How is writing a long poem different from writing shorter poems?
Writing a long poem, for me, is more comforting than working on shorter poems. Something about knowing I have a large space to work in puts me in a good place emotionally. I mean, I love writing shorter poems, but they generally don’t take as long to write and if I don’t have anything else I’m working on, I’ll start to get real anxious. But lately my short poems are all part of a larger vision/conceptual framework, a book or chapbook, so even when I’m done with an individual poem I know I have a lot more to work on in terms of completing that particular manuscript. It makes me feel more like I’m working on sections of a long poem instead of isolated one night stands, as Spicer called them. The end of your collection is packed with prose poems. What do you like about the prose poem? Those poems were a real turning point in my writing. I could sense that I wouldn’t be writing too many more poems like the ones from the first section. Not because I didn’t like them. It was just that…I do
