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On Sat, 2003-02-01 at 02:13, Douglas Barbour wrote: I mean, I wonder: does what is generally called a > 'prose poem' more or less have to be fairly short, shorter than a single > page? That's an interesting question, too. I seem to remember Genet being referred as a prose poet and perhaps for want of a better description _Prisoner of love_ was referred to as a prose poem. One story I read about that book was the publishers thought the old man had gone senile when they first read the manuscript. It looks almost like reportage toward the beginning of the book and at times a confessional genre but both these descriptions don't hold for the book as a whole, so maybe prose poetry is the easiest way out? I promised Jill a story around this question of narrative. The above book makes me think of a problem I have had, also. I use to be a professional writer and got paid good money for doing this. Even more way out sounding jobs like writing pornographic phone horoscopes for the modern het couple (non-sexist porn) came really easily simply by applying narrative and genre forms (point of view and so forth) but then I got a job producing a magazine for injecting drug users funded to prevent HIV in that population. It sounded fairly easy and I did the usual research, talked to lots of people, went on field trips and so forth and understood why previous health promotion attempts had failed. But when I came to write articles and put the magazine together none of the formal skills I had would work with this publication. I became an illiterate expert and each article rather then being quick to write was a really slow and difficult process, as was the editorial side of designing the magazine. Not even the serial writing forms which I knew very well would work. Anyway, an issue was produced, using an underground circus layout style and each issue after still remained a slow and difficult process. The narrative which sort of came out of this slow and difficult procedure reminds me of the sort of implicit narrative or becoming narrative in _Prisoner of love_ (which was published in English translation while I was working on this magazine.) Another big help was David Herkt who managed to get enough money together to put out a journal called _Junk mail_. I then wrote a paper called "Making a Users voice" which got me into even more work then I could handle... this notion of voice, as an outside always decentred voice which is inside. The State hired us junkie poets to write from an injecting drug user point of view which they thought of as peer education but there was no such point of view, once inside this peer education setup. A psychologist I worked with threw her formal training out the window, too. Phenomenology which is the epistemological basis of a lot of my formal training, along with my psychologist friend, works as a plane which is laid out with a horizon, and as knowledge proceeds the horizon recedes so that you are always approaching the horizon, as a relative horizon. This allows point of view, movement across abstract space and so forth and most formal narrative theories operate with this plane. But the peer education situation I mentioned above is already on the absolute horizon without a god's eye view of the plane. So there is no longer a point of view to speak of or any relativism to speak of, or put another way, the state was asking us to do the impossible, and paying us a good salary to do so. In this situation, which involves a double set of impossibilities, the only possibility is to produce narrative as direct time rather then an external spatial image of time which treats time as a spatial illusion. There is no metaphor involved in this. Also, the compositional plane on the absolute horizon cannot preexist but needs to be laid out with narrative. (The word narrative is problematic here and the distinction between lyric and narrative cannot be maintained, also, but I'll stick with narrative here just out of convenience.) This actively forces another theory of narrative which can no longer be formally and phenomenologically understood. Basically, narrative becomes and in this peer education example as a passive or static synthesis of divergent incompossibilities which produce a users voice not from preexisting morphologies (the form or morphology of the junkie) but as immanent intransient production. anyways... that's my theory of narrative, for now. I don't think this applies only to peer education, also. best wishes Chris Jones.