sirens and distractions

…jump-start a poem by lowering a bucket down into what feels like a kind of underground stream flowing through his mind–a stream of continuously flowing poetry, or perhaps poetic stuff would be a better way to put it. Whatever the bucket brings up will be his poem.

…he’ll give them a text in a language that none of them know and tell them to translate it into English. (He used to use hieroglyphics but found that he was getting a lot of poems about eyes and fish, so now he uses Finnish.)

Because chance encounters are important, he works well in New York: its sirens and distractions are useful to him. In fact, the sirens and distractions, and the way they affect and prompt him when he is sitting at his desk, are, in a sense, what much of his work is about. He is interested in the making of poetry, the act of writing, more than the poetry itself, which is why, when the work is over, he revises very little and rarely revisits finished poems unless he has to, for a reading.

Becoming John Ashbery by Larissa MacFarquhar