The poem you are writing

We have gone back to thinking of poetry as something more than a bundle of techniques. Which is to say that we have gone back to emphasizing that there is something more to poetry than accomplishment…The literary career is sometimes a hideous notion. It brings out the worst in critics and reviewers. It develops cliques and antagonistic loyalties when what a poet most needs is to learn from that which most opposes him or her, most disturbs, most confronts…Good poems transcend these problems, and we find them. More to the point, the act of writing transcends everything for those of us who need to write. They can take away from you everything but this: the poems you have written, the poems you are writing.

—Marvin Bell, “The Impure Every Time”