[Alan Sullivan]

I see this part of Erato is called 'Ask the Poet Lariat.' So who is this lariat guy? Why hasn't anyone asked him anything lately?

Here's question -- and I'm quite serious -- how do you feel about 'charging' prose in accordance with the same principles used for poetry?

Maybe I should break this large question into smaller units. What is the role for rhyme and other sound effects in prose? How important is compression or concision? Should prosewriters pay more attention to rhythm or cadence in their language? Is there (or should there be) such a thing as metered prose?

[Deborah Warren]

Maybe not what you have in mind, but I recall an instance: In one of her books Dorothy Sayers has some dialogue where Lord Peter Wimsey realizes that he's been speaking in blank verse.

[nyctom]

Your question begs the assumption that the only poetry is metrical poetry.

[Michael Cantor]

Interesting post. I started, not as a poet, but as a prose writer - short stories - and from the time I was nineteen until into my sixties, that was what I (unsuccessfully) wrote. As time went on, I became more and more obsessed with the sound of each sentence, with the manner in which the sentences played off each other, with perfecting internal rhythm and polishing the perfect paragraph. Such fiction considerations as plot and character were secondary. And a surprising number of my "perfect" sentences were also perfectly iambic.

I wrote more and more, completed less and less, and it finally dawned on me that what I was doing was trying to write poetry. I made an honest man of myself, and have never been happier. At the same time, when I do go back to prose now, I find that if flows more readily. I still have trouble with plot, but maybe in five more years I can marry the two more successfully.

Yes, I feel there is definitely a place for rhythm and cadence in prose, and have always been attracted to writers - Hemingway is a prime example, and Faulkner another, and Carson McCullers and William Humphrey (Home from the Hill), and the young Truman Capote of Tree of Night and Other Voices, Other Rooms - who have that beauty intrinsic in their language.

Another extraordinarily poetical novelist, in a more lyrical sense (and a favorite of Tim's as well, I believe) is Cormac McCarthy. And Peter Matthiesson has written a few novels (Dry Tortugas is one) that, if anything, struck me as trying too hard to blend prose and poetry.

So, yes - a screaming yes! Not only do I think there is room for rhythm and cadence in prose, but I feel that the introduction of poetic tools can make for the very best prose, can elevate good fiction to a higher level.

Michael Cantor

[This message has been edited by Michael Cantor (edited May 24, 2005).]

[Alan Sullivan]

No lariat yet, but I think he'll show up tomorrow...

[Mark Allinson]

Maybe it's time for another prose experiment like the literary movement in the sixteenth century in England, following the work of John Lyly, called "Euphuism".

To save me writing out a description of this prose style, here is a passage from the online "Literary Encyclopedia" (source at the end of the passage).

Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578)

Though from a twenty-first century perspective John Lyly's Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit and its sequel, Euphues and His England may appear lacking in narrative interest, and difficult of access, in their own day the two works created a literary sensation, transforming their author from an obscure Oxford graduate in search of preferment into one of the most prominent and influential writers of the age. Following their first publication in 1578 and 1580 respectively, the two parts ran through over twenty editions before the turn of the century, and continued to appear on the bookstalls for the next thirty years. In large measure their extraordinary impact may be attributed to the distinctive style in which they are written, and which has given the term 'euphuism' to the language. From a literary mode looking back to medieval Latin, based on 'schemes' or figures of sound, Lyly perfected a highly polished instrument, characterized by similarly structured clauses in antithetical pairings, and by the use of syllabic patterning and alliteration to enforce opposition (e.g. “Although hitherto, Euphues, I have shrined thee in my heart for a trusty friend, I will shun thee hereafter as a trothless foe”). Equally fundamental to his idiosyncratic deployment of the mode is the insistent use of illustrative analogies drawn from proverbial wisdom, classical mythology, or the fabulous properties of natural phenomena, and which turn, like the syntactic structure, on some species of contradiction (e.g. “I perceive that love is ... like the apple in Persia, whose blossom savoureth like honey, whose bud is more sour than gall”). The dialectical nature of the style, with its see-saw structure and copious illustration, clearly lends itself to debate (both an educational instrument and a form of polite entertainment in the sixteenth century), and a number of debate topics, of particular interest to an Elizabethan audience, served as Lyly's point of departure in both works, contributing to their immediate contemporary appeal. Source.

Clicke here for an extended passage from the work
Euphues

------------------
Mark Allinson

[This message has been edited by Mark Allinson (edited May 24, 2005).]

[Janet Kenny]

My husband has been a senior book editor (non-fiction) for years and before that was a newspaper journalist and editor. He maintains that the same rules apply to poetry and prose. He's not speaking of meter of course but he thinks that well formed phrases and sentences and the pace and placement of thoughts in either are more or less the same. Compression and concision being central to this process.

He is a much better writer than I am.

Janet

[Janet Kenny]

A snatch from page one of Charles Dickens's Bleak House.
.....
..... Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs, fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwhales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of the shivering little 'prentice boy on the deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog round them as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds."

[Tim Love]

Alan: Is there (or should there be) such a thing as metered prose? - I've read a section of prose that's in a regular meter. And some blank verse (shorn of line-breaks) could be mistaken for metered prose.

More generally, I think that prose could learn a thing or 2 from poetry formalists regarding attention to sound and letters - see http://homepages.tesco.net/~magdtp/fowed.html

[oliver murray]

Quote:

“While the ambivalence promoted by the style enforces an awareness of alternative positions, opening avenues of enquiry rather than inculcating unambiguous moral truths, the imagery, with its insistence upon duality, contributes to the movement away from finality or closure by projecting a view of all aspects of experience as ambivalent and inherently unstable. “

Interesting article, Mark, but one still wonders, reverting to the general subject of this discussion, what someone who can perpetrate a jawbreaking sentence like this would know (or care?) about cadence and compression, or what she finds so admirable in:

“Although hitherto, Euphues, I have shrined thee in my heart for a trusty friend, I will shun thee hereafter as a trothless foe”).

I think “euphusitic” means a highly elaborate way of writing or speaking, but, except in the form of mockery or satire it is hardly effective, much less attractive, prose.

I would say that devious political speeches or academic-type writing of the quality of the above are valuable examples of what to avoid (unless you are a politician, etc.) Prose style was an integral part of the power of essayists s like Addison, Hazlitt and Swift and they plainly gave attention to sound and cadence. Storytelling ability and character creation must be supreme in fiction, and no amount of good prose can make up for the lack of these. If a writer can show character in action effectively and also write as well as, for example, Saul Bellow or James Joyce, or translate Chekov as supremely well as Constance Garnett did, then you are likely to have great and compelling prose. It is interesting how cadenced even apparently artless prose like this is:


“I’ll tell you what did my father in. The third thing was Dummy, that Dummy died.
The first thing was Pearl Harbour. And the second thing was moving to my grandfather’s farm near Wenatchee. That’s where my father finished out his days, except they were probably finished before that.

My Father blamed Dummy’s death on Dummy’s wife. Then he blamed it on the fish. And finally he blamed himself – because he was the one that showed Dummy the ad in Field and Stream for live black bass shipped anywhere in the U.S.

It was after he got the fish that Dummy started acting peculiar. The fish changed Dummy’s whole personality. That’s what my father said..”

(Raymond Carver: “The third thing that killed my father off.”)

Compare with the other end of the continuum, the more obviously “poetic”, with internal rhyme, repetition, word-coinage, inversions, the lot, pretty much everything except lineation.

“SONNEZ!
Smack. She set free sudden in rebound her nipped elastic garter smackwarm against her smackable woman's warmhosed thigh.
--LA CLOCHE! cried gleeful Lenehan. Trained by owner. No sawdust there.
She smilesmirked supercilious (wept! aren't men?), but, lightward gliding, mild she smiled on Boylan.
--You're the essence of vulgarity, she in gliding said.
Boylan, eyed, eyed. Tossed to fat lips his chalice, drank off his chalice tiny, sucking the last fat violet syrupy drops. His spellbound eyes went after, after her gliding head as it went down the bar by mirrors, gilded arch for ginger ale, hock and claret glasses shimmering, a spiky shell, where it concerted, mirrored, bronze with sunnier bronze. “

(James Joyce: Ulysses)