Prose we can paraphrase; our experiences we can repeat; our knowledge we can add to by little increments; our educations we can sort of rototill. We go through routines in education all the time. But sometimes we hunger to do something once-for-all, in immediate quality — we want art. And we want not discursive words, but poetry. We'll stop and make experience stand and deliver, as the old highwaymen used to say.
It is this impulse to change the quality of experience that I recognize as central to creation. Something did not exist-you make it. You are utterly responsible: out of all that could be done, you choose one thing. What that one thing is, nothing else can tell you — you come at it over unmarked snow. This experience of freedom becomes your addiction: you rarify and rarify it. The thing you make is nothing but itself; between you and it there is an inviolable congeniality; but to others what you make may appear some kind of irresponsible affront. You are not persuading someone in politics; you are not selling some product; you are not winning friends; you are not writing in order to get into print in any magazine. What, then, are you doing? You and your materials are responsive to each other to the exclusion of all else."
—William Stafford, Crossing Unmarked Snow