Sometimes, as in an athletic event where everything clicks, inexplicable things do happen. Learning and practicing an art or a skill has always been part of the success of the goal.

For me, prose is never a poem. Because with prose there are so very few tools to create the music. And one of the most important tools missing is the ability to create silences, as you can in poetry by how you fashion the lines and breaks within the lines and stanzas.

As far as I can tell, writing the essays didn't change the way I wrote poetry. Although the essays contain scattered passages that might be called lyrical, they often contain closed statements of what is only suggested in the poetry.

I'm all in favor of poets telling about the process as much as they can. And many do.

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

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.

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.