I see this part of Erato is called 'Ask the Poet Lariat.' So who is this lariat guy? Why hasn't anyone asked him anything lately?

Here's question -- and I'm quite serious -- how do you feel about 'charging' prose in accordance with the same principles used for poetry?

Maybe I should break this large question into smaller units. What is the role for rhyme and other sound effects in prose? How important is compression or concision? Should prosewriters pay more attention to rhythm or cadence in their language? Is there (or should there be) such a thing as metered prose?

Maybe not what you have in mind, but I recall an instance: In one of her books Dorothy Sayers has some dialogue where Lord Peter Wimsey realizes that he's been speaking in blank verse.

Your question begs the assumption that the only poetry is metrical poetry.

Interesting post. I started, not as a poet, but as a prose writer - short stories - and from the time I was nineteen until into my sixties, that was what I (unsuccessfully) wrote. As time went on, I became more and more obsessed with the sound of each sentence, with the manner in which the sentences played off each other, with perfecting internal rhythm and polishing the perfect paragraph. Such fiction considerations as plot and character were secondary. And a surprising number of my "perfect" sentences were also perfectly iambic.

I wrote more and more, completed less and less, and it finally dawned on me that what I was doing was trying to write poetry. I made an honest man of myself, and have never been happier. At the same time, when I do go back to prose now, I find that if flows more readily. I still have trouble with plot, but maybe in five more years I can marry the two more successfully.

Yes, I feel there is definitely a place for rhythm and cadence in prose, and have always been attracted to writers - Hemingway is a prime example, and Faulkner another, and Carson McCullers and William Humphrey (Home from the Hill), and the young Truman Capote of Tree of Night and Other Voices, Other Rooms - who have that beauty intrinsic in their language.

Another extraordinarily poetical novelist, in a more lyrical sense (and a favorite of Tim's as well, I believe) is Cormac McCarthy. And Peter Matthiesson has written a few novels (Dry Tortugas is one) that, if anything, struck me as trying too hard to blend prose and poetry.

So, yes - a screaming yes! Not only do I think there is room for rhythm and cadence in prose, but I feel that the introduction of poetic tools can make for the very best prose, can elevate good fiction to a higher level.

Michael Cantor

[This message has been edited by Michael Cantor (edited May 24, 2005).]

No lariat yet, but I think he'll show up tomorrow...

Maybe it's time for another prose experiment like the literary movement in the sixteenth century in England, following the work of John Lyly, called "Euphuism".

To save me writing out a description of this prose style, here is a passage from the online "Literary Encyclopedia" (source at the end of the passage).

Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578)

Though from a twenty-first century perspective John Lyly's Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit and its sequel, Euphues and His England may appear lacking in narrative interest, and difficult of access, in their own day the two works created a literary sensation, transforming their author from an obscure Oxford graduate in search of preferment into one of the most prominent and influential writers of the age. Following their first publication in 1578 and 1580 respectively, the two parts ran through over twenty editions before the turn of the century, and continued to appear on the bookstalls for the next thirty years. In large measure their extraordinary impact may be attributed to the distinctive style in which they are written, and which has given the term 'euphuism' to the language. From a literary mode looking back to medieval Latin, based on 'schemes' or figures of sound, Lyly perfected a highly polished instrument, characterized by similarly structured clauses in antithetical pairings, and by the use of syllabic patterning and alliteration to enforce opposition (e.g. “Although hitherto, Euphues, I have shrined thee in my heart for a trusty friend, I will shun thee hereafter as a trothless foe”). Equally fundamental to his idiosyncratic deployment of the mode is the insistent use of illustrative analogies drawn from proverbial wisdom, classical mythology, or the fabulous properties of natural phenomena, and which turn, like the syntactic structure, on some species of contradiction (e.g. “I perceive that love is ... like the apple in Persia, whose blossom savoureth like honey, whose bud is more sour than gall”). The dialectical nature of the style, with its see-saw structure and copious illustration, clearly lends itself to debate (both an educational instrument and a form of polite entertainment in the sixteenth century), and a number of debate topics, of particular interest to an Elizabethan audience, served as Lyly's point of departure in both works, contributing to their immediate contemporary appeal. Source.

Clicke here for an extended passage from the work
Euphues

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Mark Allinson

[This message has been edited by Mark Allinson (edited May 24, 2005).]

My husband has been a senior book editor (non-fiction) for years and before that was a newspaper journalist and editor. He maintains that the same rules apply to poetry and prose. He's not speaking of meter of course but he thinks that well formed phrases and sentences and the pace and placement of thoughts in either are more or less the same. Compression and concision being central to this process.

He is a much better writer than I am.

Janet

A snatch from page one of Charles Dickens's Bleak House.
.....
..... Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs, fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwhales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of the shivering little 'prentice boy on the deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog round them as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds."

Alan: Is there (or should there be) such a thing as metered prose? - I've read a section of prose that's in a regular meter. And some blank verse (shorn of line-breaks) could be mistaken for metered prose.

More generally, I think that prose could learn a thing or 2 from poetry formalists regarding attention to sound and letters - see http://homepages.tesco.net/~magdtp/fowed.html

Quote:

“While the ambivalence promoted by the style enforces an awareness of alternative positions, opening avenues of enquiry rather than inculcating unambiguous moral truths, the imagery, with its insistence upon duality, contributes to the movement away from finality or closure by projecting a view of all aspects of experience as ambivalent and inherently unstable. “

Interesting article, Mark, but one still wonders, reverting to the general subject of this discussion, what someone who can perpetrate a jawbreaking sentence like this would know (or care?) about cadence and compression, or what she finds so admirable in:

“Although hitherto, Euphues, I have shrined thee in my heart for a trusty friend, I will shun thee hereafter as a trothless foe”).

I think “euphusitic” means a highly elaborate way of writing or speaking, but, except in the form of mockery or satire it is hardly effective, much less attractive, prose.

I would say that devious political speeches or academic-type writing of the quality of the above are valuable examples of what to avoid (unless you are a politician, etc.) Prose style was an integral part of the power of essayists s like Addison, Hazlitt and Swift and they plainly gave attention to sound and cadence. Storytelling ability and character creation must be supreme in fiction, and no amount of good prose can make up for the lack of these. If a writer can show character in action effectively and also write as well as, for example, Saul Bellow or James Joyce, or translate Chekov as supremely well as Constance Garnett did, then you are likely to have great and compelling prose. It is interesting how cadenced even apparently artless prose like this is:


“I’ll tell you what did my father in. The third thing was Dummy, that Dummy died.
The first thing was Pearl Harbour. And the second thing was moving to my grandfather’s farm near Wenatchee. That’s where my father finished out his days, except they were probably finished before that.

My Father blamed Dummy’s death on Dummy’s wife. Then he blamed it on the fish. And finally he blamed himself – because he was the one that showed Dummy the ad in Field and Stream for live black bass shipped anywhere in the U.S.

It was after he got the fish that Dummy started acting peculiar. The fish changed Dummy’s whole personality. That’s what my father said..”

(Raymond Carver: “The third thing that killed my father off.”)

Compare with the other end of the continuum, the more obviously “poetic”, with internal rhyme, repetition, word-coinage, inversions, the lot, pretty much everything except lineation.

“SONNEZ!
Smack. She set free sudden in rebound her nipped elastic garter smackwarm against her smackable woman's warmhosed thigh.
--LA CLOCHE! cried gleeful Lenehan. Trained by owner. No sawdust there.
She smilesmirked supercilious (wept! aren't men?), but, lightward gliding, mild she smiled on Boylan.
--You're the essence of vulgarity, she in gliding said.
Boylan, eyed, eyed. Tossed to fat lips his chalice, drank off his chalice tiny, sucking the last fat violet syrupy drops. His spellbound eyes went after, after her gliding head as it went down the bar by mirrors, gilded arch for ginger ale, hock and claret glasses shimmering, a spiky shell, where it concerted, mirrored, bronze with sunnier bronze. “

(James Joyce: Ulysses)

There is no such thing as metered prose. That's verse printed without its lineation. There is such a thing as unmetrical poetry, though it must be powerfully rhythmic to make grade.

My priest used to say "This is the lamb of God. Happy are those who are invited to His supper." Under my correction he says "HAPpy are THOSE who are CALLED to his SUPper."

I adore Thomas Hardy, the rabbit hunting scene at the onset of Fowles' Daniel Martin, an abject obeiscance to Hardy. I went nuts over Cormac MacCarthy's beginning to his great trilogy. Listen to the rhythm of the railroad in that first page and a half. I've been after Mason to read it for years, and he finally did. Blown away.

The Dickens may even be over done. But Mark (and Oliver) the Lyly is divine: Although hitherto, Euphues, I have shrined thee in my heart for a trusty friend, I will shun thee hereafter as a trothless foe. Shrined trusty friend shunned trothless foe. Get over Carver, Oliver, and come home.

I'm a horseshit prose writer. But I find a good egg now and then.

"Upwind the pine-clad hills were on fire, and a pall of smoke mixed with the gritty dust of Yellowstone Valley fields. Dryland corn on deep alluvial soil was stunted and dead white. Even the irrigated sections were wilting in 5 percent humidity. Russian thistles, forced to ripen months early, were tumbling over fallowed fields like wind-driven drills, sowing their hated seeds." from Ploughshare

forced fallowed fields driven drills sowing seeds.

Certainly rhyme and alliteration and rhythm are ornaments as appropriate to prose as to poetry. In retrospect, I wish I had been more sparing of modifiers here, but it came after a great deal of the sparest, drought-stricken prose imaginable. And eventually, I changed it into metrical speech:

Farmers taught me to see our tumbleweeds
as wind-driven grain drills
sowing their hated seeds
in every furrow that the tractor tills.

This all came from Kelly Miller calling the tumbleweeds "wind-driven grain drills." I think that if we listen carefully and imitate accurately the speech around us, our writing can become rhythmic and memorable.

Whether either of these examples of Murphy, the only writer on whom I am expert, is memorable or not, they delineate between prose and verse, and attempt to answer the question.

Universally that person's acumen is esteemed very little perceptive concerning whatsoever matters are being held as most profitable by mortals with sapience endowed to be studied who is ignorant of that which the most in doctrine erudite and certainly by reason of that in them high mind's ornament deserving of veneration constantly maintain when by general consent they affirm that other circumstances being equal by no exterior splendour is the prosperity of a nation more efficaciously asserted than by the measure of how far forward may have progressed the tribute of its solicitude for that proliferent continuance which of evils the original if it be absent when fortunately present constitutes the certain sign of omnipollent nature's incorrupted benefaction. (Joyce - Oxen)


Oliver,

I just wanted to note that not all of Joyce is as clearly "poetic" as the example you offer.



------------------
Mark Allinson

Tim,
Of course the Dickens was overdone and he probably would have laughed if he had read your comment. Concision there ain't but rhythm and progression there is.

The Lyly is positively tangible (unlike his awful essayist (no not you Mark!)

I vote strongly with Oliver for James Joyce.

It isn't decent to say so but Salman Rushdie can play an orchestra--whether or not one likes his harmonies is another matter.


I fell in love with Hardy when I read The Return of the Native.

"A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment. Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor."

For four pages--the entire first chapter--Hardy continues to decribe a place with no sense of urgency about introducing a human figure. The first sighting of a human is the start of chapter two. By the time the figure appears we are completely absorbed into the vast landscape and we see the unfolding drama which starts with an aged wayfarer through whose eyes we see the "reddleman" who is completely red. The reddleman doesn't appear until the end of the first page in chapter two.

Something we don't discuss in the deep end is the creation of mood. I think that mood is the most important ingredient in art. By mood I don't simply mean emotion, but a set of colours and dynamics which evoke certain responses in the reader. Without that all the other skills are worthless.
Janet

Tim PS:
"Upwind the pine-clad hills were on fire, and a pall of smoke mixed with the gritty dust of Yellowstone Valley fields. Dryland corn on deep alluvial soil was stunted and dead white. Even the irrigated sections were wilting in 5 percent humidity. Russian thistles, forced to ripen months early, were tumbling over fallowed fields like wind-driven drills, sowing their hated seeds." from Ploughshare

More than a touch Hardyish.

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited May 25, 2005).]

Just a little side-note I found re the Lyly:

You have proved my point, Mark. I don't believe I ever said that "all of Joyce" was "poetic." but I did say of the sort of language you quote "except in the form of mockery or satire it is hardly effective, much less attractive, prose.” Joyce could write in any style under the sun and the part you quote obviously mocks formal, circumlocutory and utterly boring language, which is made particularly obvious coming immediately, as it does, after a pasage like this:

“Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa! Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa! Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa!

Tim. In my opinion, the term “verse” , though often misused, still strongly suggests lineation and control over the line endings, the only thing that clearly distinguishes it from prose, so I don’t agree with the term “unlineated verse” to describe the Joyce piece. You can have unlineated poetry all right, usually known as “prose” but sometimes as “prose poetry” but that is quite a different matter. I am sure all this has been discussed ad nauseam before on these boards, but I think we can agree, if it was ever in doubt, that prose can be as noble, musical, rhythmic and moving as verse, with verse, perhaps, having the edge because of the writer’s ability to control the line length or endings. It might be argued, by the way, that this control is actually increased in the case of good free verse.

I have to say, though Hardy is one of my favourite writers, I find his prose pretty old-fashioned for its period, and to be avoided as a model at all costs, compared to, say, Joseph Conrad, though, to be fair, Conrad’s first novel was published around the same time as Hardy’s last.

“In the days of high-waisted and muslin-gowned women, when the vast amount of soldiering going on in the county was a cause of much trembling to the sex, there lived in a village near the Wessex coast two ladies of good report, though unfortunately of limited means.” “The Trumpet Major 1880- opening lines”

One would take this, at first sight, to be a parody of Jane Austen (b.1775) But Hardy is apparently being serious!

I thought the extremely talented Cormac MacCarthy became over-poetic and unbearably long-winded in his “Horses” trilogy which I gave up on about half way through. I’ll stick with Richard Ford, John Updike and, yes, Raymond Carver, thank you very much.

Oliver:
I have to say, though Hardy is one of my favourite writers, I find his prose pretty old-fashioned for its period, and to be avoided as a model at all costs, compared to, say, Joseph Conrad, though, to be fair, Conrad’s first novel was published around the same time as Hardy’s last.
Certainly Hardy used too many words for our present tastes but it is worth asking why his books brood in our memories. The excellence of Jane Austen (a superior "writer" by present standards) is irrelevant when considering Hardy I believe.
I love both writers.
Janet

Oliver, I loved the MacCarthy trilogy all the way up to the awful little fv poem that ends it. Always wanted to write him a fan letter and offer to ghost write the next poem with which he wants to end a novel.

Tim,
I should have added that the alliteration in the piece of yours that I quote is not like Hardy--the images yes, but the language is fiercely and flintily your own. Lovely stuff.
Janet

I notice Tim mentions meter, and I see I overlooked this question of Alan's. Prose, by definition, cannot be metered, in the full sense, even if it is written in Iambics or other feet, because the line-endings are determined by the typesetter or his modern equivalent. Therefore, though it can have regular metric feet, and some might call it metric in this sense, they are not in measures determined by the writer. Poems in Iambics or any other meter, which are unrhymed and have lines of irregular length, are usually designated free verse, along with mixed meters, rhythmic free verse, lineated prose and the whole caboodle outside the strict metric stuff.

Oliver,
I do agree in principle but good prose has cadence and phrasing don't you think?
Janet

When I first discussed some of the prose in Ploughshare, Wilbur commented on how "poetic" it was, meaning rhythmic and alliterative. I said "it's unlineated free verse." His response: "what a frightening notion!"

Yes, Janet, as I said above, "I think we can agree, if it was ever in doubt, that prose can be as noble, musical, rhythmic and moving as verse, with verse, perhaps, having the edge because of the writer’s ability to control the line length or endings."

I should add that prose has "the edge" in many other ways.
Imagine carrying on this discussion in verse!

Tim,

I agree with Mr Wilbur that "unlineated free verse" is a frightening "notion" rather like the notion of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object would be,
or of the Pope not being a Catholic, but it is not an actual possibility. If it is unlineated, it is not verse and "there's an end on't," as Dr Johnston would surely have said.

All right, I know I am becoming a bore by quoting from this chap so much, but I am simply "dizzy with Donne" - as someone says in a movie. How is this for majesterial prose?


PERCHANCE he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that. The church is Catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that body which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

[Meditation XVII - Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions 1624].



[This message has been edited by Mark Allinson (edited May 26, 2005).]

Mark,
Donne is indeed splendid. That idea has haunted literature ever since it was written.

I love Laurence Sterne. It is so long since I read "Tristram Shandy" that I don't really know the best part to quote. I think of Auden at his most absurd when I read it. Almost anything one opens seems sparkling and intelligent. Here is the start of Chapter I:

"I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me: had they duly consider'd how much depended upon what they were then doing;--that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind; --and for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost;--Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,--I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world from that in which the reader is likely to see me "etc. etc.........

Janet

Well, whatever the virtues of the two pieces quoted above, compression certainly wasn't one of them. I think one can see how necessary good verse was up to at least the nineteenth century in presenting ideas and emotions in a more vital way - Donne's own verse being a good example --and how unnecessary (and unpopular) by comparison, it is now, with modern prose having stolen most of its virtues.

Oliver,
That's a very original and astute observation.
Janet

Actually, it didn't. Rhythm and other sound effects, he said. You have yourself stated that free verse has its own rhythm, and it uses sound effects. So ... Tom, how do you think prose might benefit from the techniques of free verse? I ask because I am interested in knowing.

------------------
Svein Olav (The poet formerly known as Solan )

Yes, Oliver, it is a very interesting observation.

If, indeed, modern prose has stolen all the vitality of expression once the exclusive property of verse, then what is left for verse to do that prose can't?

Maybe the answer lies in the direction of the conscious, "artificial" texturing of language, an intentional "poetic" mode of speech. Perhaps not as extreme as Euphuism, but in that direction; poetry as a more formal "artful" dance of language, if prose has taken over all the vital, compressed jitterbugging.

If the power of direct, natural speech in poetry has been usurped by that of modern prose, why should we continue to insist that only such "naturalism" in our poetry is viable? Maybe we need a bit more "artifice" in our expression. Why bother competing for the same territory, when people obviously prefer the contemporary prose form? Naturalism, spontaneity, compression, vitality - if prose now does them better, perhaps we should find something to do that prose can't?



------------------
Mark Allinson

Meter and rhyme ;)

Mark, prose can be just as flowery and poetic and verbose as poetry at its worst. If nobody reads it, let's hope the writer was sufficiently entertained while producing it to not care. Good prose has much more room to maneuver than poetry, lacking the constraints of line length, meter, and rhyme that poetry imposes, but it still has access to qualities such as imagery, music, humor, and a well-turned phrase.

The challenge to writing good verse is to compress without resorting to artificial means such as turning syntax inside out or speaking like a character out of Jane Austen. The challenge is to find imagery or narrative that speaks for itself without your having to explain the moral of the story to the reader. The challenge is to find the single word that effectively replaces half a dozen modifiers so that the half dozen are not missed and the image doesn't suffer without them. The challenge is to do all the above in a few pleasing words, conveying an emotion or thought or way of looking at something that perhaps wasn't already at the forefront of the reader's mind.

Writing bad metrical poetry is as easy as learning to count. In my opinion, the single most necessary defining attribute of poetry as opposed to prose is compression. But good writing is good writing, whether prose or poetry, and poetry should be at least as well written as prose.


Carol

Mark,

Provided we have no illusions that contemporary verse can be restored to its position as a major literary form (in the sense of having a widespread readership outside that of other poets) I think artifice is probably the way to go, but not the artifice of the past, or a pale imitation of it. One advantage that verse has is that its practitioners are generally devoted to high standards, the purity of the wellspring of language, whereas prose has a whole spectrum of standards, from high (though not necessarily convoluted) literary fiction and essays to low journalism and downright mendacity and all the degrees in between, and the word “writing” covers a multitude of sins. But “new” artifice will be a new form of modernism and will bring great satisfaction to practitioners and a few critics, but this sort of verse will not be necessary in the way I feel it was in past centuries, as a more distilled form of thought.

Janet,

Thanks for the compliment, but I am sure someone must have thought of this before. It was just comparing John Donne’s relatively long-winded groping in prose towards “No Man is an Island” that put the idea in my head. Admittedly the sermon contains more examples, more matter, but the LANGUAGE is quite different.

“PERCHANCE he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am .”

Well written, of course, but Donne would have been quite capable of compressing this until it squeaked, had he wanted to. But the convention seemed to be that prose should be as windy and convoluted and “grand” as possible -although there was some excuse for a clergyman who had to fill a half hour on Sunday. (Sometimes the workings of the Lord required a certain amount of nifty footwork to put across convincingly) How do we know how good this prose is, or what do we compare it with, as examples of “bad” prose of the period are not usually readily available? Even unliterary, but literate, people wrote extraordinary well in previous centuries and were as adept at concealing their thoughts as at expressing them. I remember reading a letter from a young lady, writing in the eighteenth century in response to a proposal of marriage, and her reply expressed such gratitude and graceful compliments that the poor guy would have had to read it at least three times to realise she was turning him down.

Some return to this, rather than a shift of the chewing-gum to the other side of the mouth and a laconic “Forget it, pal!” might indeed be welcome.

Oliver,
It's true that in previous centuries many people wrote with admirable clarity and fluency. In the course of my work I had to read a great many letters and diaries of early settlers and explorers in Australia and New Zealand. They were galvanising.
My own great-grandfather left one chapter of a memoir. His complete autobiography had been stored in a bank by his friend, the bank manager. The bank burned down and the manuscript was lost. He was old and dying of cancer by that time but he struggled to rewrite it and succeeded in recreating the first chapter. The original is in the library of Otago University in New Zealand and a copy is in the New South Wales Mitchell Library. It is written like a captain's log (he was originally a sea captain). Although his education was modest he was able to express himself more vividly than many now who have greater advantages.
Janet


[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited May 27, 2005).]

You lucky ignorants! In Norway, they publish that stuff, shamelessly call it "prose poetry", and write rave reviews about how the borderline between prose and poetry is being challenged. I kid you not, good folks.

(That being said, other published "poetry" gets rave reviews because it "challenges our beliefs that poetry ought to be well-written text", etc.)

And then some wonder why books titled "poetry" doesn't sell anymore.

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Svein Olav (The poet formerly known as Solan )

I'm delighted the denizens pounced on this topic. Lots of interesting comments. A sleepy forum has roused at least momentarily.

Odd that no one's dragged speechwriting into this discussion of prose cadence.

Julie Stoner

Carol -

How strict are you about the syntax of ED? I tend to err on the side of freshness when it can't be achieved within rules or reason.

Not sure I understand the question, Mike. ED as in Emily Dickinson? Generally speaking, I'm not convinced that freshness can't be achieved without the sacrifice of syntax. Syntax is simply a tool for communicating without which what a writer optimistically calls freshness may be lost in befuddlement on the part of the reader.

Carol

Carol,
The element we call "drama" may demand broken syntax. It often happens in Shakespeare and we all understand it. I think context is all--or rather context and talent.
Janet

Alan Sullivan: What is the role for rhyme and other sound effects in prose? - "an abundance of blank verse lines in English prose usually indicates an incursion of solemnity or melancholy". F Scott Fitzgerald's "Babylon Revisited" story has examples (Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie)

Mark Allinson: If, indeed, modern prose has stolen all the vitality of expression once the exclusive property of verse, then what is left for verse to do that prose can't? - "the insistence that poetry partake of the lofty and sublime ... meant that poetry abandoned large areas of subject matter as 'unpoetic'. These areas were eagerly seized on by the newly enfranchized medium of prose ... In essence [the free verse reform] took away from poetry what had always been its distinguishing and defining characteristic, metre, and offered in metre's place nothing which prose could not already accomplish much better." (Dick Davis)

oliver murray: I think artifice is probably the way to go, but not the artifice of the past, or a pale imitation of it. - "An Oulipian writer is a rat who himself builds the maze from which he sets out to escape" (Queneau); "Oulipo: the continuation of literature by other means" (after Clausewitz)