Joseph wrote:
>Alison, I am
>interested in what you say about your own practice & your lengthening line.
>In my own work, I make a working distinction between long-lined free verse &
>short-lined free verse (more song-like?) that goes back to Donald Justice's
>essay "The Free Verse Line in Stevens." The distinction is not theoretical or
>even psychological but practical & functional.
I was exaggerating a little, I think. I do actually make a distinction
between poetry and prose - so the shorter lined lyrics I lump in with the
longer-lined poems, as distinct from the prose works. And among the
prose works, there are definite distinctions which are probably much more
defined - so there is a long and serious work I am slowly working on,
written in a dense and allusive prose which borrows features not only
from prosaic disorderliness (say Laurence Sterne and others) but also in
a micro sense, from the techniques of poetry (alliteration, attention to
the materiality of the language, sound, rhythm, etc). But still, to my
mind, most definitely prose, not least because of its imagined length.
The others are more straightforward narratives written for young people,
less "serious" literature, which is to say less consciously complex, and
so use the tropes most often recognised as prosaic, ie attention to
sentence structures and narrative logic, perhaps a more linear approach
(certainly the narrative in both is chronological). There is in these
much less pressure on the language: in the "serious" prose work, the
language is working much harder, but still not as highly pressured as
poetry. Which is not to say that prose can't reach that kind of
intensity: it manifestly does - Joyce being the obvious example, but
there are so many others.
The poetry just seems to be looking for a prosaic amplitude, certainly at
the moment. And poetic form permits me - to my mind, anyway - a much
greater arbitrariness, in part because despite its desire for amplitude,
it is not seeking to be inclusive, but exclusive; whereas the prose work
seems to want to include everything. Of course, it can't... But I'm
finding the differences quite intriguing.
But I do have the feeling that the different activities use different
parts of my brain, that qualitively somehow their processes diverge.
That there is another kind of rationality at work.
Not sure this makes any sense!
Best
Alison
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