To be a poet you have to experiment.

I have poetic failures all the time. Many failed poems. I try not to publish those, though some have slipped into each book, since I can't always tell they're failures until later... or I don't want to admit that they are.

If you were going to make sculptures of them, the swivel poems would be disparate objects all attached with hinges and the prose poems would be small sheep wrapped in extra wool.

I don't see much difference between prose poems and flash fiction (I've often taught the latter as the former), but then I also don't see that much difference between art and poetry.

Teaching is a great way to keep learning.

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.

I thought that perhaps if the sky was truly free of clouds and any other distractions (birds, kites, skywriting), we could see if there was something else out there. I wasn't really raised in any religion (in England I attended an Anglican school and went to a Methodist church, but I left that all behind at the age of eight when we moved to the U.S.), but like most people, I sometimes wonder if there's anything or anyone out there.