This book began to take shape last April when I was sitting in an outdoor café in Madrid watching pigeons hop up on the tables and demand potato chips or anything else they could get. It occurred to me then that our poems are a bit like that. They are strange creatures with wings who like to take off on their own and don't care much what their poets want or hope for. When we first start to write poems, we're amazed these creatures exist at all and don't ask questions. Later on, though, we ask ourselves what poems are, what they do, and why and how they do it. Sometimes, we even ask how they could do it better. The short essays in this book are attempts to answer questions like these, and to give other writers some ideas they can use-or argue with-in their own attempts to understand what they're doing. CONTENTS: * Poetry and Pigeons * Why Poetry? * How to Write a Love Poem * Myths of the Poetry Biz * Writing About What's No Longer Here * Poetry and the Image * Translation and the Poetic * Prose Poems * The Impulse to Publish * Saving Poetry? * Defending Love & Nature * Ten Things I Learned as a Guest Editor * On the Irrational * Against Prompts * Born Too Late? * What Is a Poem?