[F]or reasons I’ll never know, making art is how some of us make sense of the world for ourselves; it’s absolutely necessary, then, a means of survival, which makes it necessary. A poem may not be how I stave off physical hunger, but if it’s how I temporarily arrive at something like clarity and stability—emotionally, psychologically, intellectually—then yes, I need it. Art is one of many ways to get there but for the artist it’s a chief way, and sometimes the only way. To this extent, there’s truth to the idea of art-making as a vocation, a natural calling. […]

[W]hen I finally did start writing again, […] to write poems felt like finding the native language of my interior self, and discovering that I’d always known this language—I had only to speak it: so this is my name; and this here, who I am.

Carl Phillips, My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing