AustLit

'Creativity is one of the important catchwords of the early 21st century. It is invoked by government, industry, and the academy, positioned as the motive force for economic and technological innovation, and widely claimed in the literature of business and organisational management as an explicatory concept and a key ingredient for success. It can be surprising to artists in all the many forms and modes of practice that a word we had long seen as ‘ours’ has so thoroughly and promiscuously slipped from our grasp. However, there is knowledge in all those other disciplines and domains that is potentially of value to creative writers, performing artists and plastic artists, as well as all our cousins in allied art forms.

'Of course the obverse is also true: the long history of creative practice and exploration that is found in the art world has the capacity to inform and energise creative thought and discourse in those areas of human engagement that lie outside the domain of art and artistic practice. We—the editors of this Special Issue of TEXT—made an argument along these lines to the Australian Research Council (ARC), who responded by awarding us a Discovery Project grant to test our ideas through extensive fieldwork in the international Anglophone community of poets. Three of the papers included here (Biggs; Brophy; Webb and Carroll) elucidate aspects of the findings of that project: ‘Understanding creative excellence: A case study in poetry’ (DP130100402).' (Introduction)