This essay explores the writing of "Woodblock Sonnets," a poem composed of fifty-six sonnet stanzas. The essay represents a sustained enquiry into this poem's development, from its first inchoate sources and urges, to realization through shape, structure, and artifice. The development of the poem is tracked in five central writing concerns: content, language, form, time, and universality. In each concern, "Woodblock Sonnets" is observed to evolve, over the course of the writing, from more latent and intuitive versions into more manifest and deliberated ones. The poem emerges as creation of inspiration and labor, as both a spontaneously occurring phenomenon and a crafted object. In order to explore the reason of poetry, the accounts of this evolving search for significances are extended into consideration of the advantages which specific poetic practices - image, ekphrasis, rhyme, the sonnet form, and so on - provide a poem. "Woodblock Sonnets" possesses a cross-cultural nature, and the essay explores the poem's unusual fusing of Eastern and Western idioms and sensibilities, as well. "Woodblock Sonnets," the conclusion suggests, takes up the intrinsic interconnectedness of lives - natural and human, past and present, and especially our own lives and those of others, in dimensions that range from the personal to the cultural. The poem demonstrates a primary interest in revealing and interpreting relationships. Poetry, in general, is conceived as an opportunity for fusing the figurative and literal.