One the many paragraphs in Between the World and Me which struck me was this one on poetry:

I was learning the craft of poetry, which really was an intensive version of what my mother had taught me all those years ago--the craft of writing as the art of thinking.  Poetry aims for an economy of truth--loose and useless words must be discarded, and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts.  Poetry was not simply the transcription of notions--beautiful writing rarely is.  I wanted to learn to write, which was ultimately, still, as my mother had taught me, a confrontation with my own innocence, my own rationalizations.  Poetry was the processing of my thoughts until the slag of justification fell away and I was left with the cold steel truths of life.