On Creativity Notes Towards a Poem

Creativity comes
when what you have controlled for long, escapes
and does the thing it always meant to do,
the thing it had been nudging you to do,
but you were somewhere else, your mind on other things.

There was a shape emerging from my thoughts
that changed profoundly when I looked away.

Sometimes the best lines are written while I sleep.
I go to bed with them rattlling around in my mind, not quite working,
and in the morning they are there, waiting for me in final draft form -
but so ephemeral; the act of writing down the first of them erases all 
the rest. And needless to say, the original lines, unless I wrote 
them down, are gone for good. I am amazed at Coleridge's tale of 
The Visitor from Porlock (here), how he (Coleridge) could have 
remembered so much for so long and in such detail.

I'd worked all evening on the two ideas, could not resolve them,
went to sleep still playing with them in my mind. What happened
while I slept I cannot say, only that the brain must have gone into
its processing mode, so that by morning they were mixed in great
confusion. I could not even think them back to how they'd been.
But now they fitted easily together.

A shape, a colour or a sound, they all may change in some
altered status of the mind: asleep, awake, distracted or  intoxicated.

The inspiration moment always catches me off guard.
I cannot ever say what I'd been thinking at the moment that
it struck. It is as though I've hammered out an artefact and cannot  then
remember how the metal was.

Inspiration is seeing beauty change its shape

If an artwork does not feel finished and I cannot take it further, 
either I have not worked hard enough on it
or else I have not waited long enough.

Sometimes it feels as though you're fighting with the angel

Looking back over these notes I am struck by the the realisation that
they mostly seem to involve looking away or an absence of the mind or
some such state or action. 

Written for Anna Montgomery's Meeting the Bar prompt on Creativity 
at dVerse Poets