I say that Shakespeare’s poet has the tools (pen, language) and the positive imaginative power (that ability to “give form to airy nothings”) to order disorder. But what do I mean by disorder, and what does it have to do with us in the twenty-first century? I’m using the term disorder to cover huge areas of human experience, most of which have existed for millennia. For starters, disorder can refer to events that disturb or excite us, and that become the subject matter of poems. Experiences of love and loss are major instances of disorder—falling in love, having your heart broken, losing someone you love or some place or creature you love. Love for some person or some thing can be a delirious disorder that a poet might wish to organize and dramatize in a poem of celebration. Leaving something or someone behind forever, either by chance or by choice, and feeling grief, regret, or backward longing—that’s another disorder that poets often dramatize. So are experiences of illness, suffering, and trauma. And the brief or persistent experiences of intense emotion—rage, joy, despair, fear—are other forms of disorder that lyric poets body forth in poems.
In daily life, we often push down as much as we can of disorder or disturbance—ignore it or repress it in order to keep our forward momentum and to stay focused on the world before our eyes and our tasks in that world. It’s possible to say that with poetry we pause and step aside to make a place for that disorder, whatever it is (feeling or event)—invite it into our poem and try our best to express and order it there. It may be that you took note of the examples of disorder I gave in the previous paragraph and applied them to your own life; but if you didn’t, they might seem a bit abstract and generalized. So before I say more about how poets incorporate disorder into the thing we call a poem, let me bring the issue closer to the personal specifics that matter to you as a poet and a unique individual. When you did the “I Remember” exercise, you probably encountered a number of instances of disorder—memories that excited or saddened or disturbed you. That’s what I mean by disorder: not anything abstract and theoretical, but your own actual experiences—the who, what, when, and where of it. These personal experiences of disorder are what lyric poetry is superbly designed to engage and make sense of.
There’s more to be said on this topic—in fact, I think it’s one of the key aspects of lyric poetry—so let’s return to Shakespeare and work forward toward our own time as we consider what insights several other great writers have provided into the issue of disorder and order in creativity. In the passage from A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, Shakespeare gives a cool and complimentary picture of poetic creativity in action—the poet is clearly in charge, and we watch as he handles what neither lover nor madman can. But in the Shakespeare scene, we’re watching the poet from outside. It’s as if we were seeing a movie of the poet sitting at her or his desk and rolling eyes up and then down, then back up again—heaven to earth, earth to heaven. Then the poet splits the difference between the two places and, using a pen and language, bodies forth a kind of compromise: something never seen before, a form of things (previously) unknown. It’s a nice scene, and it’s gratifying to poets (Look how we do it! Look how we take control with our pen or laptop and body forth!). But is it that simple? I mean, a poet observed from a distance writing a poem might resemble this cosmic, slightly cartoonish eyeball-roller, but what does it feel like to the poet in the act of creating? We see the glancing, but what is the poet actually experiencing?
THE CREATIVE PROCESS: TWO GODS PRESIDING
Let’s shift forward several centuries for a different story about the creative process that might give a more vivid sense of what it feels like to the poet as he or she creates. The nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche had a lot to say about creativity. Let’s begin with a quote of his from Thus Spake Zarathustra that picks up some of the wildness of disorder that Shakespeare attributed to imagination. Nietzsche has this to say about poets and creativity in general: “Who has no chaos inside him will never give birth to a dancing star.” Let’s assume that a poem could be imaged as a “dancing star” (personally, I like that image for its dazzle and energy and grace and strangeness). Okay, a poem is a dancing star—end product of the poet’s creativity. But notice Nietzsche says “chaos inside him”—his aphorism claims the end product (dancing star or poem) can only emerge from a chaotic subjective place inside the poet.
So Nietzsche says we need chaos in us, but what do we do with it? How does that relate to creativity? To making poems? In The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, he has another, more extended image for creativity—it’s a two-part process, he tells us, by saying that there are two gods who preside over the creative act: Dionysus and Apollo. These two ancient Greek gods both bring their particular energies and attributes to the same process—but only one god at a time is in charge. First comes Dionysus: god of chaos, wine, wild flute music, intoxication, ecstasy, excess, even madness. He starts the process. Only after he has asserted his presence as wild disorder can the second god appear to finish the process, to complete the art. And so Apollo enters: god of beauty, proportion, rationality, harmony, the music of a harp—where different notes are harmonized as chords. First the god of chaos and confusion; then the god of order and clarity. Neither can do the job (i.e., make the poem) alone. Dionysus represents the aspect of imagination that is wild and out of control; Apollo represents the “shaping of imagination”—that which asserts control and molds the shapeless chaos into a coherent form.
This story of the two gods is fairly easy to translate to our contemporary world and to our interest in poetry. First Dionysus, then Apollo: at the outset, the poet has to let disorder in, give permission to let chaos happen—she must permit herself to write down on the page what might seem jumbled and crazy or out of control (Dionysus), trusting that eventually Apollo will come along with a new ordering beyond what the poet’s self could have predicted or forced into being. Thus, first we must give ourselves over to the confusion of our early drafts. But I don’t just mean confusion about plot or anything structural; I mean a deeper confusion of letting ourselves feel disorder, allowing ourselves to put anything and everything down on the page in the hopes of letting some significant disorder enter our process of creation. We must suspend judgment about what comes out of us, letting words flow onto the page regardless of whether they’re coherent or dignified or logical or what we intended to say. When Dionysus is present, we are not in charge; we are whirled around. This first stage is necessarily messy and even embarrassing, and it can also be scary. How can we be sure that Apollo will even show up for the next phase? What if we give ourselves over to the chaos of Dionysus and his serene partner doesn’t arrive in time to roll up his sleeves and set things in order? It’s a risk that poets take in order to write significant poems.
Nietzsche’s point (my point, really) is that disorder precedes order in poetry. You need to let in enough disorder before you try to order. It means giving yourself permission. You did this to a great extent during the “I Remember” exercise—you let your memory swirl around in a kind of Dionysiac dance. (Or let’s say, more accurately, that both gods presided at the same time: your memory jumped and raced around for seven pages like a young, untrained dog, but Apollo was holding the leash the whole time with his ordering principle of “I remember” and his ordering advice to not go on too long, to try to keep each memory limited to a single phrase or sentence.)
Suppose this story of Dionysus and Apollo, chaos evolving into harmony, has some truth in it. We’re still looking at the process from a slight distance. Why not hear firsthand testimony from a person who initially is quite convinced he’s taken that initial risk, has given himself over completely to Dionysus—surrendered control of things in order to arrive at some intense and significant state of being. This testimony is in the form of an intriguing poem by the twentieth-century poet and novelist D. H. Lawrence entitled “Song of a Man Who Has Come Through.” The speaker seems to feel that he has opened himself to disorder—“I yield myself and am borrowed” is the way he puts it—in order to get to some special place: to “come at the wonder,” to “find the Hesperides” (a magical garden on a mythical island). He opens himself to disorder, and all goes well until he suffers a rude shock near poem’s end. Here’s the poem:
Song of a Man Who Has Come Through
Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!1
A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.
If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me!
If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift!
If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed5
By the fine, fine wind that takes its course though the chaos of the world
Like a fine, an exquisite chisel, a wedge-blade inserted;
If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge
Driven by invisible blows,
The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides.10
Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul,
I would be a good fountain, a good well-head,
Would blur no whisper, spoil no expression.
What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?15
It is somebody wants to do us harm.
No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them.
D. H. Lawrence (1917)
All the way up through line 13 of the poem, the speaker seems quite confident that he has let himself be open to the vital disorder of the world—that he himself has become a shifting and flexible being—he floats, seemingly like a weightless seed; he becomes the tip of a chisel splitting a rock that pours out “wonder” like a fountain; he even imagines that he has become the fountain that speaks wonder. And then . . . ? And then he hears something that frightens him deeply: a “knocking at the door in the night.” (Who, reading this poem, would have ever known it was taking place at night or that the poem was set inside the speaker’s house?) It is a weird knocking—one that doesn’t simply surprise and unnerve the speaker, but that generates paranoid fantasies of malicious disorder seeking him out (“somebody wants to do us harm”). And next an even stranger thing happens: some other voice speaks. (Who even knew some “other” was present in this poem?) This other voice speaks with great calm and authority, correcting the original speaker and calling a halt to his panic with clear instructions as to what to do:
No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them.
They are angels, the voice tells the poem’s original speaker (and us), but they are “strange angels.” Chances are, these nocturnal visitors are bringing in more disorder or some message from a different dimension (the English word angel comes from the Greek word for “messenger”). It seems the original speaker is being reassured by this authoritative voice, but also urged toward a further action—a further, risky faith in the mysterious. It’s not hard to imagine that opening a door in the middle of the night can be dangerous. Even as a metaphor, we sense that the issue might be: Am I letting in too much disorder? Am I risking madness or destructive chaos?
My own, milder version of Lawrence’s admonition (“Admit them, admit them”) is this mantra: give yourself permission. Open yourself to a bit of chaos at the beginning of the writing process. Don’t judge the words you put down on the page in a first draft. Just let the flow happen, and don’t worry about where it’s going. I don’t just mean, as in the opening lines of Lawrence’s poem, letting yourself float on the language or hammer against something that resists like a rock; instead, think about opening yourself as one opens a door in the night: there is something alive out there, some entity or theme that wants to enter your room—the room of your mind, the room of the page. Don’t be afraid to put words down, no matter what they are—it’s essential to admit a few strange and unpredictable angels.
THE THRESHOLD IN POETRY
In the ceaseless interplay of disorder and order in our daily lives, it is possible (and crucial) to imagine that there are certain situations in which that ceaseless interplay can be held briefly in a steady state. One such suspended moment is the poem, which freeze-frames the interplay as language so that we can contemplate it, feel it, and concentrate on it. Robert Frost characterized poetry as “a momentary stay against confusion,” and his phrase expresses the power of poetry to lift moments of clarified drama up out of the ceaseless and discombobulating flow of experience. Imagining the poem’s moment as a threshold between disorder and order can reveal a lot about poetry and also about ourselves.
When the speaker in Lawrence’s poem hears that knock on his door in the night, he wants to retreat from it, maybe even cower behind a couch. Instead, he is instructed to go to the door and open it—to stand on the threshold and welcome (or at least admit) the strange angels. The threshold is a crucial place in poetry because it symbolizes poetry’s power to present both disorder and order.
What is a threshold? What do I mean by this term? In the simple, dictionary sense, a threshold is the place of transition that a door makes in a house. Imagine, for a moment, standing on the threshold of a house: the door is open, and we’re facing out into the street and the wider world. Behind us, at our backs, we have the sense of the geometrical order and stability of the room we’re facing away from. Behind us, we know the room’s furniture is staying put, that its walls and floor and ceiling are solid and unmovable, completely stable. In front of us is the street—cars going by, clouds moving through the sky, tree branches waving in an unpredictable but strong way as they respond to the wind. Perhaps our dog runs a zig-zag on the lawn, following the inspirations that her nose announces. There is nothing threatening in what’s before us, but it is alive and in motion and essentially unpredictable in its events (e.g., we can’t know what cars or trucks will go by, or whether the dog will discover and chase a squirrel). We are standing on the simplest and most basic of thresholds, a place where we experience both order (behind us) and disorder (before us). We are at the place where they meet.
A threshold is the place where two different states meet. I’m using the term threshold to stand for that place in poetry where disorder and order meet. It is the place where urgent and significant poems are written. Each one of us has his or her own personal threshold. In order to write well, a poet must locate and write from this threshold.
The Personal Threshold and Poetry
The edge is what I have.
Theodore Roethke
Each of us has his or her own personal threshold: the place where order passes over into disorder. It’s a matter of how much order we need to feel safe and yet how much disorder we need to feel vitally alive.
In poetry, the threshold is that place in the poet where disorder and order meet. It could be a place of subject matter—a theme. Or it could be a formal disorder that the poet is encountering—experimental poets sometimes scramble ordinary syntax (the word order in a sentence that establishes meaning) or disrupt logic in order to create an encounter with linguistic or imaginative disorder.
Poets tend to go to their thresholds to create their best poems. Why? The first reason would be that thresholds are places where energy exchange is happening, where something real is at stake for the poet. In his essay “The Figure a Poem Makes,” Robert Frost puts it this way: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” The poet must go to his or her threshold and authentically experience the disorder (in this case, the disorder of emotion: tears and surprise) in order to move the reader. The poet is not and cannot be a puppet-master using language gifts to manipulate the reader while remaining personally detached—that is the realm of advertising and political rhetoric, not poetry. The threshold that poets must approach is a place where the ordering powers of imagination are responsive to the stimulus of disorder. When, in the same essay, Frost defines poetry as “a momentary stay against confusion,” he is acknowledging the significance of thresholds as a place where disorder and order meet and are held in dynamic tension by the power of the poet’s imagination. (Nietzsche might say that after Dionysus arrives with tears and surprise, Apollo shows up to shape it all into a “momentary stay,” or the brief stability that the poem embodies.) In Frost’s statement, confusion of all kinds (from anguish and despair to wonder and joy) is understood to be the ordinary, human mental condition, and poetry (a poem) helps to clarify or dramatize that confusion in such a way as to stabilize the self. Elsewhere in the same passage, Frost points out that culture also supplies “large” stays against confusion—religions and certain other systematic ideologies claim the power to order and make sense of the world—but that poetry doesn’t make such grand claims. It’s a “momentary” stay, a momentary clarification or victory for the self—and one that invites a similar experience in the reader.
Each individual reader has his or her own threshold. Like the poet’s, it is formed by two forces: one innate, the other experiential. The genetic part has to do with our inborn temperament or personality and includes attitudes and qualities that are biologically inherited. A lot of who we are seems to be established from birth and doesn’t budge much—if you don’t believe scientists, you can ask your parents (if they’re available). They’re probably pretty aware of how set and solid certain aspects of your personality were right from birth. The experiential part concerns the way environment affected or altered your basic temperament; this part has to do with experiences and events that happened to you, especially during the formative years of childhood and adolescence. The threshold is a different place for every poet and reader.
The Personal Threshold in Writer and Reader
When we read a poem that takes us to our threshold, we know it. When a poem takes us way beyond our threshold—into a chaos we can’t make sense of or feel stimulated by—we know it. When a poem doesn’t even approach our threshold, instead seeming to squat safely in the middle of a sealed room, we know that too—we feel a bit stifled, a sense of claustrophobia. Each poem has a threshold, and we read in hopes of finding poems that will take us to our own threshold or show us a new and persuasive one.
Because your own personal threshold is formed by your temperament and personality (the innate element) and also by your experiences during childhood and adolescence, the two factors together determine what proportion of disorder and order you find stimulating or enlivening. The threshold is not a moral category—it has nothing to do with good or bad, right or wrong. But it’s something just as important—it’s an existential category. In other words, your threshold has a lot to do with who you are: how much disorder you need to feel alive or real, how much order you need to feel that (as the poet Robert Duncan put it) “certain bounds hold against chaos.”
Innate temperament and early experiences (childhood and adolescence)—these seem to me the major factors in determining where your threshold is: how much disorder you can tolerate and enjoy; how much order you need to feel safe. But it’s not predictable from these two factors. The impact of early experiences is especially complex. For example, having had a chaotic or dysfunctional childhood doesn’t necessarily mean you can handle lots of disorder, more than someone from a less turbulent background. It could go either way. Your chaotic background could make you more sensitive and even “allergic to” disorder, less tolerant of it. You might feel: “I had so much disorder and violence in my childhood that I need lots and lots of order now to make up for it, to calm me.” Or the opposite: “I have a high tolerance for (even a need for) disorder, because I had a lot of it early on and now I crave a certain level of it in order to feel that something is real.” There’s no predicting, but the issue isn’t about prediction. The issue is this: What do you feel about it? How would you locate yourself on a spectrum of disorder to order?
Where you fall on such a spectrum may vary from topic to topic, but still I think we all have a general sense of our own needs and inclinations in this regard.
A threshold can concern subject matter, content, theme. I know people who absolutely will not read a poem about a sexual assault. I also know people who will willingly read and even seek out poems on that subject. As a teacher, I wouldn’t conclude anything about those two facts. But the reader who is attracted or repulsed by such a subject would certainly be experiencing something to do with his or her threshold. Likewise, a personal threshold can concern formal qualities of poetry. I know students who are intrigued by and attracted to poems that rhyme, and others who dislike rhyme so much that they cannot enjoy any poem whose rhyme scheme is apparent. Again, a personal threshold is at work in these responses. Rhyme isn’t good or bad; nor is any subject matter in poetry good or bad, appropriate or inappropriate, in our present-day American culture. We cherish the diversity of our experiences and try to honor and enjoy the variety of it. But a threshold is a real thing for each of us, and it comes powerfully to the fore in our reading and in our writing.
Poems that matter to us take us to our threshold: either in subject matter or in style, or both. We grow as poets, as readers, as people by extending our thresholds. Poems invite us to their thresholds; poets do also. One way we grow as poets, as readers, as people is by extending our thresholds, and reading lots of poems helps us to do that.
Often, arguments about taste, about whether or not a particular poem is “great,” are simply the result of differences in readers’ thresholds. To say that we find a poem “boring” is another way of saying that it doesn’t bring us close to any threshold in us. To say that a poem seems to us “meaningless chaos” is just another way of saying that it throws us way out past our threshold. No one “wins” these arguments about taste, because they are really just disguised ways of discussing our own thresholds.
When reading a poem we don’t consciously think about its threshold, but we do have an intuitive feel for the play of disorder and order in the poem. We assess the threshold with a part of our minds, but still there’s not much point in rushing to judge a poem’s worth on the basis of its threshold—to say (as if speaking with objectivity and authority): “not enough significant disorder here” or “this is way too chaotic and jumbled.” It’s more important to become aware of how someone’s poem relates to our threshold than it is to judge the poem. A poet’s job is to go to his or her threshold, not to your threshold. Of course, if it doesn’t go to your threshold, you’ll have a less positive response to it. But we’re all of us different—different things have happened to us, matter to us, have hurt or thrilled us. Our job as poets is to engage those things in a way that feels real to us and let the reader respond as best he or she can. Frost’s “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader” is a good principle to remember when we write.
Above all, threshold is an awareness about yourself—a sense of how you feel in relation to certain topics and/or, in poetry, to certain ways of using language; an awareness of how the intuited relative proportion of disorder and order makes you feel. It’s important to adapt the term to your needs and experiences—to use it when and where it’s helpful to you as poet or reader. But I argue that the threshold is a real thing—with roots deep in the human psyche.
In addition to the personal threshold that each person, poet, and reader has, there is a cultural threshold. It is different in different cultures and also can change within a given culture, depending on where that culture is in its historical development. It has to do with the society-wide agreement about how much disorder and order should be present in an act of imagination.
In America, the cultural threshold has been rising steadily over time: we’re able to tolerate increasing levels of disorder in our cultural products. Consider what seemed to be a terrifying horror movie fifty years ago (The Blob, which was just a gelatinous sofa that oozed around slowly like an amoeba made of jelly) and what can be shown and eagerly viewed on movie screens now in the horror genre—dismemberment and gore galore. Consider the threshold for violence shown on television or in movies, or the acceptable level of verbal violence in those media. To note this cultural threshold shift is not to judge it, either morally or aesthetically, but simply to note it as a part of the environment in which a poet’s individual threshold is situated. As a poet (or reader), we may feel as if we’re in harmony with the cultural threshold of our moment, or we may feel out of tune with it—either way out ahead of it, or lingering behind as if we were nostalgic for a gentler mix of disorder and order. This cultural threshold is one more factor in our creative lives, and it can lead to a sense of buoyancy or tension.
What matters most is your own exploration of your personal threshold—that place where important poems are written. When you write a poem from your threshold, you can feel it. You know it in your bones.
A poet’s threshold can shift over time. Young William Wordsworth was a poet of radical disorder—in both subject matter and style—for his time (the late 1700s, say). We may read Wordsworth now and find him very dull (as many of my students do), but in his youth he was considered so radical and chaotic that his poems were deemed not poetry at all, but the ravings of a fool or a dangerous subversive. Yet as Wordsworth grew older, he got tired of being so far out at the edge. He’d written so many poems that were (in his youth) experimental and risk-taking in terms of subject matter and style that he began, in his early thirties, to lose his taste for disorder. He wanted to come in out of the chaos and write from a more ordered, culturally acceptable place—a place where he could feel less exhausted by his freedom. Consider these lines from what I’m tempted to call his surrender poem, “Ode to Duty”:
I supplicate for thy (Duty’s) control;
But in the quietness of thought:
Me this unchartered freedom tires;
I feel the weight of chance desires:
My hopes no more must change their name,
I long for a repose that ever is the same.
It wasn’t long after this ode that Wordsworth began writing one sonnet after another and celebrating the narrow confines of its formal restrictions, which he now experienced as the safety of a convent cell:
Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room;
And hermits are contented with their cells . . .
For Wordsworth, the intense formal ordering of the sonnet form was a welcome refuge.
Wordsworth wasn’t the first person (or poet) to become more conservative as he grew older—to draw back from his threshold, or to feel his threshold shift beneath him. You are young poets starting out, so you don’t need to think much about this issue; but as an old poet I think a lot about how to keep my poems vital by trying to find new thresholds. I like to think of how T. S. Eliot worked hard to move in an opposite direction from Wordsworth as he grew older, pressing out against the unknown by writing a new kind of poem in his fifties and announcing in one such poem that “Old men ought to be explorers.”
THRESHOLD EXERCISE: THRESHOLD AND YOU
During the course of the “I Remember” exercise in Chapter 1, you may have felt yourself drifting on a flood or stream of associative memories and then found yourself caught in the occasional whirlpool that swirled around a painful or traumatic memory scene. You may have felt caught in its downward spiral and sensed an urgent need to break free. I’ve had students say that they had to stop completely, clear their heads, and start over again in order to feel safe and secure, or free of sadness or danger.
For this exercise, I want you to go back to your ten pages of “I remember” statements and circle those memories that had strong emotion associated with them: for example, fear or shame or pleasurable excitement. When a memory arrives attached to strong feelings, positive or negative, it’s a signal that you’re in a threshold situation. You don’t have to be able to name the emotion or understand exactly what it is. In fact, one purpose of writing poems is to come to a better understanding of what feeling or feelings are involved in our experience. Poets have been known to say: “How do I know what I feel until I see what I write?”
Now comes the harder part of this exercise. While your “I remember” list is in front of you, try to recall some memories that you decided not to write down during the original exercise. Memories that were too intense—too disturbing or embarrassing or painful or exciting or shameful. Memories that came up and you shunned, blinked your eyes to dismiss; or if you did write them down, you crossed them out (even though you weren’t going to share your list with anyone—you crossed them out as a way of reasserting control over them through silence or suppression). I don’t have any moral or artistic point to make here. I’m not saying that these are the memories you should write about. I don’t believe that. My only point is this: you definitely experienced a significant threshold there.
READERS APPROACHING THRESHOLDS
Both poet and reader risk the instability of thresholds in poems. The poet risked it first, when she or he wrote the urgent poem in which something real was at stake—in which he or she approached a threshold where disorder and order meet. The poem exists, so we know by way of that simple fact that the poet succeeded in the effort to successfully order material encountered at the threshold. But now the reader is experiencing the poem, entering into the dynamic of disorder and order that is the poem unfolding. The reader, in order to be moved by the poem, must also experience the thrill and risk of the threshold. If we as readers are not moved, then we have not reached a threshold in ourselves or been affected by the poet’s threshold.
But how does this transaction between poet and reader take place? How does the poet’s threshold become the reader’s threshold? It takes place when the reader is able to identify with the speaker of the poem. If there’s no identification, then there’s no ability to be moved by the poem, no matter how great it is said to be. To give an ordinary example of how important identification is to pleasure, think of a time when you watched a movie and couldn’t identify, even slightly, with any of the characters. If you were in a movie theater, you probably spent a long and boring (or irritating) ninety minutes in the dark as you endured something you couldn’t have cared about in the least. Detachment and alienation are the enemies of enjoyable participation in any art form. But when this identification is successful, in poetry it is the glue that binds us to the poem and to its pleasures and discoveries. I call this essential transaction between poem/poet and reader the lyric invitation.