The Production of Poetry

Production and form are not two words that automatically come to mind when one thinks on creativity, yet, they are fundamental to the creative process. The architectural formation of a creative project, such as a novel or poem, is not only a work of passion and inspiration, but there is a formulaic method to the creative madness. Much like building a skyscraper, a novel must take certain steps to find form; it simply cannot exist in full form. There are shapes it must maneuver through, or as Paul Valery explains: "A voluntary act, which in every one of the arts is very complex, often requiring long labor, the most absorbed attention, and a very precise knowledge, must adapt itself, in the making of art, to a state of being in itself quite irreducible, to a kind of definite expression, which does not refer to any localizable object, but which may itself be determined, and achieved by a system of uniformly determined acts; all of this resulting in a work whose effect must be to set up an analogous state of being in someone else-I do not say a similar state (since we shall never know about that)-but one analogous to the initial state of the producer" (Valery 104). There is a great deal more to creativity than it is given credit for.

Yet, with architecture, there are certain limits to which creativity will be inclined to obey, regardless of its intense need to be creatively free. Creativity is always subject to the limitations of the imagination and the forms of the producer; it is building codes for the creative process. A writer cannot write a biography about the Holocaust, and suddenly place aliens into the storyline. It wouldn't work; however, if the writer wrote a science fiction piece set in the Second World War, an audience could believe it. "Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem" (May 115). But the limitations allow the creator to form a story in which the audience can believe, can place themselves into and empathize with the characters.

It is much like the explorations of Doctor Who. Though the Doctor has the ability to move through time and space, he is always limited by the space-time continuum. He must adhere to certain forms, lest he destroy the timeline of the entire universe. He cannot go back in time and erase a historical event which changed the world, as it would rewrite history, and throw the timeline of Earth into disarray. Yet, he cannot ignore the events he has changed in the past to set up the future, as it would again send the timeline into decay. He is bound to the continuum. He is bound to the form of time and space, much as a writer is bound to the architectural formulation of a work. A work simply cannot appear without the steps to get it there.

May, Rollo. The Courage to Create. New York: Norton Publishing, 1994.

Valery, Paul. A course in poetics: first lesson. The Creative Process. Brewster Ghiselin, ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985