"Not ideas about the thing, but the thing itself": Poetry, materiality and ideas

This chapter traces the contemporary understandings of what research is and how artists might approach it; and then moves on to discuss, with particular reference to poetry, the confluence of ideas and materiality in creative research work. Both creative practice and research work begin at the same point: with spark of thought, a shimmer of awareness; which may then expand to become a fully-fledged project. For both art qua art, and art qua research, the movement from idea to completed work operates in no small way through attention: attending to the idea, to its context; attending to the practitioner’s personal and phenomenological responses; attention to the flow of object and understanding along the process of making. Drawing on insights from a number of poets – including Francis Ponge, John Keats, Katharine Coles and Wallace Stevens – and building on the work of earlier scholars, including Simon Critchley, Kevin Brophy, and Terri Bird – the chapter seeks to explicate the relationship between the making of poetry and the making of research, with particular reference to the generative force of ideas, and the efficacy of close attention.