As usual I left the salon with my head buzzing over what we were talking about, this time mostly prose poems, (less so how much I dislike the poem Anthacrite).
So I gave the prose poem point more thought. My basic view is that prose poem is a contradiction, that poems are poems and prose is prose. And my basic rational, hopefully not arbitrary, demarcation is broken lines as a necessary but not sufficient condition for a set of words to count as a poem.
What is prose but coherent sentences and paragraphs without line breaks except for paragraphs. And poetry? Doesn’t it present itself via verse, that is by setting up its lines in a purposeful way, with the breaks going to meaning in more accomplished poems? If so, then on this formal distinction a prose poem is a day night. Free verse doesn’t obviate this distinction for we still have purposeful line endings.
So, beating a dead horse, line breaks are exactly what prose poems give up, ie the basic difference between poetry and prose.
A prevalent justification for subtracting the difference from the distinction is that prose poems can and do have all the key characteristics of poetry like, dense, charged, implicative language, musical rhythm, imagery, metaphor, inverted syntax, multi layered language and so on. But adding back the difference, prose can have these qualities too and that includes prose that doesn’t say it’s poetry or that it’s like poetry.
Clear thinking, I argue, wants to distinguish between poetry as a definable thing and poetry or poetic as descriptors. I noted the song sung by Johnny Tillotson:
Poetry in motion,
See her gentle sway,
Lovely locomotion,
A wave out on the ocean
Could never move that way.
To elaborate on the self evident, a poem is not that which is poetic. It’s a genre whose boundaries are definable and intelligible, maybe something like—this is mine, with doubtless lots of problems, but I’ll give it a shot:
“A coherent set of words intended to be artistic set in broken lines.”
Whether a poem is good or bad is a separate question that presupposes the validity of something like my definition.
We need to guard against the slippage from “this is poetic” to “this is a poem.”
I’m not a philosopher but I argue there’s an important point underlying the issue of prose poems. Labels, distinctions, categories, taxonomies that are helpful aren’t merely arbitrary. They’re how we see, understand and articulate differences that matter.
So as I said, or tried to say in the salon, the issue isn’t, why all this differentiation. If we collapse them all, then obviously chaos. This is elementary. Overlaps and borderline cases are rule-proving or rule-illuminating exceptions. The real question is if the conceptual difference between poetry and prose, even poetic prose, say a prose poem, is worth keeping.
I say in collapsing this distinction we lose sight of a basic principle of setting up words in a functionally generic way, ie line breaks as a necessary condition of poetry. In other words, if poetry conceptually simply merges with poetic, we lose a basic principle of a certain kind of literary genre that differs from others.
It’s not a question of being rigidly formalistic, of ticking off boxes. It’s a matter of seeing things more clearly. Functional categories don’t just group classes of things. They keep differences intact that we’d otherwise be blind to.
The claim that prose poems are poems repudiates the virtue of the distinction between poems and prose. And more so, perhaps an irony here, the notion that a prose poem collapses the distinction should be put together with understanding that it, a prose poem, derives its very meaning from the intelligible difference between the two.
So “proselets” is ok with me.
