"Freeing your inner tortoise"

"John Cleese says that the creative part of the mind is like a tortoise. It's a nervous little creature that needs an enclosure before it can be sure that it's safe to come out.

So, to create, we need to make our own tortoise enclosure, with boundaries of space and time. The dangerous thing is to be interrupted, because it can take a long time to get back into that creative state, and ideas won't come if we're rushing around all day."

Jane Sullivan,2014, "Freeing your inner tortoise", The Saturday Age (Life & Style), 11 January, p. 24. 

Notes on Ekphrasis by Alfred Corn

" ... The result is then not merely a verbal 'photocopy' of the original painting, sculpture, or photograph, but instead a grounded instance of seeing, shaped by forces outside the artwork. In such poems, description of the original work remains partial, but authors add to it aspects drawn from their own experience - the fact, reflections, and feelings that arise at the confluence of a work of visual art and the life of the poet."

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19939