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In a message dated 12/8/00 7:18:09 PM Eastern Standard Time, [log in to unmask] writes: << For me, creative activity (as opposed to the writing I do in my professional life) is more *listening* to something faint and subtle than wilfully generating product, and when I can't hear anything I *really* can't hear anything, and I know it. And to "make something up" to fill in the silence seems an insult to the creative endeavour, which for me is definitely about "telling the truth" at a level that runs below the surface frazzle of the conscious mind. I can't always do it, but I know when I have and when I haven't, and work I produce that doesn't tell the truth at this level always ends up being discarded. Not to mention filling me with self-loathing >> I'm not certain one shouldn't suspect (mistrust) the poems one "hears inside" oneself as much as the poems one "invents willfully." I do endorse the discarding. I get the sense sometimes that poems are being published without discernment, willy-nilly, throw it up against the wall (of cyberspace or print media) and see if it sticks. Writer's block may be a bad thing...but writer's reticence isn't. Finnegan