The creative impulse may throb early, as is likely during a person’s growth — while sketching figures or applying colors as child’s play. Or forming clay into familiar or strange shapes. It may then be shunted aside in favor of a realistic reckoning of life choices. Or appear as an occasional refrain towards adulthood, even suddenly become a significant part of one character while coping with an environment. Or it may never have disappeared, rather steadily gained levels of dedication, devotion and passion that eventually define a life.

To write poetry, compose and play music, paint or sculpt or take pictures, to dance, act, involve oneself in design, high couture, architecture or filmmaking, steps are taken to assure increasing expertise as a professional.

The sense and conduct of craft are for the most part technical — hurdling challenges towards the achievement of perfection or consummate artistry.

One devotes time and effort to scale the narrowly angling pyramid towards the peak of self-satisfaction — that degree of personal approval that may be echoed by observers, mentors and peers who acknowledge the merits of appreciable creativity.

And one may settle for the hard-earned admission into an elite circle of artists who have gone well beyond the borders of normalcy.

But it is imagination that is the strongest weapon in a creative’s arsenal.

It is what separates an IM Pei from other great designers and builders, when he dares conceive of planting a glass pyramid in the middle of the Louvre.

It is the same rarefied whiff of derring-do that launched Antoni Gaudi in the rendering of epic, whimsical architecture that continues towards completion well beyond his lifetime.

That streak of imagination — we might call it a swathe — makes Yayoi Kusama stand out among installation artists, or establishes Banksy as a rara avis among street artists, just as Christo became the supreme wrapper in a generation that sought to outdo one another in drawing not just global attention, but the acknowledgement, hardly ever grudging, that among the elite, an even more special breed stamped remarkable originality as their trademark.

Playfulness, or levity that suggests incipient levitation, is often an undeniable ingredient in the execution of creative impulses.

The grandeur of Beethoven finds a shared intimacy, if you listen hard enough, with the more patent frivolity characteristic of Erik Satie or Scott Joplin.

And the audacity of Bob Dylan and John Lennon, ever seeking to contribute what has not yet been done, will always be fresh, forever young, venturesome and cerebrally defiant — in the same risk-prone spirit that Freddie Mercury had deviate from the usual rhapsody to stamp his class among rock stars.

With a nearly overbearing imagination, Picasso and Dali became the poster boys of Cubism and Surrealism.

Imagination when applied to craft led Hemingway to a different horizon, just as T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens lifted their poetry beyond the mere exercise of sheer technical skills.

When Nick Joaquin’s prose resounds with “A las doce han dado-o-o!” or when the suggestion of a possible demon appears in a mirror, or a man grovels with kisses upon a dominatrice’s feet, it is the writer’s imagination that has taken over his proven mastery of word craft.

How does one claim imagination as a silver bullet? Is it a matter of luck that has it bestowed it upon the chosen ones?

When Simeon Dumdum Jr. arrives at a decision to assign poetry’s various metrical forms to delineate particular birds, his arc as a poet of extraordinary skills has dared to challenge a rainbow.

It is like plucking from a dream. It is leaping into a different realm of reverberations, beyond accepted standards, convention, revered tradition — feats that a creative has been gifted with because he did not settle for scholarship or research or the limited application of all the other conceits and tricks of the game, rather allowed himself to fly free from encumbrances that come with acceptability.

Maybe it started when he first found a parent funny for introducing him to art. He had already seen reality wrap itself around their daily lives, but espied some cracks through which he imagined some otherworldly features, like the fun he is now led to as part of proper rearing. He finds this intimacy generous, and loving, but redundant, or superfluous. And his own imagination is stoked by all the possibilities he can game with.

He appreciates the word “jabberwocky” and revels in the antics of Mister Mxyzptlk. And an uncanny spirit of adventure that knows no conceptual bounds stays with him all his life.

Perhaps at some crossroads in his progressive vocation as a creative, he remembers to draw the finest dagger from his sheath, and wields it to surprise everyone with the delight that does not hurt, but draws awe at this freshest of memories.

Alfred “Krip” A. Yuson’s last two published books were “The Mountain That Grew” — an illustrated fable for young and old released late in 2022 — and “Kafka in the Tropics,” his ninth poetry collection, which came out last year. Both were published by San Anselmo Publications, Inc.