creative flow Archives

This Week’s Create Date: Park Walking

February 24, 2022December 1, 2018 by Orna Ross

On Saturdays, I write about my create-dates (one of the recommended Go Creative! flow practices, a date with yourself, doing … Read more

Countdown to Christmas: WH Auden's For The Time Being

December 29, 2013 by Orna Ross

WH Auden

This is a section from the most remarkable Christmas poem ever written, “For The Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio”, by WH Auden. Composed in 1942, the darkest days from the British Allies perspective of World War II, the poem is 1500 lines long (more than 50 pages), a series of dramatic monologues spoken by the characters of the nativity story, in twentieth-century speech, as if the events were happening in that time.

It's a long parable, merging biblical and contemporary into an audacious display of metaphysical poetics underpinned by Anglican theology.

How could the Eternal do a temporal act,

The Infinite become a finite fact?

Nothing can save us that is possible:

We who must die demand a miracle.

The structure is held together with choruses and a narrator and, in the penultimate section, Christmas is over and its meaning pondered.

Auden's conclusion seems to be that

Answering Back

February 24, 2022August 3, 2010 by Orna Ross

One major inspiration of art and writing is… art and writing. I'm reading a brilliant anthology, edited by Carol Ann Duffy, called Answering Back, with a simple, delightful concept: a living poet chooses a poem from the past that has touched them and writes a new poem in response.

It's a beautiful collection of calls and replies, echos and illuminations across centuries — and gives a vivid sense of how, through writing, language and human connection transcend time and place.

Here's a poem about art by WH Auden, chosen by Billy Collins and,

A Crowd of Stars