you talking to me

So many poets speak about not being in control of a poem’s making, as if some divine inspiration came over them or the poem had somehow been dictated out of the air around them. It’s you, it’s all you…get over it.

showed up

A poem can come unbidden, and also be unwelcome.

tethered to existence

One believes the poem came from nowhere, while each line could be traced back to life.

only need to stoop

One of those days when you could find poems lying about on the ground.

like air

reading is often a big help
but wherever you turn
you are surrounded by language
like the air

—John James, “A Theory of Poetry,” Poets on Writing: Britain, 1970-1991 (Macmillan Academic and Professional, Ltd, 1992) edited by Denise Riley

wait it out

He’d become much more willing to wait for a poem to come.

didn't see that coming

Tabula rasa, facing the blank page, then ex nihilo, the wonder of the poem that comes from nowhere you saw coming.

looking up

A poet waits on a tongue of fire to settle over his head.

--
Acts 2:1
1 And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place.

2 And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.

3 And there appeared unto them separated tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.

no there there

A poet must learn to shun inspiration toward trivial purposes.

missing person

Teaching the Ape to Write Poems

They didn't have much trouble
teaching the ape to write poems:
first they strapped him into the chair,
then tied the pencil around his hand
(the paper had already been nailed down).
Then Dr. Bluespire leaned over his shoulder
and whispered into his ear:
"You look like a god sitting there.
Why don't you try writing something?"

—James Tate (1943-2015)

willed lines

Let will summons the lines that inspiration was unable to call forth.

base matter

Inspiration remains hoped for, but so often art begins in the material of medium.

photo portal

It was that kind of photograph you could step into and begin making a poem of what you experienced therein.

no waiting in this world

Poet, don’t wait for inspiration, initiate through experience.

not refined but final

So active, so positive is the inspiration of this poetry that the question of outside influences does not even arise. Unamumo is probably the Spanish contemporary poet whose manner owes least, if anything at all, to modern developments of poetry such as those which take their source in Baudelaire and Verlaine. These over-sensitive and over-refined artists have no doubt enriched the sensuous, the formal, the sentimental, even the intellectual aspects of verse with an admirable variety of exquisite shades, lacking which most poetry seems old-fashioned to the fastidious palate of modern men. Unamuno is too genuine a representative of the spiritual and masculine variety of Spanish genius, ever impervious to French, and generally, to intellectual, influences, to be affected by the esthetic excellence of this art. Yet, for all his disregard of the modern resources which it adds to the poetic craft, Unamuno loses none of his modernity. He is indeed more than modern. When, as he often does, he strikes the true poetic note, he is outside time. His appeal is not in complexity but in strength. He is not refined: he is final.

—Salvador de Madariaga, introduction to Miguel de Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life (McMillian, 1921)

while scrubbing the floor

One’s best things are more than likely to come in the midst of floor scrubbing.

—Wallace Stevens, Letters of Wallace Stevens (Knopf, 1966, p. 450)

work song

As one labors through revision one listens for the echo of the original inspiration.

inexhaustible window

In the frame of any one window there are a million poems.

from where

After all those years to still not know where poems come from.

from a small flame

That one word was the pilot light which ignited the poem.