Pick one poem... thoughts on process: not so simple as I unthinkingly assumed.

To fess up: my shelves are all but bare: a browning version of Walt Whitman ’55— from which I’d give you Leaf 26, urbanmusic... not Neruda, he's too far South, and he, like Donne, writes his woman as landscape. And not the lanky Gary Snyder, looking west from the last frontier— happily logging redwoods and a new ecology of myth.

The fallback : memory...
Lowell in tweed, taller than the lower lecture theater tiers, dim, inflection affectless, intonations tuned right down; his readings unrecalled... or loping across the tracks, past a youthful Sidney Goldfarb:

When I sit in the hiring hall Waiting for my number to fall dead off the board Then I really read the newspapers It wouldn't do to bring an anthology of Russian poetry Into the hiring hall of Local 6 Of the so-called International Longshoremen and Warehousemen's Union

—nope. None these will be my poem—not even Louis Simpson’s Walt-encounter at Bear Mountain, though the last lines lodged in my backbrain fifty years ago:

And the angel in the gate, the flowering plum, Dances like Italy, imagining red.

Let's try Lowell's friend John Berryman, whose lines from Mistress Bradstreet I airmailed home, snowbound at Moosehead Lake:
Outside the New World winters in grand dark white air lashing high thro’ the virgin stands foxes down foxholes sigh, surely the English heart quails, stunned
and for this conceit, John B, much thanks:                    
‟My psychiatrist can lick your psychiatrist”...
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