[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

I still remember when my 10th grade English teacher said, "The purpose of the novel is to comment on society."

I thought then and still do that that was a pretty sad definition of a novel, and a pretty sad impetus for writing one too. Yeah, it explains Steinbeck, but authors have more to them than that, even Steinbeck, and I'm much more of Virginia Woolfe's line of thinking, specifically that a writer writes because they have to write.

The Nemerov poem, while prettily written, also misses a lot of observational habits about sleet, snow, slush, graupel, freezing rain and the sorts of things that the Eskimos probably have words for but English doesn't, except in skier slang, such as freezing crud, the sort of sodden masses of globbed-together malformed snowflakes which hit your jacket with a splat and then freeze there. It's something that's unpleasant to be caught in, but good to cement a base coat of snow for a slope, unlike the fine white powder snow that can be blown away after it's fallen if the wind is strong enough.

There certainly are novelists who don't know the first thing about poetry but the same can also be said of some poets. But I also know novelists who've dropped submerged blank verse sonnets into their novels as easter eggs, or who've put whole passages of the narrative in verse because it simply fit. I've done the same myself.

[Janet Kenny]

A nice little quote from Clive James "North Face of Soho".
In his youth he had been talent-spotted by the Times Literary Supplement to review poetry:

"Though the contributor woould see his name on a cheque, he would not see it in print: the TSL still had its policy of anonymity in those days. The news however would soon get around if you could review a whole batch of new poetry books in a thousand words and make the piece more readable than most of the poetry. That part of the challenge wasn't hard: then as now, most of the poets were writing verse only because they lacked the sense of structure to write prose."

[Rose Kelleher]

Well, short stories are prose, and they're not that structurally scary, but novels, yikes. Whenever I've tried to write one it's come out as a bunch of short stories held together with chewing gum and string. Not good.

[Henry Quince]

Fiction and poetry aren't opposing terms -- prose and poetry are. Just because poetry gets shelved by libraries in non-fiction doesn't mean much. Poetry can be fiction just as prose can be non-fiction.

The inherent semantic problem is the conflation of "poetry" with "descriptive and/or evocative." What I'm arguing for is a restriction of the prime definition of poetry -- we should understand poetry to first mean something written in lines and strophes, just as we understand prose to first mean something written in sentences and paragraphs. Then we can talk about elements of descriptive and analytical writing in both modes.

The main semantic problem is that "poetry" may refer a) to a type of form and layout, and b) to an effect (of which there can be only subjective definitions).

I don't think restricting the term to a), as the above quote seems to be urging, is remotely possible at this point, or at all useful. No longer could we look at a mess of chopped prose with zero detectable "poetic" content (in the "effect" or value judgment sense) and say, "To me that isn’t poetry," since anything presented as lines and strophes would be "poetry" by definition.

Why embark on a doomed attempt
to restrict "poetry" to that meaning,
when we already have a good neutral word
to describe something written in lines and strophes?
I refer to the word verse.

There, that little poem didn't take me long.

The true opposites are not prose and poetry, but prose and verse, because they both refer to form or presentation, not content or effect. Traditionally, verse is more poetic than prose, but of course some prose is more poetic than some verse. To maintain anything else is to maintain the absurd notion that poetic effect is primarily created by layout and line breaks.

But to speak more to the original question of this thread... Janet, it’s a fair point you make about a lot of poetry being about "I". Of course the "I" is often a persona or created character (as David L. has said), but still. I think it's a useful exercise to try to write fewer poems containing the word "I" and more that focus on other people or events, etc. Of course the "I" will still be there in the point of view, as it is in even in a third-person novel.

Don't mind me. Just a little flurry between drinks.

[G. M. Palmer]

Thank you, Henry, for correcting my semantic error. I shall have to ruminate on its implications.

M

[Janet Kenny]

Another terrific quote that I have just read in an article about the Australian novelist Christopher Koch:

"In abandoning the essential disciplines of plot and character, and in forsaking the ambition for a large audience, the literary novel, he believes, is in danger of becoming a minor art form: "If you're writing a novel, you're writing for a large audience. I fear that novelists are losing those large audiences and the novel may end up in the state of poetry, or the theatre." This state is one in which the artform survives but is enjoyed only by a small minority with specialised tastes, and is cut off from the mainstream of literate, well-educated but non-specialised people."

The article in the "Weekend Australian" (Oct. 27-28 2007) is unfortunately not on the internet. There are many wise observations. Basically he believes that the difference between what he himself dislikes describing for convenience 'the popular novel' and 'the serious novel' is that popular novels are not trying to develop any themes (beyond the story they tell) about the nature of life and people.

He names a German film The Lives of Others as something that does what serious novels used to do. "There is an absolutely gripping plot, deeply felt characters, a sort of crisis that puts you oon the edge of your seat, and it has things to say that really matter."

Janet

[Mark Allinson]

"There is an absolutely gripping plot, deeply felt characters, a sort of crisis that puts you on the edge of your seat, and it has things to say that really matter."

Here we go:


The Man He Killed

- Thomas Hardy


“HAD he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!

“But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.

“I shot him dead because —
Because he was my foe,
Just so—my foe of course he was;
That’s clear enough; although

“He thought he’d ’list, perhaps,
Off-hand like — just as I —
Was out of work—had sold his traps —
No other reason why.

“Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You’d treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown.”


==========


But still, readers today seem to prefer to have something like this expanded to 500 pages of prose.

Maybe the modern terror of death lies behind the desire to extend the literary experience of a work as far as possible.

The poem, at a glance, shows its end along with its beginning.

It's all over far too soon - and we don't want life reflected in such a stark mirror.

?

Just wondrin'

[Janet Kenny]

Mark,
That's a wonderful poem. I'm not defending everything that Koch says but merely putting his views forward to be understood in the body of the wider discussion.

It must be remembered that Hardy wrote his poetry after half a lifetime spent writing novels which dealt with human character and motivation. It shows.
I think that is one great virtue of prose and it can also be in poetry. I also think that Koch may have underestimated, or forgotten to mention, the intensity of a moment that poetry does better than anything else.
Janet