list making

Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind, as it is related of Lord Chatham that he was accustomed to read in Bailey's Dictionary when he was preparing to speak in Parliament.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Poet"

poetic ear

Poetry, from a technical point of view, may be defined as “the harmonic word”—with the greatest possible emphasis on the term “harmonic,” in the sense of a conjunction, cohesion, correlation, opposition of one idea to another, of one emotion to another. Once I spoke of a “poetic ear”; I meant the ear that can discern such things as these.

—George Seferis, On the Greek Style (Little Brown, 1966) translation by Rex Warner

continuing on

Poetry is about continuing poetry.

—Joanne Kyger, ABOUT NOW: Collected Poems (National Poetry Foundation, 1997, p. 631)