Moondustwriter's Thursday - A Look at the Arts

Welcome to Moon Dust Writer Thursday

 I am using today to stand on a platform and shout.

I have had several friends recently who have doubted themselves as writers, poets, musicians. 

I have to say I blame society for the discouragement. I myself am a victim of society's hand of judgement on creative people. Why? I was bound to art and poetry, heart and soul, as a child. I grew up encouraged to be creative.I won my first awards in art at 5, sold my first drawings at 12, and started publishing
 (well you get the idea). When it was time to go to Art School, I caved in to the opinion of society.
All I heard was: "How will you make a living? You will be poor unless you become a commercial artist."
I had known poor my entire life as well as what appeared to be "unsuccessful." My extremely, talented artist mother is the epitome of the starving artist.  Her joy is in creating beauty and expressing the woes of mankind on a canvas. Those who own her work received it as a gift of gratitude. I walked away from my painting and poetry because I was intimidated and never looked back (until a year ago.)

So here's my shout to you - write, paint, create because you love it!

 Strive at it because you are inspired. Put your pen to the paper because you might inspire another to greatness. Don't look for self-aggrandizement. Art is intended to influence society. It is the intrinsic value that influences not the dollar value. Long before a DaVinci had a value of millions, DaVinci was influencing art students and bringing joy to the common man. Take your words and paint - big flashy stokes, 

 fine quiet ones, or a mixture of the two
. 

Here are two of my mother's paintings; they represent different styles and moods.
 I encourage each of you to use your words in a variety of styles and moods.

Your heart and hands will thank you!

OF MODERN POETRY
by Wallace Stevens

The poem of the mind in the act of finding.

What will suffice. It has not always has had

To find: the scene was set: it repeated what

Was in the script.

Then the theater was changed

To something else. Its past was a souvenir

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.

It has to face the time of the men and to meet

The women of the time. It has to think about war

And it has to find what will suffice. It has

To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,

And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and

With meditation, speak words that in the ear,

In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,

Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound

Of which, an invisible audience listens,

Not to the play, but to itself, expressed

In an emotion as of two people, as of two

Emotions becoming one. The actor is

A metaphysician in the dark, twanging

An instrument twanging, a wiry sting that gives

Sounds passing through sudden rightness, wholly

Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend

Beyond which it has no will to rise.

It must

Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may

Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman

 Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.

Wallace Stevens was a poet born in October 1879. Based on the ideas conveyed in this poem, he had a forward thinking mentality about poetry.Fortunately, for us, poets like Stevens took a stand or we might all be writing in quatrains.

Thanks for your visit to One Stop Poetry today. Our goal is to encourage you to inspire and be inspired. Hopefully we will have a generation on our heels driven to do the same thing.