What Will Hatch? A Constructivist Autobiographical Account of Writing Poetry

Abstract

In this article I present a constructivist analysis of my own experience of a specific creative experience—writing a poem. An overview of the literature on artistic creativity highlights the relative lack of attention to the examination of the lived experience of artistic production in its social context. Through phenomenological analysis of an autobiographical account of writing the poem, I define three integrative themes that characterize key aspects of my experience: the search for validation, the unseen process, and managing the imagined audience. I argue that constructivist concepts provide an especially effective way of understanding my experience: These include Kelly's creativity cycle, suspension, the existential phenomenological notion of the “prereflective,” anticipation, and the sociality corollary.