Both our other essaythings concerned poem reception, not poem production. How poetry works on its reader, not how poetry generates itself. What's the deal with this question then?

I think Spicer was right about the Other thing, about poetry as "dictation." Artistic thoughtstream is like another person. It seems to me like the imposition of all other people and intelligences I've experienced. Like they shed a little when we launched against each other. Obviously my mind can't grasp having other things live inside me. So it feels like a comfortable stranger.

Imagine someone in your house since childhood, since birth really. Never a part of your family, but always respected and prompted for wisdom. Never seeming to establish a presence, always existing when you call him. Never seeming to mind his servitude. I don't know.

A muse makes sense: sure, logically, it lives only inside you. Logically, language is a socially constructed relationship engine and we're all alone. But despite the fact we can't feel the Otherness of the muse-thing — as that's impossible to reconcile with our self-awareness — maybe the muse-kids were on to something. Maybe the tangled body of all we've encountered lives inside us, allowing us to call it our own because it is intelligence without the vanity of self-conception.

So, where I differ with Spicer: poets are not lonely radio antennas, nor are the transmissions singular packets from a singular "outside." Poets live with their transmissions/their transmissions live inside of them. I don't know how important this distinction is. I'm trying to say that we're not the translator: the Outsider is the translator living within us, the one that picks and chooses which material he'll deliver when he tells us we're going to write a poem -- or when we want to write a poem, I'm not picky.