I've got a question

[UnderYourSpell]

I've been assured at different times that there is such a thing as Prose Poetry, yet if this is so does that mean that every book written (yes I know some are very poetically written) is actually one long poem? Unless of course the author doesn't chose to call it a poem. So when does prose stop being prose and it's line breaks make it a poem?

 

[Magnetron]

I've been assured at different times that there is such a thing as Prose Poetry, yet if this is so does that mean that every book written (yes I know some are very poetically written) is actually one long poem? Unless of course the author doesn't chose to call it a poem. So when does prose stop being prose and it's line breaks make it a poem?

I view it as more of a range of extremes, like hot and cold or positive and negative.

On a scale of 1 to 10. 1 being 99.999% prose, 1O being 99.999% poem.

Then you can say that poem was prosy or that prose was poemy, but still get away with labeling them as one or the other.

 

[butters]

i'm having trouble understanding your ''does this mean every book ever written...?'' bit

i don't think anyone ever claimed prose poetry = a book of prose. just imagine those dry texts of technical or mundane stuff... not a scrap of poetry in them!

now poetic prose i do get, and i kind of like mag's sliding scale application to the idea, but as far as i'm concerned prose poetry is a poem written not using verse (more commonly associated with ''poetry'') but written in paragraphs and employing poetic elements such as meter, sound-links, emotional content and greater attention to imagery to elevate it above pure prose.

looks like prose, reads like poetry is probably the most concise definition

 

[Tzara]

I've been assured at different times that there is such a thing as Prose Poetry, yet if this is so does that mean that every book written (yes I know some are very poetically written) is actually one long poem? Unless of course the author doesn't chose to call it a poem. So when does prose stop being prose and it's line breaks make it a poem?

The existence/non-existence or possibility of/impossibility of prose poetry is a problem poets and other writers have kicked around for years. Here's my take on prose poetry:

• It can look at lot like flash fiction. Or flash non-fiction. A lot of prose poems are like very short stories. Perhaps there is a bit more imagery than one would find typical of fiction, but otherwise there is not a lot of difference. This is the "prose-poetry-is-what-poets-write-when-they-write-prose" school
• It can look like someone's impressionistic journal--all feelings and emotion and gushy description of some airy impressionistic nothingness. The "well, that was very pretty, but I am not at all sure what the fuck you were talking about" kind of prose poem.
• In my personal experience, the most common form is heavily influenced by Surrealism. These tend to be rather goofy I bet this made more sense if I was stoned kind of narratives. I think English language writers get this drift from the French, who originated the form and who were probably doped out of their minds by absinthe while they invented it.

Let me give you two examples, one of the first type and one of the third:

A Story About the Body
Robert Hass

The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, "I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy," and when he didn't understand, "I've lost both my breasts." The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity -- like music -- withered very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, "I'm sorry. I don't think I could." He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl -- she must have swept them from the corners of her studio -- was full of dead bees.


Source: Human Wishes

This is perhaps my personal favorite of all prose poems. Like a little story, of course, but so vivid. Type 1 in my description above.​

Here's a very different one, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems:

[I am the last . . .]
Charles Simic

.......I am the last Napoleonic soldier. It’s almost two hundred years later and I am still retreating from Moscow. The road is lined with white birch trees and the mud comes up to my knees. The one-eyed woman wants to sell me a chicken, and I don’t even have any clothes on.
.......The Germans are going one way; I am going the other. The Russians are going still another way and waving good-by. I have a ceremonial saber. I use it to cut my hair, which is four feet long.

Source: The World Doesn't Endrose Poems​

 

[UnderYourSpell]

The existence/non-existence or possibility of/impossibility of prose poetry is a problem poets and other writers have kicked around for years. Here's my take on prose poetry:

• It can look at lot like flash fiction. Or flash non-fiction. A lot of prose poems are like very short stories. Perhaps there is a bit more imagery than one would find typical of fiction, but otherwise there is not a lot of difference. This is the "prose-poetry-is-what-poets-write-when-they-write-prose" school
• It can look like someone's impressionistic journal--all feelings and emotion and gushy description of some airy impressionistic nothingness. The "well, that was very pretty, but I am not at all sure what the fuck you were talking about" kind of prose poem.
• In my personal experience, the most common form is heavily influenced by Surrealism. These tend to be rather goofy I bet this made more sense if I was stoned kind of narratives. I think English language writers get this drift from the French, who originated the form and who were probably doped out of their minds by absinthe while they invented it.

Let me give you two examples, one of the first type and one of the third:

A Story About the Body
Robert Hass

The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, "I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy," and when he didn't understand, "I've lost both my breasts." The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity -- like music -- withered very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, "I'm sorry. I don't think I could." He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl -- she must have swept them from the corners of her studio -- was full of dead bees.


Source: Human Wishes

This is perhaps my personal favorite of all prose poems. Like a little story, of course, but so vivid. Type 1 in my description above.​

Here's a very different one, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems:

[I am the last . . .]
Charles Simic

.......I am the last Napoleonic soldier. It’s almost two hundred years later and I am still retreating from Moscow. The road is lined with white birch trees and the mud comes up to my knees. The one-eyed woman wants to sell me a chicken, and I don’t even have any clothes on.
.......The Germans are going one way; I am going the other. The Russians are going still another way and waving good-by. I have a ceremonial saber. I use it to cut my hair, which is four feet long.

Source: The World Doesn't Endrose Poems​

Now that's my problem, I don't see either of those pieces as poems. Poetic yes, but not poems. They are like reading a précis of a book. If this is poetry, why do we have line breaks at all?

 

[Tzara]

Now that's my problem, I don't see either of those pieces as poems. Poetic yes, but not poems. They are like reading a précis of a book. If this is poetry, why do we have line breaks at all?

I think you're mixing two different questions/issues. Your statement "They are like reading a précis of a book." is pretty prescient--a lot of prose poems look/read like some incomplete bit of writing. Why, perhaps, their authors think of them as poems; they are not complete enough to be stories, which they otherwise most resemble.

Here's the things I think you are making assumptions about:

• Poems have line breaks.
• Poems are short.

What I was trying to get at in my earlier post was that prose poems look a lot like stories--either fictional stories or nonfictional ones. There is much confusion (or fighting) about whether some particular bit of writing is a poem, a story, or an article.

As you said, you found my examples "poetic," yet not poems. What do you mean by that?

You seem to be assuming line breaks as essential to poetry. I am not personally convinced that the presence of line breaks should not be a requirement for naming something as poetry, but havng myself tried prose poetry, I'm not sure I'd argue either that prose poems cannot be poems.

Here's the question: What do you mean by your statement "Poetic yes, but not poems"? If something is "poetic" how is it not a poem?

It's a difficult and non-intuitive distinction. I'm not trying to refute your opinion, here, just trying to clarify it for the both of us.

 

[Trixareforkids]

I'm a jump in here (because I can ) to say I used to be with you Annie, I didn't get prose poetry before. To me the line breaks were what made it poetry, then I read SusanSnow: https://www.literotica.com/stories/memberpage.php?uid=1037672&page=submissions, sorry too tipsy to do the cute linky thing, and suddenly I "got" it.

I wish I could explain it better, but her work is undoubtedly poetry to me even though she usually doesn't use line breaks. Line breaks would actually spoil most of her poetry pieces as it would interrupt the flow, the mingling of words/thoughts that happens in her pieces.

I'd read prose poetry before seeing hers and thought that it was as you said Annie, kinda poetic but not really poetry. To me that's probably the difference between a piece we connect with and one we don't. I think prose poetry has to work harder to overcome the lack of traditional poetic formatting, but then you see a piece that just IS poetry to you, and even though you may know that you could not emulate it or format it into more a traditional visual likeness of a poem, it still most definitely is a poem.

I think the question of prose poetry is very much the question of "good" poetry, no matter what qualifiers we espouse to back up our gut feeling, in the end that's what it comes down to, that feeling or connection with a piece that makes it good in our minds. The same is true of prose poetry, despite our own or others' definitions, you just know it when you read it.