Hmm, about images. I sometimes think--actually, I've been thinking this for a couple of years now, since I first started reading and writing in meter--that "The Image" increased in relative importance as the primacy of the metrical framework declined. Ya know? And the thing is, there are plenty of poems out there that don't rely on the primacy of The Image (and not just l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e poetry neither, though the poems I am thinking of, like "The Bob Hope Poem" by Campbell McGrath, are far more philosophical than lyrical).
And as for narrative, well that Atwood certainly has a narrative in abundance. So it may not be a matter of definition by checklist--which I find is often the case with hybrid art forms (think of performance art or assemblage, for instance). Hybrids tend to foster lots of gray areas, uhm by definition...
Well, for argument's sake, here is a short short story by one of my favorite short story writers, Amy Hempel. It's from a book I highly recommend, Reasons to Live:
The Man in Bogata
The police and emergency service people fail to make a dent. The voice of the pleading spouse does not have the hoped-for effect. The woman remains on the ledge—though not, she threatens, for long.
I imagine that I am the one who must talk the woman down. I see it, and it happens like this.
I tell the woman about a man in Bogata. He was a wealthy man, an industrialist who was kidnapped and held for ransom. It was not a TV drama; his wife could not call the bank and, in twenty-four hours, have one million dollars. It took months. The man had a heart condition, and the kidnappers had to keep the man alive.
Listen to this, I tell the woman on the ledge. His captors made him quit smoking. They changed his diet and made him exercise every day. They held him that way for three months.
When the ransom was paid and the man was released, his doctor looked him over. He found the man to be in excellent health. I tell the woman what the doctor said then—that the kidnap was the best thing to happen to that man.
____
Maybe this is not a come-down-from-the-ledge story. But I tell it with the thought that the woman on the ledge will ask herself a question, the question that occurred to that man in Bogata. He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn't good.
*****
So, then, what makes this prose and, say, the Atwood I posted earlier, prose poetry? And can we, by analyzing one comparison by example, begin to flesh out that rather academic definition provided by the Princeton Encyclopedia (must be the word "ontological" that makes me feel I must be back in one of those uncomfotable desk cum chairs in some dusty lecture hall).
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