And in your own writing?

It’s impossible to qualify my writing in this way. Along with my love of exploring the natural world — in the hills and gulleys near my childhood home — writing became the most important thing to me. Although I had no mentors, family members or particular teachers who inspired me to write, it was all I wanted to do; all I thought about when I wasn’t doing it. My parents were not involved with the arts in any way. Nor were they tuned into what I was doing. So they never thought of helping me as they might have were I to have shown high mathematical or scientific propensities. In short, they thought it a good hobby.

I never wanted to lose the magic I’d always associated with writing, with creating and mastering a kind of world in which anything and everything could happen.

I started writing before I knew how to write, making believe I was actually copying words that were spewed from the old Philco radio in my parents’ family room. I don’t know why it seemed important to me at the time. My first year in school learning to write letters was magical for me. Drawing those large-scaled lower and upper case versions of all twenty-six letters with a jumbo red pencil, while holding it the well-instructed way, was for me the creation of an entirely new universe through which I could create any world I wanted. I had even won a few contests for poetry. I also loved telling a story. One of my first was called “My Lonely Home is Near,” after which I wrote about anything: jungle adventures, space exploration, westerns, mysteries, and detective stories. When I was eight, someone handed down to me a pretty old Royal typewriter with a black and red ribbon. I knew then what I wanted to be.

I never wanted to lose the magic I’d always associated with writing, with creating and mastering a kind of world in which anything and everything could happen. If my poetry can in some small way continue to point in that direction, it will have been enough.

You publish short fiction, and from time to time, prose work of different genres. What is your definition of a prose poem?

Baudelaire wrote his “poetic prose” in Paris Spleen (Le Spleen de Paris) in the mid-1800’s out of a need to express through what — at that time — was too rigid a verse form. Plus, he needed a “vehicle” that rendered him access to “untouchable subjects” without being inhibited by the prevalent meter or rhyming patterns. Those subjects were shunned by most French contemporaries. Baudelaire saw a different way to open the door: he found that he could pull it to observe what was behind it or push it and enter into what was there.