I think the difference is that the poem you cite here IS susceptible to improvement in the "creative writing" workshop. You could make it better (a whole lot better) by the normal means. Houlihan is at a loss of how to "improve" the poem she is criticizing here, since she doesn't know what it's about in the first place and therefore thinks it merely a random selection of words in random order.

See my blog today for my own take on this "best words in the best order" critique.

The psychosis is induced by a trigger word: "Best."

RIP Charles Bronson.

The poet as a prose writer slips through loopholes to confront cool necessities.

It's disappointing, though, there are beat-up middle-of-the-road bad examples of prose on poetry. Let's turn away and forget them.

Keep them anonymous.

It's pointless to call out names or even cite examples, unless we're ready to meet our enthusiasms, tongue in the other's cheek (so to speak), and compose something at least as good as the poem under the scope.

And the poetry should stay under the scope to convey the origins of the prose writer's empathy. We can look at prosody, lexicon, lulls in syntax, semantic trademarks and such to support and attack a few priorities of more abstract data like theory, strategy and biography.

Frequently occurring words or phrases of more than four syllables would be routinely defined. Superlatives starved or, if needed, expressed exclusively by way of a Romance or Altaic language.

Elaborated analysis required.

I did a web search on "Joan Houlihan" to see what her own poetry was all about, and found her poem, "Joan Houlihan," on the Mainstream Poetry site. It's funny that Ms. Houlihan is so upset about strange poetry when her own work is fairly unusual!

Joan Houlihan

I made a little mother out of mimes,
old Styx tee shirts,
and a bit of middle-aged llama futures.
I once saw Gary Chandling on TV.
That's when the troubles were too pockmarked
to be resplendent,
awash in gas, but distant enough
to keeps me coughing
and rooting for all
the animals on the farm.
Matter is every dried family that sews for a living.
They're bound to disappear: power to my feelings.
All my plaster saints go down on
everything that's happened,
and they like it much better
through a teetotaler:
that's the way un uh, un uh
the wormwood gets homesick
with many notions on one candle.
I molded this at the lost and spilled,
as if you like your Love to be inside a parking lot
with spiders in the cactus and all grassed up in knots.
It's so YOU to become as a garnish is.
The Horrible Actions(tm)
Matter takes up while spackling the interns
we call tradition.
Knife, Fork, Many Mo and Jack,
set on the mantle to be singin' to the crack?
Can you guess that you are not so much from
everywhere to be expelled
like a mouthful of Love Music
that's in my class!
It's my brand of new coat
to enjoy these pleasant burning sensations, mother said,
because another horrible infestation
watches the car sink into an off-stage swamp.
It's rocks and tree explained the whips of potatoes.
and like Nixon's womanly arts,
thoughts from a sleepy person have some weight.
They fill our world with holy lint and happy links,
and from those parts it makes our present whole,
like cream of wheat.

When Batman went home at the end of a night spent fighting crime, he put on a suit and tie and became Bruce Wayne. When Clark Kent saw a news story getting too hot, a phone booth hid his change into Superman. When you're programming, all the variables you juggle around are doing similar tricks as they present one face to you and a totally different one to the machine.

Each Stack Frame represents a function. The bottom frame is always the main function, and the frames above it are the other functions that main calls. At any given time, the stack can show you the path your code has taken to get to where it is. The top frame represents the function the code is currently executing, and the frame below it is the function that called the current function, and the frame below that represents the function that called the function that called the current function, and so on all the way down to main, which is the starting point of any C program.

This back and forth is an important concept to understand in C programming, especially on the Mac's RISC architecture. Almost every variable you work with can be represented in 32 bits of memory: thirty-two 1s and 0s define the data that a simple variable can hold. There are exceptions, like on the new 64-bit G5s and in the 128-bit world of AltiVec

But variables get one benefit people do not

The most basic duality that exists with variables is how the programmer sees them in a totally different way than the computer does. When you're typing away in Project Builder, your variables are normal words smashed together, like software titles from the 80s. You deal with them on this level, moving them around and passing them back and forth.