Words, it would seem in Housman's case, announced the poem. Does that mean we got the creative process wrong in our last post?

Helped along by poets Gary Snyder and T.S. Eliot, we argued there that writers experience two facets or phases to their creative work: the first characterized by imagistic, emotional, pre-verbal imagination; the second by the hard work of verbal composition, the search for words that express what has been imagined and thought. It must be acknowledged, however, that many writers, like Housman, place the origins of poems or prose in the gifts of internal speech, that silent discourse ever trickling through the conscious mind. Interestingly enough, however, closer examination of the creative terrain suggests that even words-first poets experience a ground swell of "not knowing," that is, not knowing articulately what cries out for expression. They are often aware of a jumble of feelings, sensations and intuitions provoked by and provoking the swirl of given words.

Housman certainly was. As he expressed it, what alerted him to poetic possibility were involuntary, physical responses to stray words and phrases: a shiver down the spine, a constriction of the throat, tears in the eyes and above all, tell-tale sensations in "the pit of the stomach" (in Ghiselin, p. 90). Full articulation of the poem almost always came arduously, as somatic sense and mute sensibility resolved into linguistic image and utterance. Houseman pointed out that in one of his poems two stanzas dropped into his mind whole and a third "came with a little coaxing after tea." But the fourth and concluding stanza simply would not bubble up. "I had to turn to and compose it myself, and that was a laborious business," he recalled. "I wrote it thirteen times, and it was more than a twelvemonth before I got it right" (in Ghiselin, p. 91).

Poems grew on paper for W.B. Yeats, too. As he told Louise Morgan, "I couldn't work without paper in front of me." Typically he would jot down some lines of prose, purposefully vague, in his notebook, then gradually delve into rhythmical form, visual images and words. Nevertheless, he recognized that poems began in "sudden emotion," "in moments of personal excitement" (Morgan, pp. 8, 6). Nabokov was yet another writer for whom "vocabulary dwells deep in my mind and needs paper to wriggle out into the physical zone..." (Nabokov, p. 4). Nevertheless, when asked what language he thinks in the multi-lingual author responded, "I write in three languages, but I think in images. The matter of preference does not really arise. Images are mute, yet presently the silent cinema begins to talk and I recognize its language" (cited in Robinson, p. 123).

Nabokov clearly distinguished between the generative facet or phase of thinking in sensory images, emotions and so forth and the compositional facet or phase of thinking with words. Though for some individuals these facets may be sequential, one phase before the other, they are not necessarily experienced by all of us in linear fashion. For many others, imaginative thinking and craft composing belong to a recursive process, a back and forth between the sensual, somatic generation of ideas and their technical articulation.

Katherine Porter certainly described her own experience in this way. Ideas came to her through her senses, her pores, with all the immediacy of felt, rather than meditated, experience. "You're not thinking in images or words or -- well, it's exactly like a dark cloud moving in your head," she said. "You keep wondering what will come out of this, and then it will dissolve itself into a set of -- well, not images exactly, but really thoughts. You begin to think directly in words, abstractly. Then the words transform themselves into images..." (Writers at Work, p. 154). Then the images demand verbal representation on the page, which elicit additional images, and so on. Housman took pains not to assume that others entered or exited the creative process as he did, but it sure does look like writers criss-cross each in their own way the whole territory: somatic and emotional imaging, internalized streams of speech, and the externalized recording and shaping of patterned language.

The order in which the writer engages these facets and phases of creative process is not important. What matters is the recursive spiral of verbal and non-verbal thought, the yin and yang between that thinking and composing.

There is, in fact, a tension generated between wordless imagination and articulate expression that many writers believe essential to their art. Unless there is that element of "not-knowing" what there is to say, a promise of discovery in what finally is said, the writer has little motivation to write. "The not-knowing," novelist Donald Barthelme has argued, "is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made...without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention" (Barthelme, p. 10).

The images, feelings and intuitions of imagination may not always come before language, for all poets and writers. But if they do not come at all, neither does personal and original expression. Only because writers do not only think in words, but in shadowy images and mute emotions also, is creativity on the page possible!

© 2011 Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein

Look for our next and final post in this series on how writers think: the logic of personal imagination...

References:

Barthelme, Donald. 1986. "Not-knowing," (Georgia Review) in Elizabeth Hardwick, ed., The Best American Essays (New York: Ticknor and Fields).

Ghiselin, Brewster (ed). 1952. The Creative Process. New York: Mentor/New American Library (Berkeley: University of California Press).

Morgan, Louise. 1931. Writers at Work (London: Chatto and Windus)

Nabokov, Vladimir. 1973. Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co.)

Robinson, Robert. 1980. "The Last Interview," in Peter Quennell, Vladimir Nabokov, A Tribute (New York: William Morrow and Co., Inc.).

Writers at Work, The Paris Review Interviews, 2nd series. 1963. New York: Viking Press.