lovely quip from an interview with jorie graham

Q: You write so sharply about the way the mind, and your mind, moves. I’m curious about that poetic mind. Is it the same mind you bring to the breakfast table or the garden? 

A: The mind is a current—let’s take a river as an example. It not only carries whatever it picks up by what it traverses (breakfast table, garden), but it is also changed in its course by what it traverses. Its weight changes, its speed, the direction in which it was going. Being taken by surprise is one of the fundamental experiences for any poet writing any poem. You know you are in the grip of a poem when it—the subject, the terrain you are entering, traversing—reorients you and puts you before a question that you did not know existed. You are irrevocably changed. One writes to be so changed. The silence you break to enter the poem is never the same silence closing over again when the voice reënters the silence. The poem is an action you have taken and an experience you’ve undergone. You’re not the same person you were when you undertook that poem. That sensation of transformation is addictive—spiritually and emotionally. Why else would anyone attempt this insanely difficult—practically impossible—practice day after day for a lifetime? One is in it for the conversion experiences. What are the ideals of form for except to get us into legitimate danger that we may be legitimately rescued, Frost asks. The key term in this brilliant formulation is “legitimate.”