Trevor Joyce asks:
>
>So: why bother breaking lines? What can verse do that prose can't? I have my
>own notions, but I'd be interested to know what others think, as I suspect
>I'm more opinionated than lucid.
Me too, I suspect. I tend to write in lines because I'm relaly in love with
the rhythmic possibilities the line break allows for. I cut my teeth on
Levertov, Olson, Creeley, Duncan etc, Phyllis Webb, bpNichol & others in
Canada, & so the line continues to mean a lot to me, but to explain its
actual workings is beyond me at the moment...
(...& then every so often I 'fall' into prose in a poem anyway).
And, that point that it should be verse/prose rather than poetry/prose was
made a long time ago by, of all people, Northrop Frye in the Anatomy of
Criticism; I agree that it's the more specific one.
Doug
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
(h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
now I long to give up cigarettes
and change the sheets on my carboniferous bed;
O baby, what Hell to be Greek in this country -
without wings, but burning anyway
Gwendolyn MacEwen
|