Poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.

Art is what everything else turns into when it has been fully absorbed. Knowledge, feeling and language all sit underneath it, and the poem or the song is the point at which they become one compressed thing that can be handed to somebody else. That is why it looks effortless and is not. Nothing flowers without a long unglamorous period of root.

If you make anything, notice that the fallow stretches are not wasted time. Read widely, feel things, pay attention to how people talk, and let it sit. What comes out later will be made of exactly what went in.