why do we choose what we choose?

C. Dale Young asks "What makes us choose what we choose when we write?"

I have little photographs, videos of incidents that flash through my head all the time- as if there is a constant random generator pulling file titles from the past 58 years. They pop up and I usually let them fly by with a nod, but other times they take me into a fugue of anger or regret, nostalgia or grief, then replay replay replay- the same way I listen to one favorite song on a CD thirty or forty times in a row driving to work.

Then a poem comes- or goes, depending on where I am and how soon I can get the gist written down.