creativity cretins

Caution: There are many cults run by creativity promoters.

investigative presence

Too much emphasis on the creative aspect of the arts and not enough on the artist as an investigative presence in the world.

in the thick of things

Often in the presence of other art, or one might say under the pressure of other art, poetry arises.

digging and sifting

Less creativity and more archaeology; that is, less imagination and more psychic excavation.

no there there

A poet must learn to shun inspiration toward trivial purposes.

know enough to explain

A poet who had the audacity to speak about his creative process, even though he only dimly understood what was happening.

solved by substitution of terms

The essential feature of mathematical creativity is the exploration, under the pressure of powerful implosive forces, of difficult problems for whose validity and importance the explorer is eventually held bound by. The reality is the physical world."
— Alfred W. Adler, “Reflections: Mathematics and Creativity”, New Yorker (1972)

The essential feature of poetic creativity is the exploration, under the pressure of powerful implosive forces (the emotions), of difficult problems from whose validity and importance the explorer is eventually released. The reality is the physical world.

poet's first obligation

Poetry’s freedom resembles, thus, as Plato pointed out, the freedom of a child, and the freedom of play, and the freedom of dreams. It is none of these. It is the freedom of the creative spirit.

And because poetry is born in this root life where the powers of the soul are active in common, poetry implies an essential requirement of totality or integrity. Poetry is the fruit neither of the intellect alone, nor of the imagination alone. Nay more, it proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together. And the first obligation imposed on the poet is to consent to be brought back to the hidden place, near the center of the soul, where the totality exists in the state of a creative source.

—Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition In Art & Poetry (Pantheon Books, 1953)

the other side of originality

When he claims to be solitary, the artist lulls himself in a perhaps faithful illusion, but the privilege he grants himself is not real. When he thinks he is expressing himself spontaneously, creating an original work, he is answering other past or present, actual or potential creators. Whether he knows it or not, one never walks alone along the path of creativity.

—Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Way of the Masks, quoted in “The Artist as Critic,” Every Force Evolves a Form by Guy Davenport