I remember Shakespeare or someone saying that the limiting forms of sonnets, haiku, etc. actually enhanced their creativity because it reduced the overwhelm of how to structure a poem. Basically I’m looking for any examples about how limiting something actually frees rather than constrains. Quotes, examples, etc… would be great. Anyone?
I should add that examples of limiting as paradoxically freeing need not be restricted to creativity. I fact, intuition would even be better. I’ll take anything.
I tend to get pretty creative when I am thinking around the limits and roadblacks. It helps me focus on the problem instead of all the myriad of options.
Plus, being the perverse being I am, I put a lot of energy into bending the rules.
A few examples from the rock and roll world:
The Beatles’ Get Back project was an attempt to get away from the heavily-produced, studio-bound experimentalism of Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s. The idea was to write and record quickly, with minimal overdubs. Of course, the album that finally resulted from those sessions (Let It Be) semi-abandoned the original concept, but the sessions still produced, IMHO, a lot of the Beatles’ best work.
Similarly, starting with (IIRC) The Cult of Ray and continuing through his albums with the Catholics, Frank Black recorded under strict self-imposed rules. Each song had to be a complete performance, recorded directly to two-track with no overdubs or post-production at all. Again, IMHO, this technique resulted in much better music than his fussy, overly-elaborate first two solo albums.
Then there’s Robert Pollard, the “man of ten thousand songs.” On top of being a ridiculously prolific songwriter to begin with, his typical recording methods involve almost none of the usual filters between the songwriter’s brain and the listener’s ears. He records and releases practically every scrap of music he writes. If inspiration hits when he’s alone at home with only an acoustic guitar and a cassette tape recorder, then that’s how the track gets recorded and that’s what ends up on his next album. If he writes a good verse but can’t think up a chorus on the fly, then the song just won’t have a chorus and that’s that. Being a fan and trying to sift through the mountain of music he releases any given year is practically a full-time job. 
The man’s a genius though.
I’m with Shakespeare. I’ve been writing poems and song lyrics since I was a kid (I’m now 35), and my stuff almost always deliberately rhymes: I can’t tell you the number of times I have discovered a better way of expressing something while in the process of looking for/working through a rhyme. I feel that the twin constraints of rhythm and rhyme are often actually freeing, and make me a better writer. They make me a less lazy writer, for damn sure!
Yes, rhyme is a good example since it means you can’t just grab the first word that means the right thing, or close to it.
I often take my own free verse poems and turn them into rhymed and metered pieces. That can show me new avenues with the original, or the new poem might be an improvement.
Anything that serves as a challenge forces us to think differently, to stretch. It might not help that particular art work, but it might help every piece after it.
Because instead of wasting your time on trying to be original, you can focus on being good.
Originality is overrated.
I think that most art can fit into that category, even if not as neatly as it does with a sonnet or a haiku.
Painting on a canvas itself imposes a lot of structure on the process, not to mention doing a portrait, a nude, a still life, which might be the equivalent of a sonnet, a limerick, whatever.
My wife is a jeweler, and you notice this phenomenon in the world of arts & crafts. Ceramic artists or jewelers don’t just make “anything”. They express creativity through their take on a tea-pot, an urn, a necklace – classic structures with modern ideas and materials applied to their creation.
There has to be some parameters within which to evaluate them. Sometimes people can transcend that entirely – Christo might be an example – but that’s much more the exception than the rule.
I haven’t seen it yet (it’s in my Netflix queue), but I’d say from the description, The Five Obstructions is the perfect anwer to your query.
I think this was the driving appeal behind the “magnetic poetry” craze a few years ago. We had that stuff in our lockers, dorm rooms, fridges, et cetera. Maybe they’re still around, but I never see them anymore.
That strikes me as almost the complete opposite.
I can see how it fits into the thread. The challenge is to create a poem from a small, pre-selected set of possible words, instead of the entire language.
When writing “freeform” (jus to stick with writing as an example for now), you’re not only trying to come up with original thoughts and expressions, you’re also trying to come up with an original structure to put them in. Two different parts of my brain at work. When working within a pre-designed format, you can let the structure part of your brain rest and concentrate all your energy on the “art.” When I’m experiencing writer’s block, I try to write whay I’m saying in iambic pentamater. Whoosh! it’s like ExLax for the brain! There’s a nearly physical sense of the blockage being just blown away, and the flow reasserts itself. Then I can go back and un-iamb, if necessary, and move on from there.
I think it fits. You’ve got a small set of words and you have to manipulate them around to make poetry. How many people just go off and write a poem without being prompted?
It’s hard for most people to just sit down, think of something to say, and then write a poem from scratch. Yet everyone I knew was tempted to create funny or pretty or thoughtful little phrases when they saw a bunch of little words they could arrange however they pleased. Trust me–put some out somewhere, and it’s hard for people to walk by and not put something together, even if it’s nonsensical or inane.
One of the trends I noticed among bands at SXSW was the prevalence of vintage keyboards–not just the old 60s and 70s organs, but plenty of the cheap Yamahas and Casiotones a lot of us had in the 80s.
Even cheap keyboards these days sound pretty damn good, and have reasonably good pressure sensors and polyphony; they’ll go just about as far as you could ever want them to go. Back then a non-virtuoso could push a keyboard like that to its limits, where you could come up with new ways to make it sound cool.
I know I’ve seen a quote about this somewhere, can anyone recall it? A pithy quote would help to make the point and add some authority to it.
Architecture comes to mind, especially in urban environments. Sometimes you have a very small piece of land, or an oddly shaped one, on which to build.
In the case of the OP, you are given a structure, and it is the artist’s job to create that structure using a set of building blocks that is virtually limitless.
In the case of the magnet poetry, you are given a set of building blocks, and can create arbitrary structures.
In the sense that you’ve limited the universe, they’re similar. But, to me (and what I thought the OP was getting at) the use of language is the expression of the poet – not the construction of new forms.
(Or maybe I just find the idea of selecting 500 words from a dictionary, and stringing them together arbitrarily until you get something that sounds interesting lame.)
It’s like “jewelers” who purchase pre-fabricated beads and baubles or drill holes in dice or sticks and string them together to make a bangle. It forgoes what makes the process of creation interesting in the first place.
I don’t know. It’s distinct in my mind.
Try Wordsworth’s Nuns fret not sonnet; I think it’s rather commonly read in HS English classes:
Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room
And hermits are contented with their cells;
And students with their pensive citadels;
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:
In truth the prison, into which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.