There’s a whale shark that’s mostly shadow and moves like a storm, threatening and retreating, and eels doodling like a dirty finger drawing on the other side of the acrylic glass, and gaudy fish dollops of cast-off colors too bright to be part of anything larger we’d believe is real, and dolphins that come and go as they please, deigning occasionally to hover close and eye with contempt we baggy, clumsy mouth breathers, and seals not wholly of either world of air or water, somehow sleek and fat at the same time… but look at the lowly schooling sardines, flashing wet coins now a sheet of lightning, now a storm of oily silver, now what from some angle is a face, and once even a perfect churning sphere, each embodying their simple logic: if it’s small feed; if it’s large flee; look to the you next to you and do what they do.
[pad 4.5 - 6/27/09]
What separates prose poetry from prose, you’d asked? For a few: intensity of imagery, condensed energy, completeness despite relative brevity.
I think back to one critic who very elaborately articulated the … hm … transformation? necessary in a poem. The fact that at some point you must be transported, flipped on your head, in order to catch the meaning.
Now I’ve got to go dig that up. Sloppy commenting, I know.
Hm, I guess it was Barfield’s “felt change of consciousness” I was referring to.
I don’t see these characteristics as limited to prose poetry. Don’t they exist in poetic prose? There are all kinds of theories of leaps and jumps and what have you, but in the end they can all be found in what is generally agreed to be fiction (not to mention many of them existing in creative nonfiction of various kinds).
Unless you find something really amazing, I think the answer’s going to end up that there’s verse and prose and other definitions for poetry of other kinds constantly fail. At least that’s been my experience.
Right, I don’t expect to come to any conclusion, or to be authoritative, but I do think its worth looking at, and supposing, if only for the mental exercise.
So, to further suppose, I could _guess_ that such intensity of poetic language might be overwhelming, or unsustainable, or tiresome, when applied to a novel-length work of fiction, even to an essay or short story. Just a guess.
I’d guess there’s some outside limit at which such things can be sustained (that’s part of my problem with long poems, actually), but then we get into having a definition of poetry that is tied to length, don’t we?
Heheh, I thought of this during my weekend drive and figured if you wanted to write a logical argument you’d have to start with verse, and move slowly, carefully toward prose.
Length? Try to argue that the great classic epics are not poems. Of course, someone has made that argument already (was it Poe?).