The award-winning author of many volumes of poetry, Jonathan Holden is better known for his verse than his essays. But he thinks the two genres are related to each other, and that this relationship is illustrated by the process he went through in writing his essay "Imaginary Fathers."

"Confessional poetry and personal memoir are codependent," Holden said. The relationship between his essay and his poems lies in their use of language: his essay "digresses," he said, while his poems "condense" language.

"This essay, like all of my personal essays, recapitulates subject matter that I have written about in poems," he said. "The personal essay seems to me to be the genre most similar to lyric poetry when the poetry is personal, confessional-but it differs from poetry in that, whereas the conventions of poetry encourage condensation, the conventions of prose encourage digression.

As a result, he concluded, "Prose may be superior to poetry, because of the permission prose gives the writer to digress and supply context that, in a lyric poem, would attenuate its intensity."

In his essay Holden explores growing up with a scientist-father who did not pay him as much attention as he wanted. Holden said the digression encouraged by the essay-form permitted him to make several discoveries during the writing process, discoveries he had not made in writing poems about his father.

"The discovery I made when writing it was that, in my 'strategic' approach to raising my son, I was putting into practice a 'scientific' approach to 'love' that my father, however inadvertently, had taught me," Holden said. "I discovered that, by loving my son better than my father had loved me, I could be an ideal version of my own father-could enjoy his love retroactively while fathering a son better than myself."

In permitting himself the luxury of the digression that comes with writing prose, Holden also encountered another problem writers sometimes face: the desire to wreak vengeance.

"It was a difficult essay to write, because its subject was a painful one. I had to try to resist the impulse to exact revenge on a scientist whose preoccupation with himself and his career came before his duties as a father."