“But at the heart of that sentence––only a poet would write a sentence like that––lies something else, too, something I find morbidly fascinating. Therein lies a judgment about what other writers don’t do, and what poets do exceptionally well. First of all, poets write with line breaks, i.e., they literally break the line––they rupture the integrity of the sentence and paragraph. Writing with lineation is what we have deemed the unnatural, lyric, and circular form of writing (rather than prose, which is supposedly faithful to linearity and logic and the delivery of information). A poet can and will do unnatural things to language, which is to beautify it, estrange it, strip it bare, or bend it into deformity. Poets defamiliarize language. Poets change language.”