A Process:

On the composition of Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale:"

"Keats did not record these few hours in 'Ode to a Nightingale.' In the poem, the bird sings 'in some melodious plot / Of beechen green' (8-9), not in a plum-tree. The time is 'night' or 'midnight' (35, 56), not a morning after breakfast. The season is summer (10, 50), not spring. Keats' imagination transmutes what he experiences under the plum-tree. He acknowledges, for this reason, flying up to the bird 'on the viewless wings of Poesy' (33) and only returning to himself when his 'fancy' fails, its spell broken by a word, 'forlorn' (71-74).[...] Imagination ends the experience it initiated. At the word 'forlorn,' Keats comes 'back' to his 'sole self,' that is, the self left alone by its flying double. He becomes conscious of what he has experienced..." (Lancashire)

Or, so often, the act of writing a poem interrupts the poem being written. I can write a poem only when I got to this place, oh, on the left side of my head, three inches or so behind my eye (or so it feels afterwards) where poems, or the words for poems, are made, or are waiting. If I know I'm there I'm no longer there, then I'm in the front of my head. I can feel it afterward, when I read a line back that came from there I can recognize it as having come from that place in my brain--a line that doesn't sound like a poem, but belongs in one because it doesn't sound like a line in a poem. Then I have to get back there to write the next line, sometimes I get back there right away, sometimes I sit for a long time before I let me back in. Sometimes that waiting looks like me sitting in front or a blinking cursor. Sometimes I write through it and lines that want to be in poems, that sound like lines in poems and that's why they don't belong in one, try to sneak in undetected. Most times I catch them, lately, usually I am too tired of fighting with the poem and let in an impostor. But then it usually poisons the poem and I have to start again.

Take now for example, I wrote a "good" poem last night, and a "good" poem the night before, and right now I am letting a new "poem" settle. I wrote it, it is still hot, and has to cool for me to check it for impostors. Let's go see if it's ready...

...
...

...ok, I'm back. Verdict: an eight line poem is comprised of 5 lines of impostors and three real lines of poetry that are nearly ruined. An interesting turn of events: one of the impostors is made real by the deletion of the other 4:

The "Poem:"

The exercise enacts bravery.
In this column a thorny side
The other columns wait
Or are filled up while they wait.
Loneliness fogs over me
My posture responds
Suspicions confirmed
Animals wait for the signal.

The Impostors:

Or are filled up while they wait.
Loneliness fogs over me
My posture responds
Suspicions confirmed
Animals wait for the signal.

The lines of poetry:

The exercise enacts bravery.
In this column a thorny side
The other columns wait

The "converted" impostor:

My posture responds

The new part of a poem:

The exercise enacts bravery.
In this column a thorny side
The other columns wait
My posture responds

I remember "My posture responds" coming from that poetry place in my brain, but then impostors hitched their talons into the real line and muddled it. However, the word "responds" is setting off the alarms and sounding really "poemy" to me...

I won't here go into your affect on the poem, for "[t]o recreate the nightingale's song, we must listen in the context of human suffering." Your heart of course is the last thing to shape anything I write.