Poetry as Rock Formation
In an interview at the Huffington Post, poet James Kimbrell compared the act of writing poetry to the slow formation of stalactites out of hollow straws of rock over thousands of years:
But what creates that shape and form organically is repetition—of dropping water, of water through a particular porous passage in the rocks. I think if you have a force, a voice, a statement, on the one hand, that may seem not terribly formally coherent—if it goes through a passage over time, form starts to work its own magic. It doesn’t end up being forced; it ends up being something that comes out of the repetition of a certain action over a period of time. I think the poems happen that way.