"Employing an extensive archive of interview materials with major Anglophone poets, this book uncovers how they think in the moments of composition, providing a lucid account of the links between poetic composition and live performative thinking"--.

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
  • Permissions
• Introduction
  • Cognitive Constraint
  • Suddenness Defined
  • The Question Driving This Book
  • Approach
  • Notes
• Part I: Revising towards Spontaneity
• Chapter 1: We Do Not Know What We Are Going to Say Until We Have Said It
  • The Split
  • Not a Fast Writer
  • A ‘Kind of Tightrope Walk in the Composition’
  • The Length of a Moment
  • Notes
• Chapter 2: ‘That’s the Illusion You’re Supposed to Get’
  • ‘The Lyric’s Collective Voice’
  • Telling More Than We Can Know
  • In a Nutshell
  • Notes
• Chapter 3: Scepticisms
  • Notes
• Part II: Two Histories of Sudden Verse
• Chapter 4: Romantic Revision and Its Others
  • A Sixth Sense
  • What Is Revision?
  • Suddenness at Last
  • Notes
• Chapter 5: The Iliad and The Odyssey Were Rapidly Composed
  • The Balkan Epics Were Rapidly Composed
  • Critiques and Impacts
  • Relevance to Written Literature?
  • Coda
  • Notes
• Chapter 6: The Desk as Stage
  • Performing on the Page
  • Author Being Multiple
  • Notes
• Chapter 7: Oral Verse in Performance
  • The Art of Telling Stories
  • The Art of Keying One’s Audience
  • The Art of Thinking by Speaking
  • Speech Written Down?
  • Notes
• Part III: Writing Is Speaking
• Chapter 8: Not-Quite Speech
  • Parryan Literary Criticism?
  • Speech-Like by Convention
  • Notes
• Chapter 9: Writing as ‘Oral Dictated’
  • Speaking for the Page
  • Hearing while Reading
  • ‘Worked Over Speaking’
  • Dictation
  • Notes
• Chapter 10: Consciousness as a Window of Three Seconds
  • Spoken Thought
  • Topic
  • Notes
• Chapter 11: Song
  • Notes
• Part IV: Suddenness and Art
• Chapter 12: The Split in the Archive
  • Poets’ Objections to the Idea of Originality
  • Notes
• Chapter 13: ‘Great Goblets of Magnolialight’
  • It’s Forty Past Five
  • Peleiadic Achilleus
  • Email Me a Receipt
  • Intensifying
  • Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author