Methods …

… The Poet's Pencil | by Charles Simic | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Since poets, if they are honest, rarely know where their poems come from or remember how exactly they were put together, they are forced to concoct explanations out of their biography, literary jargon, and psychobabble in the air to please their audiences. They didn’t always have to do that. Nobody asked T.S. Eliot or Robert Frost such questions. I recall a famous poet in my youth, sitting in a chair surrounded by kneeling students who watched him in total absorption as he cleaned his nails with a toothpick, thoroughly and in complete silence.