Seeing Light in Richard Blanco's Inaugural Poem for Obama

Hi friends of reading and writing,

I have been thinking about seeing this week, even before hearing the poem Richard Blanco read for Obama's second presidential inauguration.  My weekly idea to chew over and live with is that we can only see through light, that we mainly learn to "see" aka understand by our visual sense, and that it can both convince us and mislead us.  We can see and understand something only because it's presented to our eyes, illuminated in light.  But also, we can use vision to fool others (think of magicians, for example, or people who try to make you think they're something they are not.)

So Blanco, following the light of a day from sunrise to the newest constellation awaiting our creative response in the evening, taps into these thoughts.  He shows us concrete objects like the shoes without which he could not have gone to school, traces the role of his parents' sacrifices in providing them, but gives all that in a fleeting glance aside from the whole flow of society.  We each see and understand things that are part of the river of society, and depend on light to let us intepret them.  I highly recommend this poem to you.  You can find it in Hector Tobar's LA Times piece.

cheers,
Laura

PS Photo from Creative Commons with thanks to photographer Till Credner.

Stopping by Woods in August

An online publication to which I subscribe recently had an excerpt from a book (Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth) by Andrew Wyeth in which he discussed the poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost.  Wyeth asked Frost if he went through a lot of revisions of this poem, and if it had been written in winter.  Frost answered, "I'd been writing a very complicated, long-drawn-out poem, almost a story type of poem, entitled 'Death of a Hired Man.'  I had finished at two o'clock in the morning. It was a hot August night, and I was exhausted.  I walked out on the porch of my house and looked at the mountain range.  It came to me in flash!  I wrote it on an envelope I had in my pocket, and I only changed one word.  It came out just like that."

I love to think about that sort of flash of clarity, where a great poem leaps from the universe into the mind of a poet, even without the stimulus of the same sort of scene to prompt it.  But it may be that the intense work Frost put in on his long narrative poem was a required part of the birth of the Stopping by Woods poem.  All that intensive effort may have primed the pump. 

Readers, writers, what has been your own experience with writing that appears in your mind more or less fully accomplished?  Is there any pattern to it that you can discern?