I can’t find Mr Linky, but the prompt comes from here.
This is a very long winded way of asking a question (above) that has always troubled me. Because, and I am being honest here, when it comes to poetry and prose, I don’t really know the difference.
Good poetry, in my opinion, is just good prose with frequent line breaks. Presenting prose as poetry somehow adds a certain literary credibility to the same set of words. Although it also enhances the risk of artistic ridicule. Poetry is simultaneously a more arrogant form of expression and a potentially suicidal one than is prose.
I responded to a challenge that required a 144 word prose response to one line in a poem from Amy Woolard which said ‘what does it matter that the stars we see are already dead’, and my initial (144 word) response was …..
*
What does it matter that I no longer bother
To look at the sky
That there’s no sort of sadness
Can still make me cry
It turns out there’s nothing
That money can’t buy
That I have no more questions
But I still don’t know why
What does it matter that the stars we see
Are already dead
This book we read
Had already been read
From the scars I carry
I’ve already bled
Jesus rose from the grave
And immediately fled
He’ll not give us this day
Our daily bread
What does it matter that the mountain we climb
Is no longer so tall
That the atom we study
Is no longer so small
That the walls that protect us
Might so easily fall
That the God that we prey to
Won’t answer our call
What does it matter?
Nothing matters at all
*
Now clearly that’s not prose, but nor is it poetry. What Amy has written is quite beautiful, of course, but I still question if it were represented as follows, would it still be poetry or would it be prose?
*
I can’t love them if their hands aren’t all tore up from something, guitar strings, kitchen knives & grease or burns from heaving the window ACs onto their crooked old sills, come June.
Fighting back.
That porchlight’s browned inside with moth husks again & I can’t climb a ladder to save my life, i.e., the world spins. Even when it’s lit, it’s half ash. Full-drunk under a half-moon & I’m dazed
We’re all still here. Most of us, least. For the one & every girl gone, I sticker gold stars behind my front teeth so I can taste just how good we were. I swear I can’t love them if they can’t fathom why an unlit ambulance on a late highway means good luck. I hold my cigarette-smoking arm upright like I’m trying to keep blood from rushing to a cut. What’s true is my shift’s over & I’m here with you now & I’m wrapped up tight on the steps like a top sheet, like the morning paper
Before it’s morning look up & smile. What does it matter that the stars we see are already dead? If that’s the case well then the people are too. Alive is a little present I give myself once a day. Baby, don’t think I won’t doll up & look myself fresh in the eyes, in the vermilion pincurl of my still heart & say: It’s happening again
*
Anyway, I wrote a second response to the prompt which, though precisely 144 words, still fails really to qualify as either poetry or prose. Just a few words strung together.
*
We are sitting on a mountaintop, you understand. The air is thin and our brains are compensating for the lack of oxygen by shutting down certain non-essential functions.
Logic is often the first thing to go under these circumstances.
It’s difficult to say whether the dope we are smoking or the romanticism of the campfire into which we gaze is enhancing our reality, or placing chemical limitations upon it.
“What does it matter that the stars we see are already dead?” I ask, deliberately staring into the heavens, “or that those that are born beyond our event horizon shall remain forever invisible?”
You forcibly exhale a long arrow of smoke, and I watch as the very idea of it evaporates and surrenders itself to the cosmos.
“That’s a difficult question,” you respond, “but what is your favourite flavour of ice cream?”
“Chocolate,” I say.
*
If you are still reading at this point, and I don’t know why you would be, have a listen to the following, from J.P. Donleavy, one of last century’s great masters of prose, and tell me if it’s actually poetry or not.
Richmond Road 
I’ve heard this argued about, Richmond. Is it poetry or broken up prose? But when I read Woolard’s poem written as prose, I found something was lost, because those broken up lines of poetry force you to pause, if not to take a breath, then to move your eyes to the next lne and in the very motion reflect for a heartbeat. To me that’s where poetry lies, in the heartbeat. And as many reams that have been written about it, we simply know poetry when we read it. Can’t explain it better than that. Well, that’s my two cents anyways!
I went ahead and added your post link to Mr. Linky, btw. Thanks for alerting me. Appreciate your joining us on dVerse. As I said in the comments, I enjoyed both your prosery and poetic feats! 😀
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Yes, I know what you mean. I suppose I recognise quality prose when it has a poetic feel to it.
On occasions I have done the opposite – find a piece of prose that I admire and add some line breaks before presenting it as poetry. Very few people see it then as anything other than poetry.
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You’re right about quality prose sometimes having a poetic feel to it. When I read Faulkner or Cormac McCarthy, for ex., sometimes it seems just as poetic as a T.S. Eliot poem which if you wrote as prose would destroy it somehow. I’m thinking The Wasteland or Prufrock.
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All good writing, or perhaps O mean
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I think I just sent something by mistake. But I meant to say that all good writing, or perhaps just great writing, has a lyrical feel to it – a sort of tune that you can almost hum – it’s as though the words are carried by something else – a kind of mist that drifts through the reader but leaves this faint perfume.
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Yeah!! To all of the above. 😃
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The border between poetry and prose is such a hard one… there is definitely things that are nothing but poetry and we have prose that is nothing but prose (for instance law-text)… but it is hard to draw the line.
As for the final 144 word prose I think you did great, I like the humorous conclusion
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I’m not totally sure what this post is all about … but to me, prose is, as you put it … Just a few words strung together. (Oftentimes MANY words!)
Now, generally speaking, one would hope those words strung together SAY something, but regrettably, this is not always true. And one has wasted a small part of their lifetime looking for a message that isn’t there.
Whereas, IMO, poetry sort of “sums it all up” in a neat and uncluttered way.
JMO.
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Yes, fair enough. But there is something about some poetry that really irks me. It’s as though the writer somehow believes that a few line spaces here and there and the removal of a bit of grammar automatically provides gravitas and mystery to something that is still just a bunch of words thrown in a vaguely similar direction.
Great prose is the equal of great poetry, in my opinion, but bad poetry is immeasurably worse than bad prose.
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Oh yes … I certainly agree that some poetry can be as you describe. In fact, IMO, there some (so-called) “great poets” that fit this category.
Just a sidenote — I personally appreciate poetry that I don’t have to “figure out” what the poet is trying to express. I don’t deny that a little mental gymnastics is OK — even good– because that’s part of the charm of poetry. But when I have to read a composition several times to “absorb” the message? Nope. Not worth it.
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Maybe. I think the whole point of poetry, and art in general for that matter, is to send you a message that you feel deeply but cannot actually explain. That’s not to say that it is in code, but that the art itself couldn’t be expressed otherwise. The only reason that the artist sends it in the form it is is that they themselves could not express it any other way.
Many ‘poets’ seem to think that it’s all about being clever, when nothing could be further from the truth. Cleverness is not art.
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I went through this once over, and it came across as poetry without linebreaks–too overstated to be prose, too long to be poetry (although some poetry goes one forever…)
I think the video that went with this was far more interesting and poetically illustrated than the words that came along for the ride. But then what do I know; I just realized that for me, anyway, most of Frost’s early work was just stories with interesting linebreaks, and not much anything else. Scandalous as that might sound…
My idea about poetry is it needs to be concise, stick to the path, and at some point grab you by the throat gently but firmly.
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I cannot tell you how much I hate this new efficient way of working. I’ve written an answer four times and every time it dumps me. No, I didn’tlike the poem, it was too wordy, too long, and overdressed. The video was nice, though.
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Hang on … are you talking about J.P.? It was prose, not poetry!
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Read ‘The Gingerman’ or ‘A Fairytale of New York’, Judy. Brilliant prose …
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