>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
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