The story of poetry

When I started to write poems, someone asked me if I "saw" the poem before I wrote the poem.
Yes, I guess I did.
I'd see a shape, a block of darkness on which a lighter darkness had been overlaid in which the shape of the poem would either reveal itself or not reveal itself.
That is, the poem as a shape was revealed to me before the poem as a poem was revealed to me as a poem
The shape being the shape, I would write to the shape, letting the shape determine the length of the line and letting the length of one line determine the length of the next line and the line after that and so on until the shape of the poem, as I'd first seen it, was fulfilled.
Some of the shapes became poems and some did not. The shapes that did not become poems stayed around as shapes for awhile, then gradually faded from my sight.
Whether or not a shape became a poem, that is, whether or not the shape was actualized into becoming the containment of visual space filled by words, was, from the point of the shape first being perceived to the point of attempting to find the words that fit the words, all up to me.
A shape that was unactualized, that is a shape not filled with the kind of words the shape envisioned, that were not the right fit for the shape, could not be used again: this was a firm rule. A whole new shape would have to be revealed and the process begun again.
If someone were to ask me today, "do you see the poem before you write the poem?", I'd have to say, "no."
I don't know what I see now. I know I don't see a poem as anything other than words, and that the poems I used to write have pretty much kept their shapes.