no free writer

He didn’t free write. He only wrote when a poem, however uncertain or half-formed, arose in him and wanted to be made.

showed up

A poem can come unbidden, and also be unwelcome.

be the prey

Better are poems that sneak up on you, and not the ones you must hunt.

way of thought

Yet I am one of those who from nothing but man’s way of
     thought and one of his dialects and what has happened
     to me
Have made poetry.

—George Oppen, “Of Being Numerous” [section 9], The Collected Poems of George Oppen (New Directions, 1971)

where poems come from

I have three children, but I only write about the troubled one.

no event necessary

Some poems answer an occasion but most arise ex nihilo.

not on the surface

Dredge the psyche for your deep images.

neither here nor there

Do your poems begin in the world or do they begin in the word?

remember this

Regard those recurring memories. They are trying to tell you something.

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.

right here

Beware of the incident that lays a poem at your feet.

inspired listening

One can entertain any beliefs one likes with regard to the sources of poetry, but whether it is God-given, daemonically inspired or willed by self, one has to be a poet before one can write poetry; if one is not a poet one merely entertains these beliefs and nothing more. Whether one deals with religious or poetic inspiration, with Grace or with any other manifestation of extraordinary power, ‘the spirit bloweth where it listeth’, and in order to hear, one must be capable of listening and of attention.

—Joseph Chiari, Realism and Imagination (Barrie & Rockliff. London. 1966)

not much there

For good or for bad, poets keep proving you can write a poem about almost nothing at all.

in situ

Poems come from place.

solitary lakes

Somewhere there they wait for unwritten poems like solitary lakes that no one sees.

—Anna Kamienska, In That Great River: A Notebook, selected and translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh

half-heard

Poems coming often half-heard from a radio turned down low in an adjoining room.

out of the animal darkness

While excavating archaeological sites in Egypt, some of the few remaining fragments of Sappho’s poetry we have were discovered as stuffing inside a mummified crocodile. Isn’t that an apt analogy for where all poems come from, arising by chance from an obscure animal darkness?

peripheral vision

Some poems come from visions; while other poems are caught out of the corner of one’s eye.

locked within the dictionary

I saw the poem locked within the dictionary, and I cut away until it was set free. (after Michelangelo)