Here's a review/essay in the New York Times Book Review that ought to reconfirm for you what we've often said about poems: they are records of decisions made by the writer, of options chosen. (And, if you read them carefully and creatively enough, they are records of options considered but rejected, that remain in the poem as ghost choices.)
It bears thinking about again and again. How DO you write that next line?
I think this reviewer puts a little too much faith in the "whatever" of the next line, as if writing were ever that arbitrary. Just as I think too much contemporary poetry, or contemporary poems too often, resort to the non-segued line, the anti-logical or constructivist follow-on line.
Yes, the writer is in charge (more or less, depending on things like skill and experience and honesty) of the decision-making aspect of a poem during composition. But we've argued frequently in Wednesdays@One that poems eventually "fall into place" or move where they "must" as we compound them with images and ideas. As the writer of our poems, we always have options, to make them make sense, to make them make nonsense, to make them make a hybrid of the two. When we say, though, that a poem leads us to its making, what we mean is that the poem is a product of our own subconscious thinking as well as our conscious and conscientious intent. It is never a "thing in itself," but rather a record of us, however surprised we may be to see what we have written.
So, how DO you get down that next line? Partly, you do it by listening to yourself, or reading back over yourself, what you've just said or written. You guide yourself into and out of yourself. In this sense the poem you're writing writes itself. Right? Right!
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