the only poetry

I often find myself trying to reach a poetic state of being. It is not the act of writing poetry that I try to recapture, not the application of poetic inspiration, but the state of inspiration itself; the formless before, the state in which the lines come to mind in fragments, or sometimes stanzas, but have yet to find themselves onto the page. I prefer this stage as opposed to the stage of composition. In fact, it is the act of cognition over the act of composition that I value in poetry. Inspiration precedes application in the act of writing poetry and in order of importance. The wandering into a poem, the aimless ambling, groping in the dark of images and emotion, is much greater than the writing.

The only poetry, I believe, exists here, in the stage of a frenzied mind; when the emotions interpreted by the soul bubble up and spew into the mind, when the soul is so shaken that the physical constitution is disturbed, agitated to a point of movement. It is here that the poem is, not on the page, not in the mind but in the disturbed soul.