Inventing the wheel

[shewhomust]

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 is an extract from His Eyes are Faraway, a fragment by Chaz Brenchley for a Book of the North project. In other words, it started out as prose.

One thing that poetry doesn't have in common with other genres is that you never hear a poem described as "too good to be..." poetry; on the contrary, prose may be the mainstream, but it's still a compliment to compare it to poetry, to call it poetic. Someone defined poetry as "the best possible words in the best possible order" - Google thinks it might have been Coleridge. I'm just pretty sure it was a poet; because the task of any writer is to arrange the best possible words in the best possible order, and sometimes that order will be poetry, and sometimes it will be prose. Chaz Brenchley is a fine example of a writer who chooses his words with care, but is none too pleased to have the resultant prose described as "poetic;": he is Proud to be Prose.


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.

Here is Exhibit 2 again, set out in its original form.

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.

I found it in a Guardian review of Paul Durcan's poetry, which also quoted Durcan as saying:

"I have been asked many times over the years, especially by people who genuinely do not like what I write: 'Why is it that you present prose as poetry?' In my defence ... I have given it a lot of thought through the years, and I am preoccupied with metric structure, as I'm sure anyone who writes poetry is. Everything I've ever published in verse has had to obey rules of metre; if somebody doesn't hear that, then I wonder did I get it right."

In laying this quotation out as prose, I have dropped some capitals from the beginnings of lines (which I don't think is a material alteration) and I have added some punctuation, not always at line breaks. Perhaps this is an unconscious recognition of its metric structure, but if so, the emphasis goes on "unconscious" - it isn't something I can hear. What's more, Durcan associates this issue with criticism, something he is asked about mostly by people who don't like his work. But it isn't necessarily a matter of dislike - one last example:


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 is a poem by Katharine Banner, from her collection [Aerial Photography], published by Mudfog; I like her poetry very much, and I enjoyed hearing her read this poem at last year's Durham Literature Festival. Which being the case, here it is as it should be:

Pulp
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.

It's a pretty anecdote - and, it seems, a true one. I liked it when Katharine Banner told us, as a preamble to her reading, that she really did know the man whose job it was to watch the shredding machine into which books were fed. And I liked it even better when she read her poem, because this was the polished version, the arrangement of words she had decided, with care and consideration, best served her purpose. But would I have liked it less if that final form had been prose rather than poetry?
The question doesn't arise, because this just doesn't happen.
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!

Comments

[menin-aeide.livejournal.com]

I used to think that prose is the "natural" form of spoken language (as Molière put it, we speak in prose and don't even know it). But then I was startled when I came a piece by Octavio Paz in which he said that spoken language is naturally closer to poetry, and that it is prose that imposes a more artificial structure, with paragraphs and standard punctuation and so on. I've come to agree with Paz.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

That's interesting, and sent my thoughts scurrying off in all different directions: the relationship between the spoken and the written language, the relationship between poetry, speech and song, the fact that Moliè's M. Jourdain speaks prose because he is a character in a comedy (if he were in a tragedy of the same period he would speak in verse), and from there to blank verse (which I had consciously excluded from my initial rant), the relationship between poetry consumed at readings and poetry read from the page...

Do you have a reference for that piece? I'd be interested to read it. But as things stand, I think it just confirms my feeling that poetry / prose is not a straight, binary either / or!