It's not the quiet that puts me off, it's the sedated quality of so much mainstream work; I'm guessing it's the effect of too much revision.

Maybe so. I've often thought the same thing. I'm uneasy when a poem works the first time. Shouldn't I revise it? Isn't that what the real poets do? Sometimes a correction will occur to me as I look something over, but I rarely subject a poem to endless rewriting. I'd rather just start anew. I guess revision could work in the opposite direction--toward greater roughness--but it tends toward the elimination of "mistakes" that might be productive.

***

Profound thought of the day:

My hands know that the words "greatest" can be typed using only the left hand. Yet my mind does not know this. In fact, my hands know where all the letters of the alphabet are on the keyboard. But "I" do not know this. If I want to know, I consult my hands. They can tell me.