It's something you apprehend in real time, but all of its history and all of its future lives there in the moment of apprehension. Whereas music is linear, you have to live in it and pass through it in time. I got interested in this notion because what it doesn't take into account is the accumulation of images, even in music, the memory of the other moments. But that wasn't what you asked me. I guess I've always felt that novelists have more freedom than poets to explore the lives of others.
People expect poets to write about themselves and their history.
Even when it's not about you, they'll read your poem as if it is. Novelists are allowed to make things up and take things anywhere they want. I love that freedom. In my writing there's lots about boundaries and different skins and different worlds. It may be that I feel the self is enclosing, and I like the idea that you can pass out of it, and get into other places, other imaginations, other skins.