Poetry:

Lewis Hyde, The Gift:

"For a creative artist, 'feeding the spirit' is as much a matter of attitude or intent as it is of any specific action; the attitude is, at base, the kind of humility that prevents the artist from drawing the essence of his creation into the personal ego (in what other line of work does the worker say, 'I knelt down - I always do after I've written what I know is a good piece'?) In his book of essays and interviews, The Real Work, the poet Gary Snyder speaks of arriving at such an attitude, and of its consequences:

'I finished off the trail crew season and went on a long mountain meditation walk for ten days across some wilderness. During that process - thinking about things and my life - I just dropped poetry. I don't want to sound precious, but in some sense I did drop it. Then I started writing poems that were better. From that time forward I always looked on the poems I wrote as gifts that were not essential to my life; If I never wrote another one, it wouldn't be a tragedy. Ever since, every poem I've written has been like a surprise ... You get a good poem and you don't know where it came from.' "