Henry, an interesting post.

I don't know the angle you are coming from but it has sparked my memory
of linguistics (or socio-linguistics as it was called when I studied it)
which makes a distinction between functional language and cultural
language. By the 19th century English is more or less established as a
dominant international functional language. The language of commerce and
so forth. Functional language often appropriates and makes demands on
cultural language and the language of Shakespeare gets used in this way
to support the function of English as well as the English Realist
novel(fairly well known examples which begin with the 18th C.) French
now finds itself, with the dominance of English as an international
functional language becoming more a cultural language and this change in
the relation of forces between the two national languages would render
possible a change in French prose. This, in part, may explain the
question about the rise to prominence of 19th C French prose poems I was
thinking about. Also, up to about the Second World War, for English
speaking people, especially of the upper middle class and ruling class
in Australia, French was an accepted second language as a cultural
language. The functional language also needs and makes use of cultural
language, which may be the play between functional narrative and poetic
language in novels.

The discussion of poetry as an event is also interesting because it may
suggest that poetry as an event renders functional language possible
(which is not to say poetry causes functional language.) I am only
speculating and my memory of linguistics is hazy and I don't have the
texts to check, but it does suggest a possibility and another angle to
me.

best wishes

Chris Jones.

(I am also now starting to think about an Australian socio-linguist  MAK
Halliday's discussion of anti-languages in _Language as a social
semiotic_  but don't have the text to check.... )


On Sat, 2003-02-01 at 00:32, Henry Gould wrote:
> >Trevor wrote:
> >Strikes me also (I'm coming back to this not having really considered it for
> >a few years) that the much-maligned blog could be worked as a high-tech
> >haibun. Whether or not a haibun worth the reading is another question.
>
>
> Poetryetc. has been fun to read lately!
>
> For the last month I've been mingling poems with prose & "socratic
> dialogue" at my blog (http://hgpoetics.blogspot.com ).  Not literary prose
> but theoretical & biographical.  Give me an opportunity to create a frame
> of reference - puts old poems in new context.
>
> Have been enjoying the circulations around the poetry/prose conundrum.  I
> think it would be hard to deny that over the course of the last 500 years
> or so, poetry has become more prosified and prose has exhibited poetic
> capabilities.  I think, though, that there are still distinct
> characteristics of language use which distinguish poetic from prosaic
> speech.  I wouldn't draw the distinction based on the qualities of lyric
> vs. narrative, though.
>
> So what's the distinguishing factor?  I would say that language becomes
> poetry when the language itself becomes an "event".  Prosaic language is
> transparent, functional, aimed at reducing any friction or static or
> interference so as to present either a logical statement or a narration or
> picturing of ANOTHER event, external to the language.  Curiously, both
> poetry & prose recapitulate experience & reality:  but the former through
> heightening, the latter through subduing & transferring, the "event" of the
> recapitulation itself.
>
> So probably the decisive moment for literary prose - "Don Quixote" -
> comically juxtaposes the knight's flowery "poetic" vision with the mundane
> exterior world.  Fiction is a hybrid mode - playing off a poetic "inner
> event" within a realistic, prose context - creating a "poetic prose" (ie. a
> literary) event.
>
> Henry
>