ИСТИНА

Memory has been treated variously as a necessary condition of creativity, or of its opposite, or of its reverse. In practice “playing back" the creative process reflexively, in reminiscences, has proved to be a notoriously tricky business. Even when it is undertaken––as by Edgar Allen Poe in “The Philosophy of Composition”––by a writer who strives “to detail, step by step, the processes by which the composition attained its ultimate point of completion,” the crucial “circumstance—or, rather, the necessity—that gave rise to the intention of composing a poem” tends to get dismissed. Remembering back to when the initial creative impulse struck, the poet’s self-birthing remains “immemorial”, beyond reflection. Yet in modern (post-romantic) poetry no few attempts have been made to model this limen/threshold metaphorically, most often as an encounter with a singular image, rhythm, sense of voice, smell or gesture later to be “performed” through language. Might not this rich, though elusive (and yet uncollected) material––the body of knowledge left largely “unattended” (Polanyi 1983)––foster new collaboration between memory studies and literary studies? Could this collaboration lend new perspective on human creativity in ways participatory and “practical” as well as theoretical, thereby interesting in both its cognitive and sociocultural aspects? References Poe, Edgar Allen The Philosophy of Composition Polanyi, Michael (1983) The Tacit Dimension. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith.