Do You Want to Make Something Out of It? - Zen meditation and the artistic impulse

One of many interesting articles at this site:

Allen Ginsberg begins his essay entitled Meditation and Poetics with this paragraph, “It’s an old tradition in the West among great poets that poetry is rarely thought of as ‘just poetry.’ Real poetry practitioners are practitioners of mind awareness, or practitioners of reality, expressing their fascination with the phenomenal universe and trying to penetrate to the heart of it. Poetics isn’t mere picturesque dilettantism or egotistical expressionism for craven motives grasping for sensation and flattery. Classical poetry is a “process” or experiment- a probe into the nature of reality and the nature of the mind.” And the poet Philip Whalen makes the same point in a poem when he say something like “I don’t want to be another pretty poety-boo; I want to be a world.”