It is impossible to describe how poems begin. Sometimes the same imagination provides me with single lines or with a cluster of lines which is obviously incomplete. I write them down and put them away. Perhaps they won t arrive until weeks or months go by. Some of my long poems took years to come, and then it took a few days or weeks in which to revise and fit all their pieces together.
Some poems arrive as dreams.
Others being from memories. Some start out of the middle of a conversation I m involved in or words that I overhear other people speaking. Writing them is a delight. In The Poetics of The New American Poetry , Donald allen and Warren Tallman, eds., Grove Press, 1973.