Writing & Society Research Centre Seminar Series

This paper reflects on 28 in-depth interviews with celebrated Anglophone poets, including Rae Armantrout, Alison Croggon, Brook Emery, Kenneth Goldsmith, Medbh McGuckian, G.C. Waldrep, C.D. Wright and C.K. Williams. It focuses on responses to a question that split those poets into two opposed camps. The question concerned the function of spontaneity in poetic composition. The majority of poets interviewed said yes, often quite enthusiastically, to W. H. Auden's proposition in Secondary Worlds (1968) that when we 'genuinely speak' we are unaware of what we are about to say; and many also affirmed his intimation that such unpremeditated utterance constitutes a key source of poetic value.