Where poems come from

 

For the most part, poets don't choose what they write about; a poem is given to us, it comes from deep within the psyche. Of course, everything takes a lot of work; poets need a foundation on which to write their poems, this includes reading, education, and years of commitment to poetry and writing. As all poets know, when a poem is given to them it has to be listened to; some poets get up in the middle of the night to write down a poem before it is forgotten. The most famous example of losing the thread of a poem when the writing is interrupted is Coleridge's anecdote of the "visitor from Porlock"; because of this interruption Coleridge felt that one of his most famous poems, "Kubla Khan", was never fully completed.

What a poet writes is an expression of deeply felt psychic issues. The soul deciphers what it perceives and begins writing (or dictating) a poem. Over time the writing will change, but what doesn't change is the need to write poems. Poetry is one of the places in life where we see the surrender of conscious choice; it is a demand on us by the soul, a demand that we listen, a demand to write our poems as they are given to us, and a demand to be faithful to writing poetry over a lifetime.

We poets were once a tribe, as Margaret Laurence described the community of writers back in the 1960s; but the tribe has broken up, it has dispersed, it has been fragmented. Nevertheless, what we write about doesn't really change; perennial themes supersede what is newly fashionable or entertaining. What has importance is our creativity and depth of perception, our visceral need to write poetry, and our knowledge that after everything else has disappeared from life, it is poetry that will still be there. This is my experience.