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"Just Imagine," purrs the New Ager's bumper sticker, and dorm room posters feature Einstein's line "Imagination is more important than knowledge" over a blurry photo of a seagull. How we love to babble vaguely about that noble concept we call creativity.

In my blog post on Monday I confessed that I seem to think of imagination and creativity as, in general, "herd-free thinking," as a way of diligently following your own compass. But that definition is too broad to mean much. Obviously I don't have answers to that question or to anything else. I'm not even terribly interested in answers. "Try to love the questions themselves," intoned Rilke, which raises another question: What good is poetic imagination, considering that such a wonderful poet was such a crappy human being? I can't answer that one either.

Recently some friends and I were talking so naturally I brought up this topic: "What is imagination?"

"It's what distinguishes Homo sapiens from other apes."

"No, our hallmark is accessorizing."

"Surely our most species-distinctive accomplishment is porn."

"People, please. It's like Short Attention-Span Theater around here. What about chimpanzees who learn to manipulate a bunch of levers and gears and stuff to finally get to the banana that they can see on the other side of a laboratory? How is that not imaginative thinking?"

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Because I Am Furniture is a novel in poems.  Each poem is its own slice of time in Anke's world, each an extremely short story to make the reader think about something new and question what's next.  The poems don't portray long scenes of continuity. They are vignettes, and have to be laid out as a novel in such a way that the story comes together chronologically. 

I am a little, um, odd.  I am one of the few writers who loves the editing process even a bit more than the writing itself.  How lucky for me!  Because much of what I write is in poems. And Because I Am Furniture required probably one-fourteenth writing to thirteen-fourteenths editing.

Perhaps I exaggerate. 

Perhaps not.

At one point in my third or fourth revision, my spectacularly brilliant editor at Viking, Catherine Frank, strongly suggested I print out each poem and mix them around, trying new combinations of what could go together.  There are many ways to put together a pile of poems so that they create a story; I had one already.  She wanted me to push harder.  So I did this.  Printed them all out (at that time a poem fit on one 8 ½ x 11 page), carried them lovingly to a large circular table in the library, selected a slight stack, delicately fanned them out, and with great terror, scrambled them. 

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I recently did a reading at a library where I was promoting my new book, Keeper of Light and Dust.  When it came to question time, someone in the audience asked me what makes writers "tick".   I ended up giving a convoluted and rather pompous explanation about creative energy and how it is a writer's "second heartbeat" and "cannot be denied".

It was really too bad of me, because last year I had attended a wonderful lecture on the topic of creative energy hosted by PEN and The British Medical Research Council and I should have been able to give a more inspired answer.

The panelists at this lecture consisted of eminent scientists and writers - among them Ian McEwan, author of Atonement.  Mr. McEwan asserted that creativity is an ongoing process - not a fleeting spark - and that in order to create, creativity has "to become a habit"  for writers and scientists alike.  He also listed persistence, tolerance of drudgery, luck, playfulness, ambition and ruthlessness as characteristics shared by both groups.  I concur, although my brother --who is a trained physicist--, has a different idea of playfulness than my own. (For those of you, who have seen WALL-E, think of the scene where Eve dances inside WALL-E's home.)