We-ell, Tom (& thanks for your help with this)... I was hoping to get us away from this "just prose" stance! I doubt Tolstoy would have much truck with that. I was however much taken with this little gem:
Quote:
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It [pp] is, in any case, not necessarily "poetic" in the traditional sense and can even indulge in an engaging wit.
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Unlike verse! (THAT explains it!)
I too was struck by those lines you quote, but what struck me most was the complete absence of any mention of a need for narrative. So this merging or pp into "short-short" fiction or whatever is - as I thought - "wrong-wrong".
You talk about "high patterning, rhythmic and figural repetition and the like" as the signifiers of poetry, in the absence of line breaks, but is the key - if there is a key, which there can't be - something like "it works through image"? There is something about the way a poem operates on the brain, and it can definitely do this without line breaks. And if you do it in a novel or a short story the story is likely to fail (as such).
I don't know... Raymond Carver seems not to have written any prose poetry. That's interesting because his poems are quite often just like his short stories, lineated, so maybe he didn't feel the need for prose poetry. (This is a digression but something that just occurred to me.)
KEB