Creativity and the lyric address

Abstract

This paper sets out to understand ‘creativity’ as a term with a now-ubiquitous role in describing contradictory dimensions of affective life in neoliberal capitalism. It argues that creativity can be read contra its current meaning (that is, as the capacity for flexibility, agility and selforganisation), achieving both a critique of ‘creative thinking’ and a reorientation of creative practice. In order to trial alternative ways of reading creativity, I look to the lyric poetry of Claudia Rankine. I propose, following others before me, that creativity as a key concept for neoliberalism informs ideas about creative practices such as poetry; this in turn informs publishing, reading and teaching practices. The lyric poem, in its twentieth-century sense (as more or less synonymous with poetry itself), is an exemplary textual form for neoliberal creativity, and yet the lyric as a form betrays a far more complex set of relationships around author, text and reader than is often assumed.