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)
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