We can say that heartbeat has a type of music in it, in its rhythm. But that is a backward view, like saying that you have a soul, instead of saying that you (as soul) have a physical body. Music exists in its own world, in a pure state. And all the rhythms and progressions that we know in the physical world are revelations of that inner musical vibration. In that state, it is a living energy, life itself.

Poets discover this music, consciously or not, and express it through words.

Can we attribute livingness to an object like a poem? We do it whenever we have treated people like objects and then realized that they are conscious, feeling beings. Some mystics have said that everything is alive, like a person, and it is invited into our experiences by our thoughts and feelings about it.

Many artists relate to their creations as children. Like a child, a poem has its own life, arisen from a miracle of creation; it is a miracle that amazes and humbles the best artists. In one sense, we are not the creators of the poem; we simply give a physical form to it, and we grant it the right to be expressed in its purest light. Paul Twitchell said, "An artist must grant beingness to his paintings, a writer to his writings, etc. This beingness is an aliveness, that which shakes with energy." (Letters To Gail, copyright 1973 by Gail A. Twitchell.)

While writing a poem, we might find ourselves using words that we have never used before, or making up words based on the poem's particular requirements of sound and rhythm. Because a poem (like a child) is unique, it needs its own environment. If we are truly expressing the poem, we sacrifice aspects of our own human identity in order to bring the poem into physical life, through his own.