We're the only ones who insist on this artificial division. No one else does. In fact, many of the great writers in other cultures, like Pablo Neruda, wrote in several forms. People don't know how to talk about writers, so they want to pigeonhole them, put them in a category. MacShane believes that Americans also have problems accepting that a writer can be both a poet and a fiction writer because of the way our system is structured.
Poetry is in the universities, sheltered from the world.
We have access to it through readings, not bookstores. Fiction, on the other hand, is out in the marketplace distributed by publishers and sold in bookstores. The marketing people label writers either poets or novelists, something convenient they can organize according to the store racks. The reasons that a poet may turn to fiction vary. For some, it is the desire for a wider audience and more recognition, for others a need to balance an intensely personal art with a more public one.