I have thought for many years that the audience any creative writer imagines has a great effect on what gets written.

A poetic list is a talent in itself. You can write a list of things, and it can be boring.

I like poetry because poetry - even in free verse - is formal, and it has to be very concise and packed and rich, and I like the feeling of having to do that, having to make the language tight and still free, as if the deepest freedom is created by the restrictions.

I'm primarily a poet, so I'd have to say in my case I'd investigate the mystery in poetry in a different way than prose might investigate it, in a way that includes the power of the music of language and maybe more imaginatively in poetry, but I don't really know about better or worse. I guess it depends on the writer.

In poetry I can let the language go, allow an image that seems out of place to enter and see what happens, always listening to the music that's being created, just like the world around us, never predictable, always shifting and intertwining, reflecting and echoing itself.

To my mind, most prose poems are more prose than poetry. They don't possess most of the qualities of a poem.

One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language.