Description
Book SynopsisInterrogating the much-cherished concept of “poetic thinking,” this book focusses on what interview and draft materials reveal of how poets think while in the act of writing. With findings from the cognitive tradition, this book uses performance theory and philosophy to examine this brief, creative window of conscious attention. Suddenness and the Composition of Poetic Thought draws out the implications of this radically curtailed view of consciousness on the poems and other texts we compose. Henrich von Kleist’s assertion that “it is not we, but a certain condition of ours which knows” emerges as central to this analysis of the thinking we perform in the very moments of composition.
Employing an extensive archive of interview materials with major Anglophone poets, discussing how they think in the moments of composition, the book also provides a lucid account of the links between poetic composition and live performative thinking in the context of the early (pre)textual history of the Ancient Greeks.
A transdisciplinary study at the crossroads of philosophy, cognitive psychology, literary studies and linguistics, this book reconceptualizes the wellsprings of new thought in poems and advances our understanding of thinking’s complex but vital link to the moment of utterance.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
Introduction: On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking
Part I Revising towards Spontaneity
1. We Do Not Know What We Are Going to Say until We Have Said It
2. “That’s the Illusion You’re Supposed to Get”
3. Scepticisms
Part II Two Histories of Sudden Verse
4. Romantic Revision and Its Others
5. The Iliad and The Odyssey Were Rapidly Composed
6. The Desk as Stage
7. Oral Verse in Performance
Part III Writing Is Speaking
8. Not-Quite Speech
9. Writing as “Oral Dictated”
10. Consciousness as a Window of Three Seconds
11. Song
Part IV Suddenness and Art
12. The Split in the Archive
13. “Great Goblets of Magnolialight”
References
Index
About the Author
