The distinction I find most useful between prose and poetry is not about line breaks or meter — it's about the unit of attention. In prose, the sentence is the unit and paragraphs organize sentences into larger units. In poetry, the word is the unit, sometimes the syllable. Poetry asks you to slow down in a way that prose rarely requires.

This is why I recommend reading poetry aloud, even if you're reading alone. The ear catches things the eye skips. A line break heard is different from a line break seen. The physical act of speaking the words changes the relationship between reader and text.

I've been reading a poem a day for two years. Not studying — just reading once, slowly, and moving on. The accumulation is strange: I can't remember most of them clearly but I feel like I've spent two years in a certain quality of attention that I can now access more easily when I read prose. That might be imagination. It might not.