Writing a poem is a more personal experience, I think, than writing prose. And perhaps reading a poem is a more personal experience than reading prose, though that's harder to say.

There is such a shelter in each other.

That's what Samuel Johnson said: "Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think particularly fine, strike it out."

In fact, lots of good poetry doesn't work , so I don't mind a bit of mystification or difficulty.

Poetry is a way of being alone without feeling alone. It allows you to experience another mind, I suppose. And it does that more fully than other art forms, I think. It doesn't simply describe an experience, or a feeling, or a moment: it evokes it through, say, rhythm or tone or diction or metaphor. It creates a mood. A poem communicates before it is understood; it's not a fully paraphrasable form, which distinguishes it from other forms of writing.

The whole point of writing poetry or fiction is that you get to agonize over whatever it is you want to say, and you finally say it, and you get it as perfect as you can make it. Then you're forced to babble freestyle.

With an age difference comes a great gap in cultural references, and so on. It's not all about race and gender. It interests me that, as you get older, your younger self becomes a stranger to you. A split occurs within yourself. But maybe we're all always strangers to ourselves.