[reader]

I imagine that if I would have gone to school the awswer to this question would be self evident. But I didn't so... please tell me: Do standards differ from verse and prose?

Specifically, can a piece of prose that is judged to be discontinuous and random be judged to be simply associative, and perhaps succesfully so, as verse?

Does prejudging a piece of writing as prose automatically sort of dumb it down..no, I don't mean that... does it automatically make the stringing-of-it-along a less intuitive matter?

I've got Prince's "Dictionary of Narratology." Could you tell me some terms in it that could pertain to my problem.

To my mind, the entity, the unsubstantial entity that connects two disparate elements is what is actually being said... when these two or more disparate elements are juxtaposed. And it seems perfectly normal and interesting to write in this disjointed manner.

Are there any lessons you think I should learn to help me communicate sucessfully without loosing that modular structure with its subconscious eruptions?

Perplexed, TEd

[Robt_Ward]

Ted,

That's a topic that demands a dissertation, pretty much.

Consider this, though: one of the "great" novels of our time is Joyce's "Ulysses", and this is a piece of prose that seems to fit what you're talking about.

In a more secular vein, this particular board is devoted to "formal" poetry, more or less, that's its slant anyway, so to a certain extent what you're discussing here will not, probably, receive a very positive response. I think...

Interestingly, one of the things we most often advise poets to do, in here, is to write out their poem as prose, in oder to discover syntactical and other logical problems and correct them.

You say "To my mind, the entity, the unsubstantial entity that connects two disparate elements is what is actually being said... when these two or more disparate elements are juxtaposed. And it seems perfectly normal and interesting to write in this disjointed manner." I am not sure why you seem to presume that the expression of such juxtapositions requires anything "disjointed" in the language or syntactical structure of the work itself.

In other words, if, as a poet, I wish to communicate (for example) "confusion", it does not follow that the poem itself has to be confusing to accomplish this. Maybe I'm missing your point?

I'm willing to discuss it, anyway, LOL.

(robt)

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

To my mind, the entity, the unsubstantial entity that connects two disparate elements is what is actually being said... when these two or more disparate elements are juxtaposed. And it seems perfectly normal and interesting to write in this disjointed manner.

Ted,

Are you familiar with the story of <u>the blind men and the elephant</u>? I think the term for the method of Joyce's "Ulysses" is "free association" or "stream of consciousness" writing. I think the best such writing isn't "free," nor strictly "disjointed," but the phrasing and imagery circle a specific communication or set of circumstances without necessarily touching it or revealing it directly. Much poetry of any kind does this sort of thing—talks around the subject matter or alludes to more than is spoken—but some poems take a longer path around the meaning. The point of the story of the blind men and the elephant: BANNED POSTeach man is describing a part of the same thing, but they disagree about what, exactly, that thing most resembles. In the same way, those elements which you are calling "disjointed" ought to circle the same thing, imo; and, if not enough elements are included, your readers will have no idea what the verse or prose is communicating. If you are wanting to communicate the "unsubstantial entity," be sure to include enough elements in order to keep your communication "focused" on that one entity and not scattershot to the point of potentially being about any number of dissimilar things.

Are there any lessons you think I should learn to help me communicate sucessfully without loosing that modular structure with its subconscious eruptions?

Well...keeping your own focus while these eruptions are occurring...would be a good thing. I suppose you should keep more than one focus: BANNED POST1) focus on the "unsubstantial entity" (keep your "eye" on it), and 2) focus on the principle parts of your writing to be certain that they are, indeed, pertaining to that entity, and 3) focus on the writing as a whole from a potential reader's viewpoint; see if the parts in collusion operate as a shadow or suggestion of a singular entity. —I once discussed this elsewhere with a former moderator; it's like drawing a circle: if you don't supply enough points to give the image of a circle, a potential receiver might see a square, an irregular shape, or a parabola. (Think "Rorschach test.") Of course, you might want to leave the shape sufficiently undefined so that readers might have several different impressions, but I think you'll want to ensure that those impressions are all similarly related...

Does prejudging a piece of writing as prose automatically sort of dumb it down..no, I don't mean that... does it automatically make the stringing-of-it-along a less intuitive matter?

I'm not sure what you mean by this. I suppose the writer might sometimes rely heavily on intuition; but how can a writer be certain that a reader's intuition will follow the same route? First, we'd need to know what "intuition" is...Certainly, common symbolism and a common value system will help in the process, but it's not a given that both writer and reader will share these in every instance. It's possible that you might want to actually touch down, occasionally, by directly referencing the central "entity," or by spiraling toward it for a bit without actually touching it. I.e., there are different distances from the central "entity;" although some of the associations might be extremely tenuous, others might serve as a bridge between these tenuous associations and the central "entity."

Curtis.

[Richard Wakefield]

Reader: I may be misunderstanding your question. If so, my apologies. It seems to me that what we choose to call something influences our way of looking at it; that's why a physician shouldn't commit to a diagnosis too quickly. So once we decide that something is prose we can hardly help bringing different expectations to it -- to name something is to make a prediction about it, after all. Those expectations might not always be conscious, but they're there. For me, the situations where our names for things become inadaquate are especially fascinating. Naming things can be a convenient way of parsing the world, but the world isn't obliged to obey the lines we draw on it. So the prose that does things we usually associate with poetry can be beautiful in its own right as well as a way of liberating us from our rigidly delineated way of looking at things.
Richard

[RCL]

Reader, to grasp where you're coming from, I read your fiction. It's metafiction (which I thought died a well-deserved death long ago), similar to poems by poets about writing poetry. I sensed from your comments on the fiction board that you're a "student" writer (I'm old, but a student poet). If so, why not try the old fashioned Aristotelian method first--straight mimetic narrative with a beginning, middle, and end? Or, as I also like to advise, one that follows the "hero's journey" as explicated by Joseph Campbell in "The Hero with a Thousand Faces"--several of my freshest writing students have had stories published based on the hero pattern. For a ready reference, think "Star Wars"--each episode and the saga as a whole. For more sophisticated examples, see Joyce's Ulysses, Portrait of the Artist, and Araby. Just a few thoughts that may not be to your taste.

Good luck,

------------------
Ralph

[This message has been edited by RCL (edited June 07, 2002).]

[Carl Sundell]

Ted,

This is a great question. I'm going to go out on a limb to answer you.

I think rhymed poetry easily distinguishes itself from prose as to form. Unrhymed poetry is another matter. Free verse in particular poses the problem of distinguishing between prose and poetry. If you take free verse and set it up in paragraph form, and it reads like prose, then it is prose, and there's no need to pretend that it's poetry. Perhaps you could call it an aphorism, which is a terse and colorful piece of prose, such as Twain or Wilde or Chesterton might have written. But if it reads like something better than clever prose, it should be thought of as a poem.

Somerset Maugham, primarily a novelist, said that everybody has to step aside when the poet passes through. So at the very least, a good poem should outclass a good piece of poem in any contest of words. At least I have found this to be generally true.

Then, of course, there are lengthy pages of Faulkner's prose that read like epic poems.

[Carl Sundell]

Ted,

One more thought from Mark Twain concerning the difference between poetry and prose:

"What a lumbering poor vehicle prose is for the conveying of a great thought! ...Prose wanders around with a lantern & laboriously schedules & verifies the details & particulars of a valley & its frame of crags & peaks, then Poetry comes, & lays bare the whole landscape with a single splendid flash." - Letter to W. D. Howells, 2/25/1906

Carl

[A. E. Stallings]

Verse is not a more forgiving form than prose--probably less.

Pound said something to the effect that verse must be at least as well-written as prose.

As for a broken narrative--I don't think it will necessarily work better in either form. It will work or it won't work, but putting it into verse probably won't save it if it is floundering as prose.

[Tim Love]

Reader: can a piece of prose that is judged to be discontinuous and random be judged to be simply associative, and perhaps succesfully so, as verse?

Yes. Currently that's the way prose/verse expectations seem to work. If you
want people to read your prose with the tolerance and effort that they give
to poetry, you need to put more line-breaks in.

Reader: Are there any lessons you think I should learn to help me communicate sucessfully without loosing that modular structure with its subconscious eruptions?

I think there's a lot of stuff around about how elements of language combine. I suppose metaphor analysis is the simplest. At a larger scale one thing to note is that with verse forms is that proximity isn't the only way of coupling words: for example, end-rhyming links the rhymed words together even if they're 10 syllables apart. Structural forms could be more heavily used in prose.

As for where to look for models, here are some quotes from my
<A HREF=http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~tpl/texts/quotes.html>Lit Refs</A>

• 
  What Coleridge proposed as a dynamic supplement, in his idea of method as 'progressive translation', is a logic of the activity of thinking...the miming of the writer's choices at transition points and of the reader's shifting attention.
  
  
• (Hopkins, Notebooks, p.96) "The further in anything, as a work of art, the organisation is carried out, the deeper the form penetrates...the more capacity for receiving that synthesis of ...impressions which gives us the unity with the prepossession conveyed by it"
  
  
• 
  In Surrealist metaphor, two terms are juxtaposed so as to create a third which is more strangely potent than the sum of the parts...The third term forces an equality of attention onto the originating terms", "Statutes of Liberty", Geoff Ward, Macmillan, 1993, p. 73-74.
  
  
• 
  "Their structure is an integration of dissonant meanings that exhibits a Gestalt-like new meaning that is not reducible to the integration - this new meaning is referred to by I.A.Richards as 'the resultant meaning', by Paul Henle as 'induced content', and by Max Black as a 'created similarity'"
  
  
• 
  "When ordinarily unassociated elements are juxtaposed, they constitute a 'place of indeterminacy' (Ingarden) that the reader is called upon to determine. But if this determination is not logically possible, if the relation between the two is undecidable, something else appears in this gap. Eliot and Pound spoke of 'emotion'"
  
  
• 
  Abrupt and disordered syntax can be at times very honest, and an elaborately constructed sentence can be at times merely an elaborate camouflage", "A B C of Reading", Erza Pound, p.86.
  
  
• 
  In the past, various bridges have been found to fill the gaps of short poems: Rhyme, melody, common religious and social outlooks, and, in the individualism of the Renaissance, the person of the poet. Thus, to bridge the gaps in the disparate images of a metaphysical poem, a reader must evoke the figure who would join the elements, and this has remained generally the mode of gap-filling until the advent of Imagism in the twentieth century.