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

I do love the prose poem because it's such a perverse and provocative little box - always asking to be questioned, never giving a straight or definitive answer.

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

Poems tend to have instructions for how to read them embedded in their language.

I think of poetry as a very inclusive term. Still, it's interesting that people want to make the distinction. I love the magazine Double Room for that reason (contributors have to write about their ideas on the prose poem/flash fiction).

It's really thrilling to work with an illustrator - your vision expands with the addition of someone else's artwork/artistic vision.

I don't think that you can say by any stretch of the imagination that all Wisconsin or Brooklyn-based poets write in a particular way. Similar sensibilities can spring up next to each other in the flower bed, or across oceans.