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PROSE_POEM

                                                          2003

"Prose poetry"?  What's that supposed to mean?
Most poetry written these days (that gets
called poetry, anyway) is so "free" that very
little of the trappings of formal poetry are
left, with *one* exception: the use of line
breaks, grouping short lines into the visual
appearence of stanzas.

There is also poetry that is not called
poetry, "song" and "rap" (and maybe even
"jingle" or "ad copy").  and that stuff is if            This is an area
anything more rigidly formal than the old                where high and low
formal poetry.  Simple, heavy handed verbal              art are exceedingly
rhthym and frequent, obvious rhyme is the rule           polarized, very little
in that world.                                           middle ground.



Well, one thing about "prose poetry" is
that it's usually a narrative form, it may
even technically be "fiction", but it is
not a "story", which is to say that it does
feature problem/resolution plots.

It's often a piece of florid description,
possibly a story-fragment?

Matters of expectation:
if presented as a story, it's
expected that it will *go*
somewhere, and then a long
description might be regarded
as an impediment, something
to be skimmed through quickly.

   Calling it a prose poem
   changes this, shifts the          One of the few ideas I've
   focus back toward the             come up with for hypertext
   language.                         fiction for which I can see
                                     any point:

                                        Use hyperlinks to provide
   My favorite example                  details that provide depth,
   of the form is                       but don't obviously advance
   Baudelaire's "Out of                 the plot.
   this World", which
   *does* have a rhythm                   The main narrative puts
   to it, and a steady                    emphasis on plot and
   refrain, the rhthym                    dialog.  Atmosphere,
   is just not applied                    character sketch,
   on a line-by-line                      physical description,
   basis.                                 and so on are pushed off
                                          into satellite
                                          prose-poems:

                                            A prose / prose-poem
                                            hybrid.


                                                   (Also, an expanded
                                                   form could be
                                                   provided, where you
                                                   could read all of
                                                   it straight through.)



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