Annie wrote:
>someone wrote:
>"When a novel is called poetic it almost always means that it is has no plot
>
>and is written in the purplest of self-indulgent prose."
>
>i truly disagree with that. have you ever read anne rice or even lord of the
>flies? anne rice has a very beautiful and poetic way of writing, and lord of
>the flies provocative plot and paragraphs evokes poetry into mind. this is
>an odd way of writing it, but i have read so many novels and books that are
>written like poetry. it is the way that they are written not the story or
>plots that is poetry. simply written poetry - frost for example - is poetry,
>so it's not so easy to dismiss a novel being less.
amd I'm sorry, Annie, but I cannot feorbear, as they used to say:
a) I'd sadly have to agree that quite often when 'someone' says a novel is
poetic they are referring to purple prose, but I also think there are
novels which work more like long poems than the usual novel written to
realistic conventions does.
b) I'd sort of agree that Anne Rice's first novel had style, but she's been
going downhill ever since, and I found, say, her last couple unreadable,
and especially boring in the extreme. She has fallen into that worst of
states, believing that her thinking is more important than her
storytelling, that she has something to SAY! There are far more writers, I
believe, even in supernatural fiction, who write with far finer style than
she does...
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
not random, these
crystalline structures, these
non-reversible orders, this
camera forming tendencies, this
edge of greater length, this
lyric forever error, this
something embarrassingly clear, this
language we come up against
Kathleen Fraser
