Inventing the wheel

Disclaimer: I was talking about poetry in the context of genre definitions: from which it must be evident that poetry is a genre about which I speak as an outsider. Perhaps, as so often when an outsider speaks of genre, there is nothing new in what follows. Regard this, then, as an attempt to clarify in my own mind, some aspects of the question What is the difference between poetry and prose?

Once upon a time, this was easy: poetry followed a fixed form. It rhymed and scanned. The wider your geographical and historical range, the more equivalents you'll need to add to that statement: it rhymed (or alliterated) and / or scanned (in feet, or stresses or syllables) or did something else entirely, but you could spot poetry because the shape of the words did something identifiable. You don't need to understand this, for example:

A Elbereth Gilthoniel,
Silivren penna miriel
O menel aglar elenath!
Na-chaered palan-diriel
O galadhremmin ennorath,
Fanuilos, le linnathon
nef aear, si nef aearon!

to know that it's a poem.
But it's a long time since poetry was freed from these formal constraints. Poets can choose to use rhyme and metre, or they can choose not to; rhyme and metre are seen as attributes of verse, but not necessarily of poetry (there are elements of condescension implicit in expressions like "light verse", but let's not go there). We used to joke that you can recognise poetry because the lines don't reach the edge of the page, but is that really all there is to it? If so, all it takes to convert poetry into prose, and vice versa, is a change of layout. Here's an experiment -

Exhibit 1:

"Rain is coming," he says,
though the sky in daylight is baked almost to white.
"Rain after drought, so long a drought;
and oh! so welcome the rain."

His hands caress me, but not his eyes.
His eyes are faraway.

"We are a people without a land," he says,
"drained by history, made pale by loss."

Even his fingers
drumming like rain on my skin
seem dislocated,
as though they bent
in other ways than mine.

I bleed for him; but not he bleeds,
no. He is too careful.

( Exhibit 1 - prose or poetry? )

Exhibit 2:

"Don't lecture me about lint on the baize - I am ninety-six years of age. What an old woman like me needs - more than a meal, or medicine,
or a life sentence in a nursing home - is seventeen days in front of the television in my own home, watching the World Snooker Championship in the Crucible in Sheffield. Although I like rugby, I am a snooker fanatic.

( Exhibit 2 - prose or poetry? )

Exhibit 3:

You're probably aware of this sad fact: that excess poetry is pulped and used for padding Jiffy bags. A man I know, who works the shredder, tells me each time we meet, (with some sly pleasure) who's getting mulched that week.
From him to me to you - the line of communication's straight - the pulping machine has no respect for even the stuff the most famous of famous names creates.
Take this as you will: hope for us all; no hope for any of us, at all.

( Exhibit 3 - prose or poetry? )

There are no "prose readings" at which a group of authors read selections from their slim volumes of short prose pieces, no small presses specialising in short prose pieces (precious few specialising in prose at all, but that's another matter!). I'm not talking about novelists signing their latest novel, I'm not talking about short stories, not really even about short-short stories. But the sort of subject matter you find in poetry - descriptions, anecdotes, aperçus, if that's not too pretentious a term - what do you do with these, as a writer, if your voice is for prose?
Until recently I would have left that as a rhetorical question, but now I have an answer of sorts: this is something that the internet does really well. Here's a wonderful description of an ordinary day's shopping from heres_luck, and here's jimfl, seeing ghosts. Reading each of those brightened up my day, each was a comfortable length to read on-line, and each seemed as perfectly formed as they would have been had the words been chosen for more obviously formal reasons (i.e. as poetry).
So now all we have to work out is how writers can make a living out of this stuff...

Edit: 16.04.2005: truepenny may have cracked it: she has sold a poem!. And she explains:

"You have to understand, I'm not a poet. I don't pretend to be a poet. Sometimes, though, my flash fiction is um, well, not so much with the narrative drive, and so I stick line-breaks in and call it poetry. I submit it because, well, I'm a professional writer and that's what I do with the stuff I write. I never in a million years expected I'd actually sell it."

Prose-writers, it can be done!