I feel a bit of a cheat quoting verbatim from somebody with scant introduction, but Lowell manages to so effortlessly and eloquently encapsulate what I've been cack-handedly fumbling over for years:
'Almost the whole problem of writing poetry is to bring it back to what you really feel, and that takes an awful lot of manoeuvring. You may feel the doorknob more strongly than some big personal event, and the doorknob will open into something that you can use as your own. A lot of poetry seems to me very good in the tradition but just doesn't move me very much because it doesn't have personal vibrance to it. I probably exaggerate the value of it, but it's precious to me. Some little image, some detail you've noticed-you're writing about a little country shop, just describing it, and your poem ends up with an existentialist account of your experience. But it's the shop that started it off. You didn't know why it meant a lot to you. Often images and often the sense of the beginning and end of a poem are all you have - some journey to be gone through between those things; and you know that, but you don't know the details. And that's marvellous; then you feel the poem will come out. It's a terrible struggle, because what you really feel hasn't got the form, it's not what you can put down in a poem. And the poem you're equipped to write concerns nothing that you care very much about or have much to say on. Then the great moment comes when there's enough resolution of your technical equipment, your way of constructing things, and that you can make a poem out of, to hit something you really want to say. You may not know you have it to say.'
