 to the creative life from the American Creativity Association's Austin Global Chapter on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Phyllis Bleath. And joining me today is our guest for the second time, Joshua Kite, delivering part two of the show called How to Save Your Life with Art and Poetry. Josh is a one-of-a-kind force of nature, a genius with words as a poet, a brilliant, vibrant, and visceral professional artist of 42 years and counting. He's a career art teacher at the K-12 and college levels who has just retired and is now showing his art and poetry full-time. Josh has touched the hearts of thousands with his unique blend of philosophy, art, poetry, and spiritual insight. In part one, Josh talked about how to save your life with art, so that we can, in his words, keep falling back in love with our lives and after each crisis or setback, come back to our feet. Today in part two, Josh is going to talk about how to enhance your life in the here and now. So, aloha, Josh. Aloha, Phyllis. And welcome back. And could you tell us about today's show, how it will enhance our life in the here and now? Well, I think the emphasis is going to be, to quote Socrates, the unexamined life is not worth living. So, how do you examine your life and make it a joyful thing? Well, one of the ways you can do that is write poetry. Poetry puts you in the moment, and it creates a surprise that you find as you write the poem. Poetry is different than prose. Prose, you start with an idea, you explain the idea, and then you recapitulate it. With poetry, you start with a triggering subject, and then there's a switch that happens where you find the real subject of the poem. Okay. So, the switch. Are you talking about the switch happens for you when you write the poem? When does the switch happen for the audience or the reader? Well, if they're just reading it, which is, I don't recommend just reading a poem. It's, they're really meant to be heard out loud. And the great thing about it is when you are performing a poem, the audience gets to go on the ride with you. And they enjoy the switch. You know, of course, the poet is getting it for the second term or whatever, but the audience gets to discover the switch as well, the switch and subject, the discovery of the real subject of the poem. Okay. So, we just had a slide up showing you doing that very thing, performing it out loud for the audience. And I have to say poetry, for me, it's difficult. But the spoken word is, that's what impacts me, because I don't even know what the cadence is in reading a poem, just like Shakespeare. I was never more moved by Shakespeare than when I watched Kenneth Bernas production of Henry V, which tracks Shakespeare, Old English, exactly. But just the rise and the fall and the expression of the actor's faces brought Henry V to life for me like it had never done. So, I'm wondering, could you share a poem with us that you think might bring about this switch or how it maybe it did for you? I know we won't be there when you first wrote it, but could you share something like that with us now? Sure. You could literally start it with the first sentence being the triggering subject, and then the switch could happen in the second sentence. It could also happen somewhere in the middle, or the switch can happen at the very end of the poem. In this poem, the switch is going to happen at the end in the last stanza. There's three stanzas to this poem. It's called The Turtle's Gaze. So, listen for the switch, The Turtle's Gaze. The sun fell from his perch, making the sky shed blood. Oaks bow in reverence before the fading light, dressed in their green cloaks, some having stood on their carpets for 500 years. Meanwhile, in eastern part the motto was, have none will travel, having fun will unravel, my brain is over its skis. But I did not sell my life's blood. I did not quell my dreams that rise. I found a peninsula of sound where water lapped all around, and turtles stare in detached amazement. All right. I was listening deeply. So, standing around switched from the turtle to me, or to people. Everybody's going to have a different ah-ha. So, you're saying that when the switch happens, the subject started about the turtle, and really it seemed like autumn to me. So, nature and the turtle, and then at the end for me, and I haven't heard this poem before, I switched to us standing around. I was in the poem. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the ideal reaction, is you want someone to hear it, and you want them to go on the trip with you. You want them to feel that switch, feel that discovery with you. Okay. Okay. So, it seems that there are different levels that we get to, that you're talking about from the poetry. And I know the byline for today's show is, we contain multitude. So, would you speak to that? I mean, where did that, that was your phrase, or maybe it's a paraphrase. Could you give us a little insight into why we've actually bylined today's show, we contain multitudes. It's a quote from Walt Whitman, and Whitman was a real wit, excuse the pun. He was being interviewed, and someone pointed out a contradiction that he had come out with. And he said, do I contradict myself very well, because I contain multitudes. That's a very famous quote, because of what it points out about all of us, about everybody, that we do have lots of personalities and things inside us that sometimes don't get expressed. A lot of times people are trying very hard to become a singular and integrated personality. And to do that, you have to kind of put some shade over some other parts of you that may be, you know, are contradictory to that. Okay. So, when did this idea come to you? I mean, you're at this stage, you've just retired from full-time teaching art, and where were you in your life when this idea came to you? Well, I think that originally, when I started writing poetry, I was wooing my wife. And I didn't know that much about poetry. I took a course in graduate school, and that's where I ran into this book right here, Richard Hugo. And Richard Hugo... The triggering... The triggering town. The triggering town. And so, in the triggering town, he puts across the idea that there's a triggering subject, a triggering town, and then the real subject of the poem. And so, that was really helpful to me. And when you start to write seriously, you go and you read as much poetry as you can because you want to learn what other people have done, try to get inspiration from it. And I came across Whitman, and I came across that quote. And that quote really speaks to that idea of discovering something as you're writing the poem. The poem gets triggered by something, maybe a phrase. And as you're writing, it's like digging up a piece of gold. You find something that you didn't know was there. And so, that's why I say we contain multitudes. I find a different member of my little multitude every time I write a poem, or at least a good one. You know, you've titled your shows How to Save Your Life Through Art and Poetry. So this... It feels to me like you're introducing us to two ways that we can maybe even step out of the sad, soft we're in, or shock that we're in by shifting into one of our other selves. I don't think you can just will that to happen, but you're saying, you surprise yourself when you're writing a poem, how that when that shift happens, it's the process or form leads to new substance. And so it puts us into a new place, just like walking in nature. That's what I'm hearing, is that form is changing our format of expression forces new revelations about who we are. And that... And I think that what that does is it brings out a new aspect of yourself. When you do that, when you discover that gold nugget that you weren't even sure you were looking for, but it comes up as some kind of surprise from within your own mind, then you have... You've found something inside yourself you didn't know was there. And that's a wonderful thing to find out. And I find... You know, I'm older and I find that when I write these poems, I'm still finding new aspects to myself. And of course, when you when you read those to an audience, the audience gets to experience that right along with you. And I have tried several ways of presenting my work as we'll get to in this one. I've got an embedded poem where I created a drawing and I did a series of poems where I kind of... And this is another one of my multitudes. I inhabited the character of a disembodied crazy horse of the Lakota Nation. And I thought about what would he think of the way life is experienced now. And so the poems came out of that. And so that was another sort of multitude. One of my many personalities or gold nuggets I discovered within myself. And it's a tremendous thing to find these things. It really does put a... It just makes you light-footed. You're just happy all day because of this kind of discovery of this... You know, your life can get very mundane, very predictable, particularly if you're working. And I found the crazy horse part of my personality I found while I was still working, while I was still going in and working in education. And it just added this joy to my life. So that's what I'm saying is with any kind of creative endeavor that you can discover parts of yourself you didn't know were there. Poetry is just very pure. Poetry is the spoken word. It originally was done around campfires where some more... One caveman, more literate than the others, would stand up and begin speaking and find these rhymes which you can you can recite poetry if you have a rhythm and rhymes. It helps you remember the poem, which was the original reason for that. The reason I did it this way was that drawings are a very intimate work of art. They're different than a painting. Particularly the larger the painting the more it's a public statement. And the interaction between the viewer and the painting is this big thing. Drawings are something where you live with it for a long time. This is the way I think of it anyway. And that you have time to examine it over time and look at the little details. And in this case the little details have this poem embedded in the drawing. So I'll go ahead and read that now. Okay. This was the third in the crazy horse chronicles series called crazy horse chronicles art free blackjack. He was no more dishonest or ruthless or bloodthirsty than any other white man. Much of our killing was done for uncomplicated reasons. Self defense, territory or blind animal rage ancestral enemies. Blackjack Ketchum was wanted. Caught and killed for wanting more. For a poverty poverty of spirit wrapped in a soul spitted and skewered drowning in a glass of whiskey and malevolence. Wanted for believing love isn't real. But just a way to seal a deal. Lest you think these planes forgive too easily, he had nothing in his last hand of five card stud. Even the hidden cards were useless. After robbing trains with his limbs in chains, they hung him so high and hard that his head popped off in a little town where a McDonald's now stands. I was traveling alone. I was going I had a residency in Colorado and I stopped into this little bitty town in Colorado right on the border. I kept seeing these pictures of this blackjack Ketchum character. Nobody could tell me anything. We're talking about a town where you can walk from one end to the other in about 15 minutes. Finally, I asked the guy at the hotel and he said, oh, yeah. He was an outlaw. They hung him and he said, popped his head clean off. So that stuck with me. Yeah, it sticks with me in the poem. Yeah, yeah. It's a vivid image. Well, you know, the drawing is too. The drawing is incredibly detailed. And so, you know, maybe reading the poem, so you'd have to really look deeply to see that there's actually a poem in there. Yes. Because the drawing leaps out at you. So was he said to have been a accordion player and or is that your embellishment? I think what I did was put a little bit of Wild Bill Hickok in him. Oh, you probably did. So the audience should know you spent a large portion of your life sitting in the very almost middle of Texas in Austin. Yes. And we're not where it's keep Austin weird is the city's tagline. And but you have a lot of, you know, shoot them up going in saloons and trying hard to keep up my end of things. Yeah. So let's keep, you know, I want to know more about the different modalities that could invite us to learn about through you to keep changing our form to drive new substance. So are you gonna, you have another form to show? I had a series of poems I did that well paintings I did that you might remember from last time called the head series. And they're out in 3D and I wrote poetry to go with them. And that was that was actually what got me really serious about writing poetry. So the idea back then was I showed one of the poems just I just typed it up printed out, put it on in a frame and stuck it next to the painting and nobody looked at it. So I thought, okay, that's not working. So what I did was I ended up working with a graphic designer. And this guy would look at my paintings and he would graphically design the poems to go with the paintings. So so is this one here on the screen now? Yes. Now I was as close to abstract as I was ever going to get during that period. And those those are body parts or what? Yeah, it's called the secret organ. Organ meaning body parts. Body part. One one top top level meaning organ. I mean, but that's so how big would this painting be? That painting is six feet by five feet. It's a whopper. Okay, so everybody, it's probably taller than you know, 80. What is it six foot, like it's 511 is average for men. So this is larger than average height. Yeah, huge. I'm on the wall, you're gonna be relating to it one on one. All right. And so how does it work? Was it on the same subject as the poem that's that's on the poster with it? Yes. Well, I looked at I thought about what I was doing while I was making the painting and it was quite the process because you know, back then when I was working almost abstractly like that, it was called the organ series. And I did a series of organ paintings based on the anatomy drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. And when I looked at him, I thought, man, you can't make this stuff up. These these are the most marvelous shapes. And so when I was working on this one, I was a little more flamboyantly freeform. And so it became a secret organ, as opposed to a kidney or a heart or something like that. And I thought of this idea that we have five senses. So before you get to the idea, you were I want to go back to the screen mic and see that. So you did both artwork, you have that organ series on my left. I don't know if it's on the audience's right. But then where the poem is in green, it has a little bit of a Leonardo da Vinci art form, human form in there, and maybe more. And you you drew that as well, right? So there are really two pieces of art here. No, no, these are these are things that my graphic designer used. Oh, okay. And he he looked, he had this funny process. He was so funny. His name is Bob Brett, wonderful, wonderful designer. And he would look at the slide I sent him and look at the poem I sent him, and then he would smoke a cigarette. And there was something about that that this worked every time when he would get to the end of the cigarette, he would have the idea what the poem is going to look like when graphically designed that that was his profit. All right. So and I interrupted your five points. I want to sure we don't we don't know the idea is that that there are other modalities of perception that we don't have. You know, everybody thinks that the world is about five senses. And I don't agree with that. I think there are things we just can't perceive, because we don't have a particular organ of sensory that will take us to that. And I think the world is much stranger and more layered than we think it is because we we're like dogs that are seeing things in black and white. We don't have the organ for it. So I invented an organ. I called it the secret organ. So I'll read that now. Please. Yes. Poem number one, what the secret organ gave. I hear a voice from my skull center, vilified in some sudden quake that shakes the third floor of my narrow life. I spend the thin soup of my days into Sonata skies, woven with soundless cries from a seven year old sparse, arched tongue. What secret organ pulses in some obverse of evolution and speaks to me in animal codes. What electric surge comes through my nerves, directing the actions of my hand and the clicking of my palate. This is the hidden mouth of the hungry I cover with a civil organ called by his forest name. That's pretty good, Phyllis. I struck you speechless. How often does that happen? Well, you did. I was thinking three things at once. One is that would it be possible to leave these poems on the platform that these shows are on like in the YouTube or Spotify? So go into the comments. We've now heard it. We've now seen it. It would be nice to read it as well, because you were at a seven year old's level in there and then you were moving a lot in and out of the body and out of organs, the secret organ, and then life. There's a lot. What I wish I could do right now is turn to the audience and say, okay, where did you go when you heard that? The way I think of poetry, and I've gone to a lot of poetry readings and watched performances. Sometimes you get something like the guy stands up and he goes, I have suffered for my art. Now it's your turn. So the thing about poetry is that when you hear it the first time, they can be very dense and difficult to get the meaning, the totality of it in the first reading. And so it's best to just hear it the first time and then read it again and read it again and hear it again and hear it again. That's why poetry is so interesting that way. It's something that you can hear over and over and over again a good one and never get tired of it. I mean, I still listen to the wasteland by T.S. Eliot and get more out of it every time I hear it. Well, and another modality that I haven't heard that you've used yet is songs. We're almost out of time, but I do want to point out that poetry is the lyrics of many, many songs and Bob Dylan got a Nobel Prize in Literature for his, the songwriting, which is poetry. And we've got Leonard Cohen and others. And those things we do listen to over. I don't know how many times I've listened to those songs. Therefore, I'm having that poetry wash over me over and over and over again. You know, I was first attracted to poetry by Bob Dylan. And then I came across something that said that he named himself after Dylan Thomas. Let's go to the source here. And I went and read Dylan Thomas and I, wow, this is so much deeper than Dylan. And I thought Dylan was deep. But Dylan Thomas is out of this world. Somebody you can read over and over and over again. So and as we can, Josh Kite, and you have a website, joshua kite, probably calm, it will show that slide in a minute. But I do have to leave it there. Okay. I'm glad we at least had two shows with you. I want the audience to know that you have been watching the creative life on think tech Hawaii. And today we have been discussing part two of how to save your life with art and poetry with our guest, Joshua Kite. Mahalo, Josh, so much for joining us. You're welcome. And Mahalo to you, our viewers for tuning in. I'm Phyllis Bleece, and we will be back in two weeks with another edition of the creative life. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching think tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please click the like and subscribe button on YouTube. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Check out our website, thinktechawaii.com. Mahalo.