[dean peterson]

There's an odd implication in that dreaded poetry workshop critique that states "your poem is simply prose broken into lines" or something to that effect.

So many great writers out there (some poets even) where does one start? In answer to your question Janice, though, two people from Nebraska sprang to mind: Loren Eiseley, Wright Morris.

[Janice D. Soderling]

There's an odd implication in that dreaded poetry workshop critique that states "your poem is simply prose broken into lines

Ah, but they never write, "In that dreaded poetry workshop critique 'your poem is simply beautiful prose broken into lines'."

Examples, Dean? A sentence or two, or a paragraph?

[Seree Zohar]

pages and pages of it are readable on amazon, J.
http://www.amazon.com/Fugitive-Piece...der_0679776591
Some sections are more 'regular' prosey, but the overall impression is of reading a book of poetic prose. It's not suprising: the author also had two books of poetry published before the novel.

[dean peterson]

Only a couple minutes here Janice, so I won't type any Morris or Eiseley, but here is a link to an essay by Lia Purpura, titled Being of Two Minds (someone else I thought of immediately when I read your question).

http://www.bu.edu/agni/essays/print/...4-purpura.html

[Janice D. Soderling]

I'm certainly not about to look any gift horses in the mouth and all contributions are welcome.

But especially I am looking forward to finding some "high art", an isolated sentence or two that one can savor, even torn from its context, and perhaps a brief explication telling why it works so well for the you who suggested it.

Of course, it isn't an order (god forbid), just a shivering little wish sent on a cold and rainy day from the north where winter will soon have us physically and mentally snowed-in again.

PS. And perhaps a tag telling who wrote and/or translated it? I think I recognize Nabokov above; the text is indeed well-writ and holds one's interest--but musical?

Consider the poetry in John Steinbeck's opening para of "The Grapes of Wrath", more poetry than we find in a lot of poems--the rhythm, the repetition, the parallels, imagery, metaphor (green bayonets), personification (rains came gently, protect themselves), the sensory quality.

To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. The plows crossed and recrossed the rivulet marks. The last rains lifted the corn quickly and scattered weed colonies and grass along the sides of the roads so that the gray country and the dark red country began to disappear under a green cover. In the last part of May the sky grew pale and the clouds that had hung in high puffs for so long in the spring were dissipated. The sun flared down on the growing corn day after day until a line of brown spread along the edge of each green bayonet. The clouds appeared, and went away, and in a while they did not try any more. The weeds grew darker green to protect themselves, and they did not spread any more. The surface of the earth crusted, a thin hard crust, and as the sky became pale, so the earth became pale, pink in the red country and white in the gray country.

Cross posted with Dean.

[Michael Cantor]

Here is the opening of Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country:

There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it. The road climbs seven miles into them, to Carisbrooke; and from there, if there is no mist, you look down on one of the fairest valleys of Africa. About you there is grass and bracken and you may hear the forlorn crying of the titihoya, one of the birds of the veld. Below you is the valley of the Umzimkulu, on its journey from the Drakensberg to the sea; and beyond and behind the river, great hill after great hill; and beyond and behind them, the mountains of Ingeli and East Griqualand.


The grass is rich and matted, you cannot see the soil. It holds the rain and the mist, and they seep into the ground, feeding the streams in every kloof. It is well-tended, and not too many cattle feed upon it; not too many fires burn it, laying bare the soil. Stand unshod upon it, for the ground is holy, being even as it came from the Creator. Keep it, guard it, care for it, for it keeps men, guards men, cares for men. Destroy it and man is destroyed.


Where you stand the grass is rich and matted, you cannot see the soil. But the rich green hills break down. They fall to the valley below, and falling, change their nature. For they grow red and bare; they cannot hold the rain and mist, and the streams are dry in the kloofs. Too many cattle feed upon the grass, and too many fires have burned it. Stand shod upon it, for it is coarse and sharp, and the stones cut under the feet. It is not kept, or guarded, or cared for, it no longer keeps men, guards men, cares for men. The titihoya does not cry here any more.


The great red hills stand desolate, and the earth has torn away like flesh. The lightning flashes over them, the clouds pour down upon them, the dead streams come to life, full of the red blood of the earth. Down in the valleys women scratch the soil that is left, and the maize hardly reaches the height of a man. They are valleys of old men and old women, of mothers and children. The men are away, the young men and the girls are away. The soil cannot keep them any more.

[Alex Pepple]

::Slightly off-topic:: & for all of you with a keen or even passing interest in good prose writing, this year's flash fiction workshop is coming soon to the neighborhood's Fiction Forum!

...Alex

[Chris Childers]

The opening of The Sound and the Fury, part 3:

The day dawned bleak and chill, a moving wall of gray light out of the northeast which, instead of dissolving into moisture, seemed to disintegrate into minute and venomous particles, like dust that, when Dilsey opened the door of the cabin and emerged, needled laterally into her flesh, precipitating not so much a moisture as a substance partaking of the quality of thin, not quite congealed oil. She wore a stiff black straw hat perched upon her turban, and a maroon velvet cape with a border of mangy and anonymous fur above a dress of purple silk, and she stood in the door for a while with her myriad and sunken face lifted to the weather, and one gaunt hand flac-soled as the belly of a fish, then she moved the cape aside and examined the bosom of her gown.

The gown fell gauntly from her shoulders, across her fallen breasts, then tightened upon her paunch and fell again, ballooning a little above the nether garments which she would remove layer by layer as the spring accomplished and the warm days, in color regal and moribund. She had been a big woman once but now her skeleton rose, draped loosely in unpadded skin that tightened again upon a paunch almost dropsical, as though muscle and tissue had been courage or fortitude which the days or the years had consumed until only the indomitable skeleton was left rising like a ruin or a landmark above the somnolent and impervious guts, and above that the collapsed face that gave the impression of the bones themselves being outside the flesh, lifted into the driving day with an expression at once fatalistic and of a child’s astonished disappointment, until she turned and entered the house again and closed the door.

The earth immediately about the door was bare. It had a patina, as though from the soles of bare feet in generations, like old silver or the walls of Mexican houses which have been plastered by hand. Beside the house, shading it in summer, stood three mulberry trees, the fledged leaves that would later be broad and placid as the palms of hands streaming flatly undulant upon the driving air. A pair of jaybirds came up from nowhere, whirled up on the blast like gaudy scraps of cloth or paper and lodged in the mulberries, where they swung in raucous tilt and recover, screaming into the wind that ripped their harsh cries onward and away like scraps of paper or of cloth in turn. Then three more joined them and they swung and tilted in the wrung branches for a time, screaming. The door of the cabin opened and Dilsey emerged once more, this time in a man’s felt hat and an army overcoat, beneath the frayed skirts of which her blue gingham dress fell in uneven balloonings, streaming too about her as she crossed the yard and mounted the steps to the kitchen door.