My coldness toward the prose poem, and narrative poetry in general, stemmed from the desire to be legitimate. I was not the first person to believe in the superiority of lyric poems; the kind that seemed to flutter above their contexts, the kind that were described as music. Unfortunately, my own drafts—the poems that became Reveille—had a strong aboutness to them. I felt the urge to chronicle and convey. Although I ultimately decided to trust that urge, I hoped, at first, to conceal it through treacherous line breaks and whirling syntax; it seemed the only way my stories could register as art.