At the poetry work shop

Writing a poem is like following yourself around while trying to see where you're going.

George Oppen, a poet who means a lot to me, wrote of That 'part/of consciousness/that works':  (these lines are from Oppen's poem "Debt", p. 60, George Oppen/New Collected Poems, New Directions, 2002.) Though I don't much llike poems about poetry, I like this poem and like to think Oppen wrote this about poetry.

Colm Toibin, novelist, writes of Joseph Conrad that, "He worked as though between the intricate systems of a ship and the vague horizon of a vast sea." ("The Heart of Conrad", New York Review of Books, Feb. 22, 2018.)

A poem proceeds, in the most significant way the word proceed can proceed; it can be seen from your car but you have to get out of your car to see it. 

I think of a poem, a real poem, as the genius the poet lives with. When I say, real poem I say it believing that most poems I read could have been written by almost any poet who is now writing poetry. This isn't exactly a criticism: even if most poets are actually writing other people's poems, or re-writing them, it's still a difficult, demanding thing to do, to write a poem well that is. 

Poetry: either the recording of ordinary experience through the means of extraordinary words or the recording of extraordinary experience through ordinary words, or both.