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TO RISK AND TO REACH

Celebrating 25 years, we wax poetic on the importance of creativity.

By FRANCINE RINGOLD, PH.D.

[ Editor's note: We at Solutions sought a unique way to commemorate RL Hudson's twenty-fifth anniversary, and we found it. Dr. Francine Ringold, Poet Laureate of the state of Oklahoma, graciously agreed to compose an original poem just for our readers. But she gave us far more than just a poem; she also gave us new insight into the creativity that has helped make us successful. ]

When asked to write a poem for Solutions magazine, I was not totally surprised. Creativity, I have found, knows no boundaries. Just last October, Nimrod International Journal, the literary journal that I have edited for 37 years, sponsored a writing conference designed to remind us that poems and stories start in places we often overlook: factories, baseball fields, political rallies, and so forth.

Poets and prose writers have been machinists, bricklayers, carpenters, doctors, and bankers. Ken Kesey, Robert Pinsky, B.H. Fairchild, Philip Levine, Manly Johnson, and other modern poets worked in and write about lumber camps and machine shops. William Carlos Williams was a pediatrician and wrote a sonnet a day while in medical school. Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive who wrote in his head as he walked to the office and often dictated his poems when he arrived. Richard Hugo worked in an airplane factory. Poet Dana Gioia, now Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, was an executive for General Foods. Robert Frost was a farmer. Maxine Kumin raised horses. Lucille Clifton raised a large family.

On the other hand, writers who never met a machine, wash tub, or currycomb know the labor of the pen, the crafting of word and image, the sweat and strain of driving character and narrative onto the scaffold of story - and nailing them down. These workers have researched unfamiliar fields and then written about the music of the hammer, the lure of the coalmine. They have written about bricklaying, about climbing to the stars, about the work of science and the work of planting. Each was reaching out for a bridge, for the image or phrase that would connect known and unknown, heart and mind, in fresh and illuminating ways.

So it is with creativity. We risk the unknown and reach from this solid footing to "make it new." And so we have a company like RL Hudson that constantly challenges itself and others to maintain the highest standards, but also to reach and risk and revise and renew and add to the circle of exchange and recognition that makes every endeavor worthwhile.

O-Rings

When poet Blake conceived of the universe,
he described circles within circles,
overlapping like puffs of wind
from the belly of the Buddha. Or, one might say,
like Nobodaddy, silent and invisible,
blooming o o o o o's into the stratosphere,
embracing sun and moon, beginning and end,
so the cyclic motion would animate
the very soul of process, sweeping into one
Ouroboros - that circle formed by the dragon
biting his own tail - all time, all that is born,
increases, decreases, dies and begins again.

It should not seem miraculous then, that now
O-rings multiply, create seals and systems
more resistant to friction than any wedding band.
And good men and women devise polyurethane
rings to keep our astronauts safe and bind
space and time to kiss "eternity's sun-rise."*
Alchemists of a new age, they breathe in,
absorb the light of the sun,
compound rubber and dust into a formula
that defies the tensile strength of stories
that circle our lives,
rotate them into a union
that is strong and good.

Francine Ringold

* William Blake, Songs and Ballads