Quoting Stephen Dobyns quoting Rainer Maria Rilke, "Ideally, [an artist] should be unconscious of his insights . . . all his progress should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition."
  

Yet not all poets see these little gifts as beneficent. Some go on to give them spiritual bodies with devilish characters, so throughout poetry we find the duende or dybbuk or recalcitrant muse disquieting the minds of poets. These particular spirits are less like radio signals, and more like waves of dyspepsia.
  

Lorca once wrote, "The duende does not come at all unless he sees that death is possible." Edward Hirsch pivots from that to "Duende, then, means something like artistic inspiration in the presence of death." Or perhaps one could say sometimes these tricksters spring from the dichotomy between messiah and predestination.
  

Hirsch again, this time on Rilke: "There are in truth any number of such uncanny moments in Rilke's poems when the mind seems to give way before an incomprehensible mystery and, out of a long foreground, the lines on the poem seem to be forming themselves, as if dictated by a force from without that is also somehow a voice within."
  

Lorca says, "It is a struggle, not a thought." But I have no fight with it, and secretly hope these tricksters do not exist for me. I have never been so afflicted. Knock on wood for me. Instead of fighting, I usually try to achieve a reverent clearing of my mind. "Don't think," I caution myself . . . then I simply wait to see what comes on in. So far it has worked pretty well, including the middle of this paragraph. At the moment I'm on a jet heading for Dallas. By the way, writing always seems to flow well for me at thirty-thousand feet.
  

Time for Emerson to weigh in. "For poetry was all written before time was," the greatest essayist points out. And, " . . . but the poet knows well that it is not his; that it is as strange and beautiful to him as to you." It would lead one to believe -- indeed all the above leads one to believe -- that there's a celestial reservoir, something like a personal cistern, floating above the heads of the elected ones.
  

I can see the choice of the word cistern has minimized the topic. Perhaps I'm writing my own heresy when I minimize, for I have always been a believer and have frequently stated in the past that one does not select poetry, poetry selects you. I do strongly believe that one's childhood grants the evidence. Elisha Porat once put it, "Artists are born with a different framework for their soul . . . perhaps some flaw . . . as alluring beauty sometimes comes from differing from the norm."
  

Whenever I tend toward the metaphysical, I self-correct, then cast an aspersion or two on the topic. I drag myself back from the mystical towers of my most cherished fantasy. Yet how do it know? Just where do these seminal nuggets come from?
  

All of these quoted poets have experienced the motion beyond intuition, the achievement of the sense that allows one to poetically intuit, and all have felt the actual words and phrases come rolling in so fluidly.