Mark Weiss wrote:
> Other English examples, aside from Peter's?
Assume we're talking prose & poetry co-existing in a single longish piece, not
necessarily in a haibun tradition, worth looking at are Douglas Oliver's "An
Island That is All the World" where the autiobiographical prose sections set the
scenes, geographical, social & emotional, out of which the poems arise -
predict & postscript - both paced & nuanced beautifully (to use a deserved,
old-fashioned word) and some of John Riley's prose pieces, especially "Between
Strangers", left unfinished at his untimely death, where the poems I recall
(long time since I spent time with them) seemed to arise from a quite different
place than the prose...but my waffleometer is ringing - will reread & contradict
myself later if needed..
Pete.
ps and there's much more besides, Doug Oliver's earlier "In the Cave of
Suicession" & "The Diagram Poems" are fascinating genre-benders. His (DO's)
statement on genre in the intro to his selection in Etruscan Books VIII is lucid
and touches on some other recent discussion:
"[writing of the books that were to make up his Arrondissements project] Since I
have little control over the process by which these books come to life, I
deliberately refuse to decide in advance what genre to adopt - whether more
broadly accessible or more tightly experimental, whether located in self or more
decenteredly. This can easily be misunderstood. I have abandoned none of the
avant-garde's long fought-for positions, nor its current interest in verbal
density and texture, nor my loyalty to its practioners. But the avant-garde is
always, in hindsight, a genre. The Arrondissements project keeps obliging me to
cross stylistic borders. Our minds, after all, have many genres of activity,
and the genres of life found in a great city surpass our mere individuality to
an extent that no one approach to writing can match." (p36)
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