the land of the shí

This sense of being in a place–mythic, geographical, or emotional–of creativity is what she calls ‘The Land of the Shí,’ the title of a new sequence of poems in Cornucopia, her most recent book…. Peacock says that she encountered The Land of the Shí some years ago in her reading of James Stephens’ Irish Fairy Tales, ‘not as a place you actually go to but as a place you get to suddenly, standing in one place, when your perceptions heighten. That is the very state I feel you must write a poem from, and it cannot be entered by trying but simply by being available to it.’

‘The shimmering verge’ is another way Peacock describes this state of creativity. ‘For me, it’s the place where you don’t know whether to laugh or cry, to leave or stay,’ she says. ‘It’s a 21st-century woman’s idea of The Land of the Shí, the place we don’t have words for, so we must write them. For me, it’s The Land of the She.’

from Women in the Arts magazine, “Woman on the Shimmering Verge,” by Renée H. Shea

This piece about Molly Peacock generated a number of thoughts.

• I like having the name Land of the Shí.
• I’ve been drawing the Princess of Cups card. It’s about the same Land. I realized I no longer really “believe,” if I ever did. I wouldn’t clap to raise Tinkerbell from the dead.
• I sort of want to call it She, but that sounds false. My feminism has sunk to a new deeper level. It doesn’t have to be overt or explicit. It has to be the ground of being, whereby you no longer have to call attention to it. The language shifts have to be so profound that you don’t even notice them. This one seems too obvious.
• I know creativity comes from another place. But the place is not where my perceptions heighten. Instead it is where my structural attachment to regular English usage loosens. Where my mental attachment to conscious thinking weakens. Other things happen there. I don’t remember that well. It’s been awhile.
• “The shimmering verge” — that’s a very nice phrase. I like it.
• “the place we don’t have words for, so we must write them” — Does this make any sense? Does she know what she’s saying? It sounds too facile, too general. I wish she hadn’t said this. I find no motivation in this must.