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MIKE ROSE: I'll tell you, a very interesting thing happened with me and poetry. Poetry was what I started to cut my teeth on with writing. So when I was a young man, I would write these little poems, and they were pretty awful. You know, they were beery, sad romances, 20-somethings' laments for lost love. They were-- I look back on them now and I wince. But I kept at it, and I kept at it, and I kept at it, and I kept at it, and finally I think I got decent at it. I got-- and thank God I moved away from the world of the beery romance to the world of my forebears. And I began to write a lot about these Italian immigrants coming over, the hard life they led, but also the quirks, and the interests, and the pleasures that were part of that life as well. As I did all that, even going back to the early stuff that was not good at all, to the stuff that finally got moderately OK, I was teaching myself a huge amount about writing, and a huge amount about language. So poetry, for me, became my workshop, my artist's workshop, my woodworker's workshop, my laboratory-- whatever metaphor you want to use. It's where I really learned a lot about crafting a sentence, about honing an image, about the dramatic moment. Here's the odd thing that happened. When I began the early stages of what would become Lives on the Boundary, writing these little prose vignettes about where I grew up, and the classrooms I remember. As I began to do that, I wrote less and less poetry. And, eventually, I couldn't write a poem if you held a gun to my head. It stopped. It somehow completely stopped. And the only thing I can figure-- and I'm somebody who studied creativity, for God's sake, and it's still puzzles me. But the only thing I configure is that that desire, that energy, that passion that went into the writing of the poetry, drifted somehow, made its way into prose, and led to, then, a kind of writing that I hope has some of the features of the poem, the image, the metaphor, the compressed language, the desire to create a moment that somehow is resonant. I hope that what happened was is that those techniques and those linguistic desires made their way into the prose. Because it's the only way I can explain the fact that I haven't written a poem in 20 years. I have no desire to write a poem. And if you locked me up in a room right now and gave me 48 hours, I could not write one for you. I could, however, sit down and write some prose sketches pretty quickly and readily. And I think you would find in them some of those kinds of poetic techniques. So for me, anyway, poetry became not the way that I would express myself as an adult, but it sure became my workshop. It became the place where I learned how to do what I do today.