was like a “thunderous train of air,” shaking the earth under her feet. The only thing to do was “run like hell” to the house, grab pen and paper and try to capture it as it passes through.
Sometimes she wouldn’t make it in time. And when that happened, the poem just kept barreling along, looking for another poet.
Stone’s notion of creativity having its own intentionality isn’t a new idea. Even so, artists have approached that topic with caution. Ours is a linear culture that is heavily skewed to what can be measured and predicted. The claim that poems are cavorting across landscapes looking for takers doesn’t fit with that consensus reality.
Even so, artists are beginning to more openly discuss the uncanny nature of inspiration. That recent candidness has been encouraged by music “midwife” and impresario Rick Rubin with his new book, The Creative Act, one that stands straight up in advocating for the mystical nature to creativity. From Rubin’s point of view, “We are all translators for messages the universe is broadcasting. The best artists tend to be the ones with the most sensitive antennae to draw in the energy resonating at a particular moment.” So no, it is not just a Ruth Stone thing.
While these insights from Stone and Rubin are uplifting, there is the verso to ebullient and flowing creativity to consider. Sometimes you offer an open hand with trust, and nothing shows up.
Every artist knows the bleak back side of being stuck. A poem comes barreling through and you miss it. What do you then? What happens when everything seems to be falling flat? How do you get to what’s next?
Writer’s block is a general term for being creatively stymied, but of course it affects every kind of artistic endeavor. The prodigious abundance of advice about how to avoid it speaks to its pervasiveness. Take a hike. Try out a different workspace. Turn off your phone. Alter your work hours. Rubin’s method is to say, “Let’s figure it out together. Tell me, what do you like? What do you feel? When was the last time you were really excited by it?”
These recommendations can certainly be useful. My experience however is that each encounter with being stuck has its own particular texture and topology. What cracked the code last time may not work now.
And there is another dimension to this dilemma to consider. Like our physical bodies, creativity changes as we age. What stymied me at 20 is very different from what snags me now. As Carl Jung noted, “We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning.”
I started Slow Muse nearly 20 years ago as a place to write about the mysteries of creativity. The topic appears to be bottomless, and its dual nature—the rubberbanding between exquisite euphoria and parched frustration—can feel unnecessarily punishing. I’ve been an artist for 50 years, but the back and forth from one end of that spectrum to the other does not seem to be oscillating with any less amplitude.
This summer brought some glimmerings to my studio, but those moments were interspersed with longer periods of signal free radio silence. While I may think I am ready to move on to my next destination, the itinerary has not yet arrived. Customer service? Hello?
I have had time to consider how my thinking and feeling about this has become Procrustean, locked into an on/off, in/out, yes/no modality. Inspired/not inspired is a construct of my own making. Perhaps this moment in my life is an opportunity, in the Zen sense, to truly surrender and detach from these confining dialectics. Maybe I need a different and better way to think and feel about all of this.
Those were some of the questions I was contemplating in early August when I drove to Portsmouth New Hampshire for an album release performance by Todd Hearon with a cavalcade of his music making friends. From the minute they began playing, I was swept into a sense of bliss. The music. The songwriting. The performance. It was wild, fresh and unencumbered. Here was an artist, deeply in his flow, who was making room for the rest of us to jump in and float along with him.
I’ve known Todd for over 30 years. Prodigiously talented, he was a touring musician before he left Texas for Boston to become a poet, get a PhD in English/Editorial Studies, start a theater company in Boston’s South End and meet up and marry the remarkable Maggie Dietz. Now on the faculty at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, Todd continues to do what he does. As one reviewer recently wrote, “If Todd Hearon were not so humble, so kind-hearted and congenial, it would be easy to resent his endless talents.”
This poet/musician/composer/songwriter/playwright/author/scholar/teacher/father/friend was also the lynchpin for bringing Clew into existence, a collaborative installation at the Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy that brought together Jon Sakata, Jung Mi Lee, Lauren O’Neal, Todd and me. The whole adventure was an experience of unfettered joy, and it soldered us all into a circle of lifelong friendship.
After putting music making behind his many other pursuits (like publishing several volumes of poetry,) Todd purchased a 1950 Gibson J-50 acoustic guitar in 2016 from a 90-year-old grandmother in South Carolina. From the minute he placed his hands on this guitar–now named Myrtle–the songs just began to flow. Now, five years and a “salmon’s journey” later, over 80 have been written. Like the earth’s magnetic field that directs the salmon’s return, this path feels indelible.
“I co-write with Myrtle now and believe that she has the songs in her,” he said. “She has melodies, chord progressions and phrasing that I never would have thought of. She has songs she wants to express, and I’m just trying to keep up with wherever she’s going.”
What has emerged is a stunning body of work. While it has deep roots in previous styles and musical predecessors, this music is elementally Hearonesque. It sits easily with the masterful Americana storytelling songwriting tradition of Townes Van Zandt, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Guy Clark, Steve Earle.
“I want to write songs that sound as if they could have been written by anyone — and no one. Songs that have been around forever, that came from the hills and the dawn, That’s the highest bar I can think of, total anonymity, and I fail to reach it with most every song I write. But that’s my goal. To write a handful of songs of that transparent quality and caliber.”
Ever the wordsmith, Todd used the phrase, “inimitable anonymity” to describe his musical aspirations. I asked him to elaborate on that idea which he did, memorably:
“Usually, we associate the word inimitable with a quality of individual style, that may also be related to a powerful and immediately recognizable personality, the way Picasso or Muhammad Ali are inimitable. And so to combine it with anonymity appears a paradox. The art I most admire—and I’m speaking here primarily of songwriting, but it could certainly apply to other media as well—is art that renders its creator invisible, and could potentially have been composed at any time, by anyone. The catch is that not just ‘anyone’ could do it; that’s where the inimitability of the virtuoso comes into the picture. Listen to some of Gillian Welch’s early tunes—Orphan Girl, By the Mark, Caleb Meyer. ‘Personality’ is absent. The songs sound like they were written by the hills and hollows of Appalachia. That’s the virtuosity. She’s immersed herself so deeply in the tradition that it speaks through her. Her voice is its voice, and vice versa.”
With his unfailing humility, he added that songwriting is “your signature in another person’s ink, and the ink is timeless, but you don’t know where that ink came from.”
Todd’s lyrics access a range of voices, from the 17th century Quaker martyr Mary Dyer (a song that won first prize from American Songwriter magazine) to stragglers living at the margins of life. He can also tell a few of his own stories which he does beautifully in the ballad Chinatown, written for his partner Maggie.
Introduction:
This one goes out to the only little lady in my life really worth yodeling about, my “I do” partner in life, Maggie Dietz, with unending gratitude for her faith, support and understanding. And with the memory of strolling down among the ruins of a Chinese New Year early one Sunday morning in the city of Boston, as our new life together was first beginning to open.
CHINATOWN
The unlikely fire on the ledge and the room swam with candles
The wine had gone straight to your head, you said I don’t understand you
When you said that, did you mean to suggest
I might like that, with your head on my breast?
Squall at the window and the snow piling forty feet deep
I can dig myself home on my own unless you’d care to sleep
Together for the rest of the night
Together for the rest of our lives
Yodelady
Little lady I do
Yodelady
Little lady I do
The fireworks down in Chinatown
Little busted lives across the ground
You could light the night sky, you could howl down the moon
You could blow it all just looking if you don’t have clue
Little lady I do
Yodelady
Little lady I do
The tea kettle screamed and the Joe Henry streamed from the kitchen
“We swung like a gate and we locked and we knocked like an engine”
Together for the rest of the night
Together for the rest of our lives
Together by the unlikely light
Together like I told you that night
Little lady I do
Yodelady
Little lady I do
Since the concert I have been listening steadily to every Todd Hearon tune available* and eagerly awaiting his next performance at the Word Barn on November 10.** These songs are both timeless and engaging, like the artist who penned them. And for reasons I have yet to determine, that “inimitable anonymity” of this work feels like a soothing Balm of Gilead to me, something I have needed as I attend to my sub rosa imaginings yet to surface. What Todd is doing has kept me hopeful and receptive.
Tom Nozkowski, a painter I admire deeply, spoke in a manner that resonates with Todd’s project: “I like painting best when it turns a little homely, turns away from the grandiose and opts for simple desire. To really want to possess something and to be willing to do anything to get it will take you pretty far.”
A salmon’s journey.
A final word, from Todd:
“The young artist has so many tricks he wants to display, to differentiate himself from his peers, his elders and the tradition he may be working against. As one matures, there is the moving into the silence and stillness of the self. The stone. And into what one hopes might be the authentic and aboriginal voice, prior even to the predecessors. There’s not so much noise there. It’s cave paintings. Driplets of candlelight and murmur. Three chords and the truth. Maybe that’s what I was trying to get at.”
Performing at Portsmouth’s The Music Hall Lounge, August 5, 2023
***
– To listen to the first two released albums from Todd’s projected three-volume “wandering stream” of song, Border Radio and Yodelady:
Bandcamp
Spotify
Soundcloud
His lyrics can be found here:
Todd Hearon
– Word Barn
Exeter New Hampshire
November 10, 8pm
Sigh. Just wonderful. Thank you.
I agree Sheri.