#creativity theory

[anthonywilson]

Lifesaving Poems: Kathleen Jamie's 'The Way We Live'

Lifesaving Poems: Kathleen Jamie’s ‘The Way We Live’

Sometimes you do not get a poem, or what a poet is up to, straight away. In the case of Kathleen Jamie‘s wonderful ‘The Way We Live’ I needed three goes before it broke over me like an egg.

Not for one second do I think this the fault of the poem.

My first encounter with it was through Neil Astley‘s anthology Poetry With an Edge, published in 1988. As I have written before, this book came into…

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[anthonywilson]

Brother, genius

  One of the central influences on my life is not a poet in the usual sense of the word, though I happen to think he is one. He is my brother, Martin. Older than him by a mere thirteen months, I cannot remember a time when he wasn’t there.

My earliest memories of Martin are of watching him eat as a child. At Saturday evening supper he would painstakingly assemble multi-layered sandwiches…

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[anthonywilson]

Lifesaving Poems: Frank O'Hara's 'Why I am Not a Painter'

Lifesaving Poems: Frank O’Hara’s ‘Why I am Not a Painter’

Here is a revelation: I did not always adore the work of Frank O’Hara. I had pause to consider why this was so at a reading once. In the Q and A afterwards the poet I was reading with said they had detected a strong American influence in my work: ‘Frank O’Hara, perhaps?’ This was told to me in a way rather as one would remind a recalcitrant child that they had stepped in something. I replied that…

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[anthonywilson]

The bow and the lyre

The bow and the lyre

I followed a lead, nudged by a hunch, and it brought me here. The book is In Their Own Words (edited by Helen Ivory and George Szirtes, Salt, 2012) and the poet is Deryn Rees-Jones. She said: ‘It’s enough to stop you in your tracks.’

So here we are, at the first paragraph of The Bow and the Lyre by Octavio Paz. With a few liberties.

  1. Poetry and Poem

  Poetry is knowledge, salvation, power…

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[makingcreativity]

"CREATIVITY is the supreme behavioral adaptation of our species. An ethological approach to the causes and consequences of creativity necessarily involves several domains of biological inquiry."