In this article, the authors interpret an event of collaborative poetry writing in a pre-service teacher education class in order to demonstrate the ways in which different theories of learning are and are not able to account for the production of original poems. The first part of the paper offers a conceptual heuristic that organizes a variety of different theories of learning into three categories: correspondence, coherence and complexity theories. For each of these categories, the authors offer a definition, a brief exposition of origins, an overview of key assumptions, and a discussion of their applications and implications for processes of learning. The second part of the article describes conditions of complexity that are useful for both creating and interpreting events of learning and teaching, with specific reference to the poetry-writing activity.