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Show " UMtJ " 4 . The challenge of the creative mind i By Syliva Kronstadt I Staff Writer 1 There is tremendous power in being able to view the human scene and say "I've got an idea, Dr Paul Engle, award-winning poet said Thursday. The Director , of the program for international , writing at Iowa University spoke , on "The Creative Mind n conjunction with Challenge Week. "The Creative ingenuity of the mind is not only manifested in the as," Dr. Engle said. "It is applied , to the totality of human experience-whether to politics, agriculture, sports or science The creative imagination is tar more diffused among the population than is commonly believed, according to Dr Engle "Next to our biological needs, it is probably the most universal quality of human nature, he said. In America, Dr. Engle noted there is the constant invention of things, ingenuity of ideas and multiplicity of concern going on at all times. "Americans have an astonishing ability to come up with 'the new thing,' " he remarked. Dr. Engle suggested that our creative power is the most important energy we have. "The practical mind energized with imagination is the most human, the most productive, the most exciting mind," he said. "Even the most orderly intellect works best when it works creatively." The imagination involves the total person in a continuous, fluctuating polarity of emotion and intellect, he explained. "The whole range of the mind is functioning simultaneously." The poem does not begin with a great burst of inspiration but with the collected, vivid fragments of thought which compose consciousness. "The phrases come and you shake them and gradually you see a direction," said Dr. Engle. "The evasive unconscious bubbles up and the mind captures it." Dr. Engle traced the development of a poem from scattered sensory images, to rhythmic phrases, to an integrated whole. He read excerpts iroiu several of his own poems. One, entitled "Collette," concludes: "Good-bye sticks in the mouth like broken glass Under the candid lens of this May light Coal shovel, hearth and tongs, whatever things We shared once, now glare at me when I pass I want my life, yet now the plain daylight That touched us both, falls on my skin and stings." The greatest hope for ttte world lies in our imaginative understanding of all men, Dr. Engle said. "We must fumble into a feeling for what they represent; to achieve an association of dignity," he stated. Fully conscious use of our inaginations alters the textures of our lives, concluded Dr. Engle, "just as ice crystals on a dead branch resculpture and rephrase the branch and glisten in the sun." |
