One of the things that seems to impel me is it never made any sense to me to separate the genres so much. Ideally, I would move towards incorporating poetry into narrative. I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t even move in and out of poetry. A lot of poets stick a lot of prose in their poems now. What holds the separation in place is, I think, money.
“I am trying to discover things that I am not already conscious of. Rather than deal with experiences from my past which are already familiar to me, the excitement of writing poetry for me is to explore places that I have not already found. Heidegger says that to write a poem is to make a voyage of discovery. In the same way, I am always interested in my future poems rather than the ones which I’ve already written. The old ones really don’t do anything for me.”
John Ashbery