So this last month I have been spying on poets in a poetry classes, and I am blown away.  To be honest I had always thought the difference between fiction writers and poets to be pretty marginal; maybe a shorter attention span, maybe a little bit more emotional than the average bear, or maybe just stronger affinity towards the avant garde.  I mean all writers I know dabble in poetry no matter what their preferred genre is but prose writers tend to write poetry in notebooks and never show anyone.  We say things like “I don’t really get poetry but I like it,” or “I can’t tell whether it’s good or not,” but we all have written poetry for fun at one point or another.  So what is it that makes one writer a poet and one a prose writer? Read more »