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I love this. It makes so much sense. I often will try to rescue or coax along a poem by imposing the order of a closed form upon it. Sort of like "if you won't behave in free verse, I'll turn you into a sestina!" Sometimes there's no going back. Sometimes I end up discarding the structure eventually. But I never considered the possibility that some of my essays might actually be dreaming of being a poem one day. That's really exciting. Thanks so much for the inspiration.

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isn't a great way to think about it? and I think sometimes--and I think this is part of what happened with Sean's work--that those things really end up existing in parallel. there are poems in my most recent book of poetry that have a kind of prose cousin in the nonfiction book I'm working on now--I can just do different things, even with the same information/images/etc, in the different genres.

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“a prose cousin” I love that phrase! When the prose cousin and the poetry cousin meet at Thanksgiving, what would they talk about? Does one like cake while the other prefers pie?

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