In poetry many things are going on at the same time and these layers of time and density of language make the poem uniquely poetic

Donald Hall

Unique – singular and personal. Poetic – to create, to make.

We’re all engaged in the business of creation, awake or asleep. Dr Lara Boyd assured her Ted X audience that the human brain never ceases to be creative. The brain learns something, and in simultaneous response is excited to learn more.

Layer builds upon layer. Many things are going on. Rich and fertile wonder lies in every living brain. It doesn’t need turning on, though it helps sometimes to turn external electronic voices off.

Time to meditate – but I procrastinate and it may be hours before the eventual sitting. Then, ‘small stones’ touched, I want to linger, and resist rising again. Why then do I hesitate so often? Why so much external noise? My most creative, loving aliveness is ever best renewed in contemplative, poetic, silence.

In silence each may discern the poetry of unique existence. Neck muscles click, click, click their way towards quiet observation and relaxation. Souls reach to mixed metaphor, listening for the touch of many-layered regeneration, up down, ground up. Herein lies the poetic. Here contemplative calm. In our world of joys and insoluble vicissitudes, the unique and the poetic offer necessary balm. Roots have their needed share of rain.

…. soon so many small stones, buried for a thousand years,
will feel themselves being touched.

Mary Oliver
from Lingering in Happiness in the volume Why I Wake Early
and in New and Selected Poems, Vol 2, page 95