Creativity and the Poetic Mind mingles the voices of well-known writers such as Nikki Giovanni, Donald Hall, John Koethe, Marge Piercy, and Robert Pinsky with newer voices, and includes engaging excerpts from interviews with thirty-eight American poets. Within a sustained argument about creative states of mind, this book innovatively presents and explores the technique of «going to the place» as more reliable in writing poetry than waiting for «inspiration». It explains why poets frequently believe that talking about their own poetry may damage their creativity and why, for centuries, inspiration has seemed to come from somewhere beyond the poet. In addition, it discusses the practicality of poets’ thinking that «being creative» and «writing poetry» are two separate skills: inspiration is unreliable, but experienced poets create daily.

The Author: Jean Tobin, Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Sheboygan, co-edited Woolf and Lessing: Breaking the Mold (1994) and has served on the editorial board of the Journal of the MMLA and as editor of Midwest Concerns. Her poetry has appeared in Present Tense, Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar, Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters, and Wisconsin Poetry.