A poem may be written in the moment but it does its work in time. May be written in acute emotion yet drives toward precision, compression, the existential intentionality of art which is its way of discovering meaning. Made in and from the material of language, poetry is continually wrestling with its own medium.
Adrienne Rich: Foreword to The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems 1950 – 2001. New York: W.W. Norton (2002)
I wholeheartedly agree. And it shows me just how far I still have to go with my own work.
Thoughts?