In hopes of making this potential discussion a bit heavier on the "musing" rather than the usual anthologizing of "mastery," I took down the heavyweight Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics to see what it had to say about pp. Some excerpts:
With its oxymoronic title and its form based on contradiction, the p.p. is suitable to an extraordinary range of perception and expression, from the ambivalent (in content as in form), to the mimetic and the narrative (or even anecdotal)....Its principal characteristics are those that would insure unity even in brevity and poetic quality even without the line breaks of free verse: high patterning, rhythmic and figural repetition, sustained intensity, and compactness.
In the p.p. a field of vision is represented, sometimes mimetically and often pictorally, only to be, on occasion, cut off abruptly; emotion is contracted under the force of ellipsis, so deepened and made dense; the rhapsodic mode and what Baudelaire called the "prickings of the unconscious" are, in the supreme examples, combined with the metaphoric and the ontological: the p.p. aims at knowing or finding out something not accessible under the more restrictive conventions of verse (Beaujour). It is frequently the manisfestation of a willfully self-sufficient form characterized above all by its brevity. it is often spacially interesting (D. Scott). For some critics, it is necessarily intertextual (Riffaterre), for others, politically oriented (Monroe). It is, in any case, not necessarily "poetic" in the traditional sense and can even indulge in an engaging wit.
And so on and so on (mostly on the historical development of the genre). The first thing that struck me when I read this was "the p.p. aims at knowing or finding out something not accessible under the more restrictive conventions of verse." With the development of free verse, and its overthrow of "the more restrictive conventions of verse," what makes the p.p. different, besides its dismissal of the line as the basic organizing unit, from poetry--or, if you prefer, free verse? Furthermore, intertextual with what other text(s), with the "text" of poetic conventions? Does a p.p. that doesn't use high patterning, rhythmic and figural repetition and the like simply prose--with pretensions?
|