Learning by Writing . . . and Revising . . .

      On X (Twitter) today I found the following quote posted by poet Ilya Kaminsky -- quoting recently deceased poet Fanny Howe (1940-2025).  Howe's poetic statement, quoted below, is one that applies (for me, at least) to both poetry and mathematics:

One way to understand your own condition is to write something and spend a long time revising it.

In revising you teach yourself.  You find your own information buried in your body.  It is still alive until you are not.

Here, at PoetryFoundation.com, are more than twenty of Howe's poems; I offer one of these below:

          Everything          by Fanny Howe (appeared in Poetry, December 2011)

               Infinite nesting
               pushes all matter
               towards emptiness:
               child-nodes,
               tree-droppings
               with a root element of null.
               None is always included
               in every cluster
               of children.

               Nothing in nothing
               prepares us.

               Yet a fresh light was shed
               on immortality
               for me climbing the stairs
               firm foot first.

               Everything was in the banister:
               crows on branches, crickets,
               architects, handsaws and democrats.
               Red moon at 3 am.