I was a guest blogger at the Journal of Cultural Conversation. The piece was called the Art of Listening, an essay on poetry and a double book review.

I used to think prose poetry was a scam, the literary equivalent of madly dripping or wildly flinging paint onto a canvas as art. Prose poetry, it seemed to me, was at best the product of the creative intellectual exercises of people way smarter than me (way smarter than I? Whatever.)

People too smart for their and my own good. For me, it was nothing like the Big Boys of poetry from school which I loved, the more formal old-school stuff that was not only beautiful but carefully structured and metered, and made perfect sense to me – even if at times some of it required a patient professor’s handheld tour throughout the more difficult nuances of the texts.

Prose poetry, however, professors’ help or not, was almost always an esoteric wasteland of scrupulously excavated fossil-words mixed with ancient allusions and slapped down on the page in a silly