Poet versus Novelist

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/24/my-novel-finally/

“With my fiction I focused on chapters and overall conceptions, while in poetry I crawled along in the trenches of each sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance. Each finished poem felt realized, arrived at directly by way of an inner struggle between whatever emotion had inspired it and the nuanced thought needed to both express and propel its forward movement.

Was I on some unrealized level granting permission to the poet that the novelist was being denied? In any case, The New Yorker magazine, the place I most wanted my fiction published, started taking my poems when I was 28. When one, “Like Wings,” generated a great flurry of letters (including marriage proposals and requests for advice, equaling a record at the magazine, ….”