Alison writes:

>There are short stories by James Kelman or Alasdair Gray which
> seem to me to be prose poems, although they are called "short stories".

To which I'd add Tom Leonard's prose (?) 'piece', "Honest". (And single out
from among Jim Kelman's work the relatively early short story, "Nice To Be
Nice" -- his only work in relatively dense Glasgow dialect.) Which
particular Alasdair Gray were you thinking of? I'm not sure his work (for
me, anyway), good as it is, falls within the category of "prose poetry".

Which would link to your next point (as my particular pick of Kelman, and
reservations about Gray connect with this):

> There is some shadow border which is surely one of readerly perception;
> perhaps a poem or that which is called a poem seems to demand a more
> charged expectation of language. But I'm really not sure about that!

Yes -- both "more charged expectations of language" (how we read the
piece) -- and more charged language itself (shades of Pound), which is
something in The Piece Itself.

My personal pick of prose-as-poetry would be _Wuthering Heights_, needing to
be read with the same attention as we devote to lyric poetry. And the final
lines, on those unquiet sleepers in the quiet earth...

But it's not a new debate: Aristotle way back in the _Poetics_ says not all
verse is poetry, and Sidney in the late 1580s in _The Apology/Defense_, says
Yes, and further some prose is poetry. Which suggests that there are
slippages not only synchronically but diachronically. For Aristotle, the
possibility of prose as a medium for "art" simply didn't enter the argument
(how he dealt with Plato as a result, we can only imagine. Or maybe that
was why he ignored Art Prose!). For Sidney, poetry is still predominantly
metric, but prose can't be ignored (as he himself demonstrated in
_Arcadia_).

Since then we've had The Novel. And the break-up of the metrical consensus
at the beginning of the twentieth century (OK, Blake predates this, but he
doesn't begin to become generally influential before the 1890s. Each change
shifts the grounds on which the argument is conducted.

As to where we are now ... The short-lived Martian School in England in the
eighties suggests that we can't (much as I'd like to -- beautifully simple
if nothing else) return to Aristotle's "poetry is metaphor".

Hm ... This post was meant to be Beautifully Coherent, but has become
somewhat rambly.

But (I don't think anyone has mentioned them yet) what about the tiny prose
scraps/fables/whatever that Zbvniew Herbert mingles among his formal poems?

Robin