I often begin writing a poem with a collection of odd notations that have come out of conversations, dreams, overheard remarks on the street…. Very often I throw out these beginning notes once I’ve finished the poem; but again they are devices which enable me to get at something I don’t already know. I can’t tell you why a certain overheard remark seems significant and another one doesn’t except that when I’m in a state of attentiveness, waiting to write a poem, I can tell intuitively what’s going to help me write it and what isn’t.

--John Ashbery