This is the last line from the poem “Vocation” by one of my favorite poets, William Stafford. He was an advocate of the process of discovery. In Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, he writes, “A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.” He wrote poetry every morning and described it as a “fishing expedition” and as “a process that leads so wildly and originally into new territory.”
William Stafford, The Darkness Around Us Is Deep: Selected Poems (New Work: Harper Perennial, a Division of Harper Collins Publishers, 1993), 73.