enjoyed this description of poet John Ashbery's method (by Larissa MacFarquhar)

"What he is trying to do (and here the metaphors get a little screwy, but these are the pictures that come to him) is jump-start a poem by lowering a bucket down into what feels like a kind of underground stream flowing through his mind—a stream of continuously flowing poetry, or perhaps poetic stuff would be a better way to put it. Whatever the bucket brings up will be his poem... Since he is always dipping the bucket into the same stream his poems will resemble one another, but because the stream varies according to climatic conditions—what’s on his mind, the weather, interruptions—they will also be different."