What I like about prose poems is that they seem to make people uncomfortable - people want to define them, justify them, attack them. Prose poems are natural fence-sitters.

When I have my students do erasures, I'm always amazed by the way their voice comes through, whether they're doing an erasure of a romance novel or an encyclopedia. Your sensibility will out.

Writing a poem is always a process of subtracting: you start with all of language available to you, and you choose a smaller field.

One of my favorite titles of an art piece is "Première Communion de Jeunes Filles Chlorotiques Par Un Temps De Neige" or "First Communion of Chlorotic Young Girls in Snowy Weather" by Alphonse Allais. It's essentially a joke of a title, since the accompanying image is a simple white square.

I'm interested in concrete poems - anything that complicates the line between the written and the visual.

I have a vague memory of seeing an image of a child in an iron lung and the phrase "sad little breathing machine" coming into my head. The more I thought about it, the more I felt that on certain days - the worse ones - we could all be described as sad little breathing machines.

I certainly believe you can write a narrative lyric or a lyrical narrative - why not a nyric or a larrative?