Prose Poetry

9 Key excerpts on "Prose Poetry"

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  Prose Poetry

  An Introduction

  • Paul Hetherington, Cassandra Atherton(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  If, as we have indicated, Prose Poetry has frequently been defined as a form always and rather restlessly in opposition to, or undercutting other, more established literary forms and genres, this is a central reason why relatively few critics have been willing to fully recognize the prose poem for its own qualities. It has often been said to occupy a doubtful and in-between literary space, a kind of no-man’s-land. But a great deal of Prose Poetry has been confidently written for a century and a half, and while the form may still be in the process of defining itself, and may sometimes still be subversive of conventional prose and lineated poetry, it is hardly nascent or unformed. It is much more than a form written in opposition to other forms and genres.

  THE FUTURE OF THE PROSE POEM

  It is yet to be seen whether Prose Poetry will claim much of the territory occupied by the contemporary lineated lyric, but there is no question in the last few decades it has claimed some of this territory. It may well claim more as the twenty-first century progresses because (in most of its manifestations), it is a relatively user-friendly and versatile form. Prose poems often function like small, expansive packages of words that, while occasionally employing limited forms of narrative, ask the reader to engage with them immediately and as a whole. They are usually satisfying imaginatively because their emphasis is on connotation rather than denotation, and they also engage readers imaginatively by implicitly asking them to complete the information they supply. Many prose poems address familiar quotidian concerns, but their manner of doing so enables readers to gain new perspectives on situations that are both familiar in their outline and unfamiliar in the way in which they have been inflected poetically.

  Prose Poetry opens up the possibility that writers who would once have been poets, but who have not been schooled in ways of making lineated poems, may become poets by making use of prose as their chosen poetic medium. Certainly, as Prose Poetry mixes registers, moving fairly easily between elevated and demotic language, and as it offers the chance for writers to work impressionistically, metaphorically, and imagistically with prose paragraphs, so it enables prose writers who want to work in short forms an opportunity to expand their range into the poetic. Other very short forms, such as microfiction, are also available to prose writers, but where works of microfiction emphasize the movement of narrative through time—focusing on what happens, albeit in very few words—Prose Poetry tends to emphasize what has happened and will always be happening

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  How to Read a Poem

  • Terry Eagleton(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 2 What is Poetry? 2.1 Poetry and Prose A poem is a fictional, verbally inventive moral statement in which it is the author, rather than the printer or word processor, who decides where the lines should end. This dreary-sounding definition, unpoetic to a fault, may well turn out to be the best we can do. Before we dissect it piece by piece, however, let us note what it doesn’t say, rather than what it does. To begin with, it makes no reference to rhyme, metre, rhythm, imagery, diction, or symbolism and so on. This is because there are plenty of poems which do not use these things, and quite a lot of prose that does. Prose may use internal rhymes, and quite commonly raids the resources of rhythm, imagery, symbolism, word-music, figures of speech, heightened language and the like. Wallace Stevens is rhythmical, but so is Marcel Proust. Virginia Woolf ’s prose is much more metaphorically charged than John Dryden’s poetry, not to mention Gregory Corso’s. There is more rhetorically heightened language in Joseph Conrad than there is in Philip Larkin. It is true that prose does not generally use metre. On the whole, metre, like end-rhymes, is peculiar to poetry; but it can hardly be of its essence, since so many poems survive quite well without it. We are left, then, with line-endings, which the poet herself gets to decide on. Even this is only true up to a point: a particular kind of metre may itself determine where the lines have to end. But the poet gets to choose the metre, at least within certain constraints. A dramatist writing around 1600 was normally expected to use blank verse, while a satirist writing around 1750 would probably find heroic couplets the most appropriate form. 25 Line-endings in poetry may not always signify, but they can always be made to. They can even act as a kind of image, of the kind F. R. Leavis discerns in these lines from John Keats’s ode ‘To Autumn’: And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep Steady thy laden head across a brook .

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  Multiple Discourses, Multiple Meanings: Jeanette Winterson's Language of Multiplicity and Variety

  • Agnieszka Miksza(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Peter Lang Group

    (Publisher)

  1 Between Poetry and Prose: Genres of the Middle 1 Introduction The first part of this chapter aims at emphasizing the most important aspects of the prose poem as a genre. Firstly, it seems crucial to compare and contrast the prose poem with other related genres, namely poetic prose and polyphonic prose. This comparison proves to be indispensable since these three terms are strictly connected with each other, as demonstrated by the presence of numerous dic- tionary entries. This chapter also attempts to outline a brief history of the prose poem as a genre, naming its initiators, major critics and the publications devoted to it. It appears that the genre of the prose poem is often said to undermine the boundary between prose and poetry, which inevitably leads to undermining the notion of “a genre” as such. The next part of this chapter deals with Jeanette Winterson’s oeuvre in the context of prose versus poetry since her works illus- trate an interesting tension between the prosaic and the poetic. This chapter will be an outline of the main features of Winterson’s discourse, namely the use of repetition in various ways combining poetic techniques such as metaphor with elements of storytelling which is abundant in her novels. The author is com- pelled to practice endless storytelling, which is to a great extent repetitive (using refrains, intertextuality, clichés), trying, at the same time, to escape repetition and create unique language which would transcend “language as a prisonhouse of repetition” (Gustar qtd. in Andermahr 55). This chapter also sums up critics’ views on the prosaic/poetic features of Winterson’s works, the relationship between storytelling and poeticity in Winterson’s oeuvre. 1.1 The Prose Poem as a Genre Before elaborating on the prose poem as a genre, the very definition of this term should be explained, as well as differences between the prose poem, poetic prose and polyphonic prose.

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  British Prose Poetry

  The Poems Without Lines

  • Jane Monson(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  In this essay, I will explore that role. During this time of dissatisfaction with the legacy of the previous century, the prose poem as ‘poetry’ in prose brought the opposition of poetry to prose to the fore, fuelling speculation about what each meant in this new century. The form provided a space for the exploration and production of ‘poetry’ unmoored from the constraints of versification, a capacity it shared with free verse. Further, ‘poetry’ in prose form offered a vehicle for capturing the sensation of the modern that seemed to fit the accelerated pace and fragmented sensations of the early twentieth-century city.

  First, how did discussion of the nature of poetry, much of which revolved around the introduction of vers libre , reflect upon the prose poem? Lines are often drawn between poetry and prose to demonstrate that free verse is poetry, not prose, although the meaning of the distinction varies. T.E. Hulme ’s ‘Lecture on Poetry’, given in 1908 to The Poets’ Club in London, provides an influential example of a lecture often deemed foundational to the emergence of Imagism :

  To test the question of whether it is possible to have poetry written without a regular metre I propose to pick out one great difference between the two. I don’t profess to give an infallible test that would enable anyone to at once say: ‘This is, or is not, true poetry’, but it will be sufficient for the purposes of this paper. It is this: that there are, roughly speaking, two methods of communication, a direct, and a conventional language. The direct language is poetry, it is direct because it deals in images. The indirect language is prose, because it uses images that have died and become figures of speech.

  The difference between the two is, roughly, this: that while one arrests your mind all the time with a picture, the other allows the mind to run along with the least possible effort to a conclusion.4

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  Fundamentals of the Art of Poetry

  • Oscar Mandel(Author)
  • 1998(Publication Date)
  • Sheffield Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  Coughing, spluttering, hiccuping. Trying to disgorge their last meal, trying to spew up the apple. 13 We have seen that the quantum, or verse, or breath, can be fairly lengthy—as it is, typically, in Walt Whitman's and in much of Algernon Swinburne's poetry. But the 'prose poem' clearly exceeds the limit. We are 'breathed out' long before it decides to turn. To be sure, many works of undeniable prose, and almost all 'prose poems', exhibit elements we loosely call poetic, among them rhythm, alliteration, rich metaphors and high intensity of emotion. This loose usage (similar to the undifferentiated uses to which we put the word Art itself) allows us to speak of the 'poetic prose' of some very long novels, for instance. But that is very dif-ferent from formalizing a species of literature as 'prose poems'. 13. The second of Two Poems' by D.J. Enright, Times Literary Supplement, 15-21 December, 1989; yet categorized as a prose work in his Under the Circumstances: Poems and Proses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 5. What Is Poetry? 87 Fig. 6. Advertisement for Mulholland Estates in Angeles, June 1989 To sum up, 'prose poems' are brief prose works that, had some-one called them cameos (for instance) at the time they originated, would have filled a concluding chapter in a text on the novel, story and essay without dreaming of become part of the realm of poetry. Cameos are discrete works of literature. But in a significant number of twentieth century poems we find prose chunks (if I may be allowed the unlovely word) embedded in what is other- 88 Fundamentals of the Art of Poetry wise, and on the whole, indubitably poetic work. Consider the fol-lowing two examples of poetic texts, each with its prose block. The first consists of six lines from Allen Ginsberg's 73-line 'America': America save the Spanish Loyalists America Sacco and Vanzetti must not die America I am the Scottsboro boys.

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  Recite and Refuse

  Contemporary Chinese Prose Poetry

  • Nick Admussen(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University of Hawaii Press

    (Publisher)

  This concept of the condensation process of Prose Poetry helps us make sense of the reason why writers and critics who agree that the idea of brevity is somehow involved with the form of prose poems cannot give clear criteria for their length. Prose poems, perhaps, do not need to be demonstrably brief, but can instead be conceptualized as literary works that have undergone a process of concentration: the result might be quite long, as Huang points out. Seeing prose poems in this way, as the record of a thinking and writing process and not any particular class of product—not discernible by its length or width, its sound or appearance— helps us understand how such a wide variety of texts can be categorized under a single genre. In Marjorie Perloff’s terms, Prose Poetry may well be the result of an aesthetic moment that prefers “process to structure.” 17 Accordingly, in defining and talking about Prose Poetry, it could be more valuable to look for processes than it is to look for reliable structures. We might say, for example, that “Peach Flowers” attempts to literalize the Chinese cliché shuo xie jiu xie that is in its title, rather than say that the poem is titled with a familiar set phrase. Exactly how we should interpret these processes—the way we should read after we have replaced static, definitional genre boundaries with animating processes—will be discussed below. Whether figured as a process or a result, condensation is a fundamental part of the definition of poetry as a whole: the Hanyu da zidian, the Great Chinese Character Dictionary, describes poetry as jinglian, concise, succinct. 18 Prose po-etry shares a poetics of condensation with other poetry, a difference from prose possessed by both Prose Poetry and other genres of poetry.

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  Zephaniah

  A Prophetic Drama

  • Paul R. House(Author)
  • 1988(Publication Date)
  • Sheffield Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  As could be expected from its syntactical characteristics, prose is linear in aim. That is, its story line will usually move from a fixed starting point to a definite conclusion. Whether the life of an individual, tribe, or nation is described, prose includes a beginning, middle, and end. Commentary on why the action proceeded as it did is often included, but is always based on the action itself. Prose is therefore objective in purpose and best suited to story. Prose narrative is in no way simplistic, as Robert Alter has conclusively shown. Each story has unique elements that make it creative and artistic. Poetry Poetry plays an undeniably important role in the composition of the Old Testament. Each of the three traditional divisions of the canon contain poetry. Most significant for this study is the predominance of prophetic poetry. Norman Gottwald writes: Lamentation, Obadiah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah are poetic in their entirety (with the exception of superscriptions). The greater parts of Job, Isaiah, Hosea, Joel, and Amos are poetic, and Jeremiah is about one half poetry (829). As Gottwald says, Zephaniah is poetic except for its inscription. This judgment is perhaps the most universally shared aspect of Zephaniah studies. This realization necessitates a study of ancient Hebrew verse. Unlike prose, Hebrew poetry utilizes a number of syntactical schemes. Verbs, nouns, participles, or infinitives may regulate the action of a phrase. Relative pronouns are used sparingly. Any student 2. A Brief Survey of Genre Criticism 31 of Hebrew trained on prose faces a new world when translating poetry. Poetry is also reflective and circular in nature. Objective presentation of a linear event often gives way to subjective statements about feelings and events. For example, 2 Kings 24-25 describes the Babylonian conquest of Judah but Psalm 137 relates the poet's feelings about captivity. While prose is linear, poetry revolves around the reflection of the composer.

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  Creative Writing Guidebook

  • Graeme Harper(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  Journals such as Quick Fiction , Brevity: A Journal for Concise Literary Nonfiction and Sentence, to name only a few, not only embrace such writing, but they make publishing and promoting it a vital part of their missions. 115 10 Structure, Style and Theme 3 . BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT But what exactly do we mean by ‘crossing genres’ in the first place? Is it simply ‘poetic prose’ or ‘prosaic poetry’? In the context of this workshop, crossing genres refers to the writing of literature that uses to good effect the conventions of multiple genres at once, such that it becomes impossible to classify the writing solely as poetry, short fiction, or creative non-fiction. For the sake of discussion, we will offer Prose Poetry, flash fiction, and concise literary non-fiction as representative of the pos-sibilities of crossing genres. Structure and crossing genre Crossing genres suggests a lack of structure, but nothing could be further from the truth. Prose Poetry, flash fiction and other hybrid genres rely heavily on a solid structure. The difference between these genres and others is the lack of a clear definition of what that structure will most likely be in the end. When attempting to explain structure, writers and teachers of writing often resort to architec-tural metaphors – a not entirely inappropriate tack – but good cross-genre writing rarely reminds you of a well-designed building. Perhaps a better way to think of structure in this context is to evoke something more natural, more organic in its design. To borrow a phrase from the great environmen-talist Aldo Leopold, writers should ‘think like a mountain’. Thinking (and writing) like a mountain requires you to heed the subterranean, tap into great tectonic tensions below the surface, and allow the structure of your writing to emerge naturally. Such a process may feel messy and unwieldy at first, but when the energy of a mountain is harnessed and directed towards your writing, powerful literature can emerge.

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  Teaching the Common Core Literature Standards in Grades 2-5

  Strategies, Mentor Texts, and Units of Study

  • Lisa Morris(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Normal everyday speech is spoken in prose and most people think in prose. It is basically the standard style of writing that students come into contact with each day (literature, speeches, broadcasts, etc.) One of my favorite quotes by Mother Teresa is an example of prose: “The poor are very great people. They can teach us so many things.” The language is simple, direct, and leaves the reader with a message. That is not to say that prose writing does not have the elements of craft language that were covered in Chapter 5. On the contrary, it does; the rhyming and rhythmic nature may not be found but creativity certainly is. Effective Teaching Strategies for Prose 1.  Read 2.  Write 3.  Discuss 4.  Integrate technology There are several types of prose: 1. Nonfiction prose —biographies and essays 2. Fictional prose —chapter books, novels, stories 3. Heroic prose —legends and tall tales 4. Prose Poetry —poetry, usually written in the narrative, but not written in verse, unlike much of the poetry students read. Teaching prose means teaching reading with comprehension. Teachers often ask students to name the basic story elements of what they have read: setting, character, problem, and solution. As readers mature in their understanding of these basic elements, teachers want students to read with more depth of meaning and understanding. Students gain this deeper understanding by interpreting the author’s purpose, inferring themes and internal messages and making personal connections. The key is to use a variety of strategies to keep students motivated and interested. The simplest way for me to do that is to make sure I select mentor texts that appeal to my students and that I have studied. Teaching Students to Interpret Prose Orally According to Jim Trelese, “The most common mistake in reading aloud is reading too fast.” Encourage students to read slowly enough for the reader to build mental pictures, also making sure that the text level is appropriate for the reader

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