Art of silence

I feel overwhelmed by my past...as if I could still feel and taste every bit of it. It can be overwhelming and yet is a summons at the same time. There is a special class of persons, objects, ideas, etc encountered in the past to which I can easily turn for the materials of poetry though little resembling their originals. How exactly?

 I believe the artist carries around inside them a register (cache?) of moods or feelings that things like music, a solitary moment, a picture easily call up. The exact (inter)relationship between recollection and response is mysterious as it is also commonplace. Rilke formulates the genesis of the poem in memory when he says “Only when [memories] have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves – only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.”

Herein lies the poem's silent rêve. Many of my own poems have begun with a 'word', 'a face', 'a moment' springing into a life of their own..the 'nameless' given a 'name' (at last).