I’ve been reading Australian literary magazine, Overland. It offered a prize for new poets—the Overland Magazine Judith Wright Prize for New and Emerging Poets, sponsored by the Malcolm Robertson Foundation. Overland presents this good advice by Judith Wright, in apparently her last published poem.

To younger poets

A light comes off the Object, called Relation.
It connects the maker with what is to be made,
and illuminates both. That is all you have to do,
    to see it.
But remember, the poem, to be a poem,
isn’t in the end a product of you.
You are the prism the beam strikes,
but it isn’t you.

Poets who keep on saying ‘I’ and ‘me’
are drunk
     on Ego.
Simply stay attentive
to the source of the light, and always
keep the prism clean.
—Judith Wright, Overland, autumn 1999, p.4.