https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/19/top-10-random-encounters-in-literature

Landmark meetings in Dickens and Joyce, and textual collisions in surrealism and poetry, remind us how central surprise is to the best writing

Coleridge once described poetry as “wild ducks shaping their rapid flight in forms always regular”. That’s one way of looking at literature, everything unusual being absorbed into the larger flight pattern of a given work. But another perspective might focus less on the regular forms than on the wild ducks. This way of looking at literature places the onus on the random encounter – the moment when one duck peels off.

Some of the ducks in my poetry book go back around a decade. I can barely remember the person I was 10 years ago, except for the fact we share a lot of the same clothes. Czesław Miłosz’s poem Encounter makes me feel better about this. Here, the speaker recalls an old memory as though watching himself in a film adaptation of his life: “Where are they, where are they going.”