At each moment, a poem might grow into a totally different shape. It is not so much like working in a garden. It is more as if you remade the garden every day.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Poems are endlessly renewable resources. Whatever you bring to them, at whatever stage of life, gets mirrored back, refracted, reread in new ways.
Poems seem to have a life of their own. They tell you when enough is enough.
Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.
If a poem is each time new, then it is necessarily an act of discovery, a chance taken, a chance that may lead to fulfillment or disaster.
And, I mean, I think poetry does need to be met to some extent, especially, I guess, 19th century poetry, and for me, it's just been so worth the effort. It's like I'm planting a garden in my head.
I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.
I would come to understand there is no poem separable from its source. I began to see that poems are not just an individual florescence. They are also a vast root system growing down into ideas and understandings. Almost unbidden, they tap into the history and evolution of art and language.
How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.