[Julie]

Joan Houlihan over at Web Del Sol wrote a fine article a few months ago that bemoaned the flat prosiness of so much current verse. I do not have a link to the article, if it indeed still exists.

I think of it because our esteemed hostess, Dorianne Laux, provided many of the counter-examples Ms. Houlihan used--poetry that is distinguishable as poetry.

Formal verse has more tools at its disposal for avoiding being mistaken for prose: rhyme, meter, regular stanzaic breaks. So formal verse is, I think, the safer choice, not for recognition from other poets, but for recognition from non-poets.

Does this seem a fair statement? And how concerned should we be that our poetry be distinguished, and distinguishable, from prose? Are there any free verse masters we could name who wrote prose with linebreaks?

Julie

[Peter K]

Julie, in fact Joan has just published Part 3 of this subject at WDS. The address follows (where one can find links to Parts 1 & 2 as well):
http://webdelsol.com/f-bostoncomment.htm

Joan also has set up a listserv that interested readers may join, if they wish to continue the discussion/debate with Joan (and others). But it will be fun to see the discussion joined here on Eratosphere, as well.

One of the tenets that Joan seems to hold to is that one can tell poetry from prose, in that poetry will use one or more poetic devices . . . many of which are attributes of formal verse. Their use in free verse should be expected; maybe just not in the proscribed ways expected in formal verse.

I will offer a suggestion for anyone interested in free verse that goes beyond prose . . . The Gettysburg Review. Usually excellent work shows up there each issue; including some wonderful narrative work . . . which most definitely is NOT prose in the hands of poets like Robert Wrigley. Here is a website address for the online GR:
http://www.gettysburg.edu/academics/...iew/slctn.html

PETER

[MEHope]

Julie,

I don't remember ever reading anything about prose writers being concerned their works are distinguishable from poetry.

No thoughts just this aside.




------------------
~~Mary

[Tim Love]

I think the answer to "is it poetry or prose?" depends on the why you're asking the question. If you're a poetry judge, or making an anthology for children, or if you're selecting a text for a univ exam question, or if you're censor in a repressive regime, or if you lived in 17th century England, etc, the rules are likely to be different. Also some cultures are more prepared to allow the possibility of "poetic prose" than others. Some notes are at http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~tpl/texts/lines.html

One more recent way to find out if a text is really poetry or prose is to people to read the text while they're being brain-scanned. If activity shifts from the verbal area to the spatial processing area, there's a chance that the text is poetic.

[graywyvern]

Originally posted by Tim Love:
One more recent way to find out if a text is really poetry or prose is to people to read the text while they're being brain-scanned. If activity shifts from the verbal area to the spatial processing area, there's a chance that the text is poetic.

i'm so glad science has solved that question ONCE & FOR
ALL. now we can dispense with the need for knowledgeable
editors, any brain hooked up to the machine will work!

[Gary Keenan]

Two things occur to me, which I may elaborate on at a later date.

One is the "chopped up prose" syndrome--not merely the instances of occurence, but the instances of that critical judgement as well. For it seems to me that breaking well-wrought prose into lines of poetry is in fact a legitimate poetic technique. Of course, bad prose or bad lines of poetry are other matters. However, I don't think poets have special gifts that only metered verse can exemplify. Prose can do just about anything that poetry can do, on the page or in performance. Meter is just as likely to be flat and unimaginative, if not moreso (because of the difficulty composing in meter).

The other thing is the mention of a "safe" choice. I don't value safety over risk, ease over difficulty, or accessibility over obscurity. As reader and writer I'm much more attracted to dangerous pursuits than safe ones. And in some ways, the unambitious prosaic verse that Joan Houlihan decries is a safe route. In my experience, creativity is a confrontation with impending failure, and now and then trumping it. But maybe that's just me.

Gary

Originally posted by Julie:
Joan Houlihan over at Web Del Sol wrote a fine article a few months ago that bemoaned the flat prosiness of so much current verse. I do not have a link to the article, if it indeed still exists.

I think of it because our esteemed hostess, Dorianne Laux, provided many of the counter-examples Ms. Houlihan used--poetry that is distinguishable as poetry.

Formal verse has more tools at its disposal for avoiding being mistaken for prose: rhyme, meter, regular stanzaic breaks. So formal verse is, I think, the safer choice, not for recognition from other poets, but for recognition from non-poets.

Does this seem a fair statement? And how concerned should we be that our poetry be distinguished, and distinguishable, from prose? Are there any free verse masters we could name who wrote prose with linebreaks?

Julie

[Christopher Mulrooney]

Ferlinghetti, in his great populist manifestos, says "most modern poetry is prose", and calls for the duende, which to Keats was "the goblin on the heath" (in reference to Edmund Kean), to revive it.

I had not known prose
had done-in so many
Lost in the city wastelands of T.S. Eliot
in the prose masturbations of J. Alfred Prufrock
in the Four Quartets that can't be played
on any instrument
and yet is the most beautiful prose of our age
Lost in the prose wastes of Ezra Pound's Cantos
where aren't canti
because they can't be sung by anyone

and he goes on about Marianne Moore, Karl Shapiro, William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell, etc., and about it being "time to admit that industrial civilization is bad for earth and man, and forthwith set about dismantling it!", which is a way of saying "free your mind of your idols if you would write poetry."

Once I asked Arnold Schoenberg's teaching assistant, Leonard Stein, why orchestras don't play Milton Babbitt's music. "Because they can't!", he said, or "because they cant!"

None of which, I'm sure, has anything to do with Joan Houlihan's complaint.

[robert mezey]

That's really something, Ferlinghetti criticizing
the verse of Pound, Eliot, Williams etc! ---a man
who couldn't write a good line of verse if his life
were on the line. He's not worthy to tie their
shoelaces. But enough yakking about poetry. Let
me post two modern poems in free verse, both of
them great poems, I think, and both of them in
powerful verse, which really moves, in which the
lines as lines mean something:

THE SNOW MAN

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

* * * *

DEDICATION FOR A PLOT OF GROUND

This plot of ground
facing the waters of this inlet
is dedicated to the living presence of
Emily Dickinson Wellcome
who was born in England, married,
lost her husband and with
her five year old son
sailed for New York in a two-master,
was driven to the Azores;
ran adrift on Fire Island shoal,
met her second husband
in a Brooklyn boarding house,
went with him to Puerto Rico,
bore three more children, lost
her second husband, lived hard
for eight years in St. Thomas,
Puerto Rico, San Domingo, followed
the oldest son to New York,
lost her daughter, lost her "baby,"
seized the two boys of
the oldest son by the second marriage,
mothered them--they being
motherless--fought for them
against the other grandmother
and the aunts, brought them here
summer after summer, defended
herself here against thieves,
storms, sun, fire,
against flies, against girls
that came smelling about, against
drought, against weeds, storm-tides,
neighbors, weasels that stole her chickens,
against the weakness of her own hands,
against the growing strength of
the boys, against wind, against
the stones, against trespassers,
against rents, against her own mind.

She grubbed this earth with her own hands,
domineered over this grass plot.
blackguarded her oldest son
into buying it, lived here fifteen years,
attained a final loneliness and--

If you can bring nothing to this place
but your carcass, keep out.




[This message has been edited by robert mezey (edited June 15, 2001).]

[SteveWal]

I suspect that Ferlinghetti was talking about something other than what we usually call prose. I can see why some people have a problem with Eliot, though - great poet, up there with the best - but basically a glass-half-empty sort of person. You get the feeling that he was naturally drawn to a kind of pessimism about humanity, whereas Ferlinghetti for all his faults (I'm not much of a fan, though I like a few of the Coney Island poems) is an optimist. And that's not just to do with politics, it's to do with temperament.

I agree with Gary about risk, though. What makes a good poem for me is that it can skirt the edge between sense and nonsense, verse and prose, deep and shallow. I think Robert's two choices are great poems, by the way. I'd hate to choose between the two.

------------------
Steve Waling

[Solan]

I'd have to check out Borges for examples of poetry which is "prose with line breaks" - I think he wrote some.

I come here as a poetry neophyte, and offer a neophyte view: Poetry is about capturing. It captures one single idea, and spins it out with all the relevant techniques of language: Metaphor, phrases, organization into stanzas and breaking into lines.

There are things published as poetry which are mere prose in which the author put in line breaks "because he could" - no other discernible reason. I think that is beyond the limits of poetry; it is not poetry.

It is a bit like whipped cream: There are many ways of whipping cream, but a half-hearted stir with a spoon is not sufficient.

The question underlying this thread seems to be one of demarcation. But do we want a sharp demarcation, or is a fuzzy one sufficient? I would go for the latter, since I think a sharp demarcation criterion is impossible. Sharp demarcation criteria are impossible with most concepts, so why should poetry be singled out with a demand that it be sharply demarked?


------------------
--

Svein Olav
http://nonserviam.com/solan/