I certainly agree with you, John. It may be possible--some folks say they can, and do, do it--but I can't make a poem by thinking the way David says he thinks (and it's conceivable that both claims are right for us, individually; what do any of us really know about other minds?)
I need a certain amount of "given" material, but then I have to make a picture out of it. If I can't visualise it, I can't write it.
Interestingly, I don't often consciously use metaphors. I posted a poem here a bit ago called "8 Lines", which is actually about a piece of music of that name. Now apart from the (hardly brilliant) thought that the poem itself ought to have 8 lines, I had no idea how to render it. Anyway, shuffling through my mental library of images, I remembered a painting of (of all places) my beloved Southwold, in Suffolk. It's an expansive canvas, half sky, half sand, but with all the distant detail concentrated into a fine line in the middle, which must have been painted with a one-haired brush.
Without thinking about it too much, I wrote:
His is a country which will not be high.
Slight scenery repeats: a single line...
Aha! some would say. You were thinking in metaphors.
Well, no. I was thinking of a picture that gave me the same hypnotic sense as the music, and which demanded the same degree of attention to small details. But when I turned that into words it became a music/landscape metaphor. The connection between the image and the music is an entirely personal, private one, but the only way I could express that publicly was by using a linguistic convention.
Not that I analyze these things much--where poems come from--except when they don't seem to be coming!
Oh, well. Back to the drawing, painting, writing board!
Philip
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