I keep poem first drafts in one ever-expanding Word document, usually with no titles or line breaks. Stream of poem. I allow myself to write there without any formal consciousness. When I go back and pillage it for material, I usually end up putting the line and stanza breaks in different places, and I add titles in at the very end. This is how I have written 9 out of 10 poems (9 out of 10 dentists) in the last two years.

Today I was trying to write something for a friend’s birthday, and the act of putting “For X” on a line by itself stopped the flow of that document. I have forgotten how to write to order, or I’m not as good at it as I used to be.