Thread: prose poetry
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Unread 04-08-2006, 09:27 AM
Marcia Karp Marcia Karp is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Outside Boston, Mass
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Dear Katy,
I am horrified to hear that the poems are being misprinted; I wish there were web standards for displaying poems and for preventing the deformation of them by screeners (my nonce use). You can, though, find the Mercian Hymns inside Hill's collected volumes.

Your thread brings up many difficult maters. I just attended a conference (by the ALSC, the organization that publishes Literary Imagination) with a panel on experimental poetry. After 1.5 hours, there was no clear, or even confused, sense on how to think about what the experimental is.

As for prose poetry, there is that super-sweet (often French) stuff of the 19th century. Pastels in Prose is a perfect example. If you can get past the Great, David Lehman's 2003 Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present is a good survey of the sorts of things that are now called prose poetry.

I think your original impetus--the negative naming of something intended as poetry as prose-- is smartly approached by you in calling up prose poetry. It seems to be neither one nor the other and it requires thinking about the (overlapping) natures of both. Too difficult for me right now. I hope others are more stalwart.

Best,
Marcia
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