I've spent much of my life being attuned to watching for an image or a phrase that can trigger what might be a poem - could become a poem.

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.

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.

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

In I Praise My Destroyer, Diane Ackerman demonstrates once again her love for the specific language that rises from the juncture of self and the natural world, and her skillful use of that language. Whether she turns her attention to the act of eating an apricot 'the color of shame and dawn,' or to 'the omnipotence of light,' or to grief when 'All the greens of summer have blown apart,' her linking of unique images, her energetic wit and whimsy, her compassionate investment in life, always bring new pleasures and perceptions to the reader.

Often when I write poetry I don't quite know what I'm saying myself. I mean, I can't restate the poem. The meaning of the poem is the poem.

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