Commenter charlieford asked, “just curious: what are your thoughts in before they’re converted into words?”

This is a difficult question to answer. Sometimes people rely on the concept of “felt sense.” An emailer passed this essay along to me, and I pass it along to you:

The poet reads the written lines over and over, listens, and senses what these lines need (want, demand, imply …..). Now the poet’s hand rotates in the air. The gesture says that. Many good lines offer themselves; they try to say, but do not say –that. The blank is more precise. Although some are good lines, the poet rejects them.

That ….. seems to lack words, but no. It knows the language, since it understands –and rejects –these lines that came. So it is not pre-verbal; rather, it knows what must be said, and knows that these lines don’t precisely say that. It knows like a gnawing knows what was forgotten, but it is new in the poet, and perhaps new in the history of the world.

Now, although I don’t know most of you, I do know one of your secrets. I know you have written poetry. So I can ask you: Isn’t that how it is? This ….. must be directly referred to (felt, experienced, sensed, had, …..). Therefore, whatever term we use for such a blank, that term also needs our direct reference.

The blank brings something new. That function is not performed by the linguistic forms alone. Rather, it functions between two sets of linguistic forms. The blank is not just the already written lines, but rather the felt sense from re-reading them, and that performs a function needed to lead to the next lines. A second function: If that stuck blank is still there after a line comes, the line is rejected. Thirdly, the blank tells when at last a line does explicate — it releases.

Between the subjective and objective sides there is not a relation of representation or likeness. The words don’t copy the blank. How can a set of words be at all like a blank? Rather, what was implicit is changed by explicating it. But it is not just any change. The explication releases that tension, which was the ……. But what the blank was is not just lost or altered; rather, that tension is carried forward by the words. Of course the new phrases were not already in the blank. They did not yet exist at all.