Let's not leave out poems that move back nd forth between verse and
prose--I'm hardly the only one that does this. For me the determination is
largely a matter of the music (music as motivating force), sometimes
marking changes in emotive content sometimes not, so that even in what
begins and ends as a letter, say, there are outbreaks of verse.
To complicate matters, many Spanish-language poets write in "versiculos,"
paragraph-long to multi-page length lines, usually not justified. In the
Cuban poet José Koser's work of the last decade, some of which for my sins
I've agreed to translate, there are many poems that consist of one long
versiculo. José doesn't consider them prose poems, which I don't think he's
ever written, but there are plenty of Spanish-language poets who write in
versiculos and also compose prose poems. Kent is I think more knowledgeable
about this than I am and could probably clarify. (Glad you're here, Kent)
The motivation that preceeds the form (using the term in its narrow sense)
seems to be a very individual matter--what's prose and what's verse being
individual to the poet, and also to the moment. Why does Olson write "3rd
Letter on Geroges, Unwritten," in prose, and why, like the other prose in
Maximus, is it not fully justified?
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