Suddenness and the Composition of Poetic Thought

Paul Magee is associate professor of poetry at the University of Canberra. He is author of the ethnography From Here to Tierra del Fuego and two books of verse Cube Root of Book and Stone Postcard.

[The] sign of a critically important book is often that it hurls one between poles of epiphanic agreement (finding a sudden elucidation of experiences familiar from one's own practice as a writer, for instance), and of profound disa-greement. Magee's book placed me in such a position as reader: throughout it I found myself in a dynamic state of response, agreeing and disagreeing in nearly equal measure, with nearly equal strength of feeling. This is a provocative book in the best possible sense, because it demands that the reader (particularly the reader who is also a writer) reconsider their practice and its relation to thought, speech, and planning. Magee mounts a complex and interlocking argument that takes us on a journey across the contemporary moment; hurls us back to Ancient Greece; and alights in the territories of Romantic poetry ('Keats was not just fast, he was accurate'), cognitive literary criticism and meditations on the relations among speech, thought, and writing; and delivers us in the end to a place and time of transformation... Magee's arresting book offers us an intervention that invites return visits and further thinking at this time when human creativity, faced with machine-made texts, must demonstrate its radical singularity, its strangeness and wildness. -- "Australian Book Review " Magee's book is hands-on, it is challenging and provoking, it's both incomplete and exhaustively detailed. And it is a model of contemporary research in the field of Creative Writing - taking what it needs from linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, ethnography, anthropology, close textual analysis, historical scholarship and lived experience. It sits alongside Nigel Krauth's The Creative Writer's Mind (Neurolinguistic Matters, 2022) as a recent tour de force in the field. This mix of interdisciplinary ingredients could produce a mish-mash, but in Magee's hands, under the guidance of his developing argument and a growing hunch about writing poetry, the book holds together both as a thesis and as its own narrative of inquiry. You get the sense that Magee has read a lot more in each field that he ventures into than he can possibly mention. -- "TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses"