It is also—and this, I suspect, is not limited to America—to learn to write without much concern for audience, not because you don’t want your poems to be read, but because in order for poems to honor the voice that creates them, a voice that, as even the most secular poets acknowledge, seems to come from “somewhere else”—in order, that is, for the poems to be poems—you have to acquire a monkish devotion to their source, and to the silence within you that enables that source to speak.
