Poetry is used by many people as a means of self-discovery. What can we discover in ourselves? Sensitivity to the beautiful and the not-so-beautiful. An ability to listen to our feelings -- the familiar ones, and the unusual, unexpected, formerly unknown feelings. By allowing our creative energy to flow, we express things within ourselves which perhaps we didn't recognize previously. We find a better awareness of the patterns of our life.

As a poet, we can lose yourselves -- our controls, our analytical judgments, our defenses -- by engaging that state of creativity. By permitting this openness, we become a channel for freer artistic expression. The creative flow itself takes over to some extent, writing its own poetry through us.

Imagine that the poem already exists somewhere beyond our regular selves -- not in verbal form, but as a state of experience. It finds us; it finds something within us that corresponds to its own nature, and then it charges and stimulates that part enough that our attention is drawn it. When we tap into that charge, we release it to find expression through our own unique self.

The poem is usually expressed within the frameworks of our remembered experiences, and within your systems of emotional tendencies, reasoning processes, and personal vocabulary -- within the frameworks of what we remember, feel and think, and the way we speak. But when we release ourselves from these confines, we allow the poem (according to its needs) to be expressed as an outgrowth of a fresh aspect of ourselves. And we might be surprised that that aspect exists within us.

By writing poetry, we can achieve this kind of self-awareness. But this doesn't need to be a profound kind of awareness; it is just a realization that a certain facet exists within the personality.

Do we write from all of the unlimited states within us? Can we be erotic, erratic, neurotic, specific, pacific -- and prolific enough to give voice to all them?

In a larger sense, our every aspect is a potential field of expression. We can write from, say, a carpenter's perspective; we can imagine ourselves in that unmanifested state where we are potentially a carpenter, and allow the creative energy to flow through that picture -- bringing it to life in fantasy and in words.

In fact, this is a way in which we could physically manifest the carpenter's complete world -- by imagining ourselves being there.

But for our purposes as a poet, our imagination will take us to that state just long enough, and intensely enough, to write that carpenter's poem.