I’m reading this Newsweek.com profile of poet laureate Kay Ryan:

“Ryan has long had an ambivalent relationship with exposure, and she has always resisted change. ‘I’m eager for stasis,’ she says, ‘because I can count on its being disrupted.’ While some poets thrive on the drama of their own experience and others want to capture the cacophonous world, Ryan probes the cracks and edges in her mind. Out of those crevices, the disruptions in a quiet life, come her poems.”

Sure, I can understand that. It’s amazing how a deer among the trees remains invisible until it moves.

But the quoted paragraph seems to suggest that there are a limited number of sources in a poet’s life from which poetry springs. I say there are an infinite number of such sources in a single poem. Writing from the imagination is like holding the world up as a prism in which the light of creative inquiry might break, then watching the universe scatter into countless colored shafts. Thus, I have never read a poem the same way twice; not even my own.