You might say that translating made me a much more experimental writer than I had been before. I became a writer in love with the palette, the brushes, the different powers of watercolor, pastel, pencil, gouache, oils. Not a repository, then, but the forging place of new experience, as a volcano is the forge in which new land is made. Every time a good image or metaphor or story comes into the world, then, the parameters of who we are expand. This is true for readers of the poem as well as for the writer.
Changed consciousness is contagious that way.
The writer needs to have come into his or her own language, his or her own authority of the tongue. When I begin a poem, I don't know what it will be, what it will know. In the writing, I learn what the poem thinks and feels, what the mind of poetry sees when it sees through the instrument of my particular perception. And in that process, I also learn what I myself think and feel, what I know and see. Zen is a path of awareness and investigation, and poetry is also a path of awareness and investigation.