My poetry appears to me at once more personal and more universal than my fiction. In my poems I speak mostly in my own persona or in a voice that's a public form of it, except for occasional poems in another character. Some poems come out of my own experiences and some issue from the energy of other people's experiences coming through me, but they are fused in the layers of my mind to a speaking voice.
Fiction is as old a habit of our species as poetry.
It goes back to telling a tale, the first perceptions of pattern, and fiction is still about pattern in human life. I've tried to figure out, coming into postmodern poetry and fiction, exactly why people have carried out these activities, what they were supposed to do, why I engage in them and why others should pay attention to what I produce. Poetry is an art of time, as music is. Rhythms are measured against time, they are measures of time. A poem goes forward a beat at a time, the way dance does, step by step, phrase by phrase.