be willing to give it up...

It is a dangerous thing to want to be a writer and to have to press so hard that in poem after poem, in page after page, you are asserting something, you are pressing to establish something. Instead you have to go venturing along, to be willing to give it up, to give up all kinds of assertions in favor of some inner thing I can't quite identify here. It is like a development, a pre-development of what you started with.

         - William Stafford, from an interview,
                Crazy Horse, 7 (1971)