Poetry is very playful with language. I think all poetry, at its heart, is playful. It's doing unusual and playful things with the language, stirring it up. And prose is not doing that. Primarily it's not attempting to do that.

Poetry doesn't function by saying things straightforwardly because the language is too imprecise, too limited often, to address the underlying subject of most poems.

I don't write or think too much about the word "salvation." I might; I probably should. We are such needy creatures, needing to be saved, to feel we are saved or might be, however we define ourselves, however we define that word.

Ordering is very important with essays, even if a reader doesn't read the essays or the poems in order through the book...

It sounds old-fashioned to say, but we have some kind of purpose for being here, not poets or writers, but all of us humans.

If I'm excited by something bodily, and curious about it, I generally want to delve into it and explore it with poetry. That's the way I ordinarily watch the world around me.

I'd rather call prose poems something else, for clarity - something like "poetic prose," prose that contains a quality of poetry, but not poems.