Trouble At The Poetry/Prose Border

Recognizing a poem as a poem used to be as easy as waiting for the predictable chime of a rhyme (no rhyme intended). But since the free verse movement about a century ago, when poetry by-in-large stopped rhyming and moving to the rhythm of the metronome, poets have been writing work that comes closer and closer to prose. Some have crossed over completely, writing poems in unrhymed and generally unmusical paragraphs (gasp!). If Lou Dobbs were a literary critic, he'd be livid.

There has always been some gray area between the genres. Playwrights used to write in verse, and plays were essentially made of poetry. Excerpts from Shakespeare still stand brilliantly as poems (I actually prefer them to his poems). Take this one from Macbeth (V, v, 19). Macbeth himself gives this soliloquy after watching his kingdom, and his life, begin to crumble.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

It's written in blank verse, so while the lines don't rhyme, they have a meter (iambic pentameter). And Shakespeare layers metaphors like he's making baklava. It's great poetry.

Novels, too, will often have some poetry in them. Here's an excerpt from Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, the title of which he plucked from the excerpt above:

The bridge was open to let a schooner through. She was in tow, the tug nudging along under her quarter, trailing smoke, but the ship herself was like she was moving without visible means. A man naked to the waste was coiling down a line on the fo'c's'le head. His body was burned the color of leaf tobacco. Another man in a straw hat without any crown was at the wheel. The ship went through the bridge, moving under bare poles like a ghost in broad day, with three gulls hovering above the stern like toys on invisible wires.

The work has obvious poetic qualities. It's musical and metaphorically rich, and the images are packed in and striking. You can break it into lines to heighten the effect.

The bridge was open to let a schooner through.
She was in tow, the tug nudging
along under her quarter, trailing smoke,

Even Moby Dick, with its dense (and unfair) reputation, has a poetic shimmer to it:

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet...it is high time to get to the sea as soon as I can.

The work rolls along, rich and alliterative (note "growing grim," "damp, drizzly" and "sea as soon"). At a minimum, it's poetic.

But it's poets, more recently, who have been aggressively collapsing the border between the two genres. It used to be that the most obvious way to distinguish a poem as a poem was to check for line breaks. The word "verse" is derived from the Latin "versus:" a turn of the plow or furrow. And lines of poetry resemble the furrows a plow carves in a field, turning before the end of the page.

But this is no longer always the case. Prose poems -- poems in paragraph form -- have become quite popular. Peter Johnson, editor of Prose Poetry: An International Journal, which publishes prose poems exclusively, said of the gray area the genre inhabits: "the prose poem plants one foot in prose, the other in poetry, both heels resting precariously on banana peels."

Experts trace the prose poem back to the 19th Century French Symbolist poets Aloysius Bertrand and Charles Baudelaire. Here's an excerpt from Baudelaire's Be Drunk (translated by Louis Simpson)

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."

Here's a more contemporary example from beat poet Allen Ginsberg--an excerpt from A Supermarket in California:

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking
among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops?
What price bananas? Are you my Angel?

Are they poems? Prose? Or both? Don't we have more pressing questions? Like who did kill the porkchops?

Comments

[JerseyBob]

I don't pretend to know poetry as I would want to. As someone notes here, your writing is a "fine introduction for a general audience unschooled in the topic". In fact, the poetry/prose discussion is just what I am most interested in. This was a great read.

Where Peter Johnson writes (and you quote) "the prose poem plants one foot in prose, the other in poetry, both heels resting precariously on banana peels.", I considered another way of saying this. If we can agree that precariously and firmly are essentially opposites, could not Johnson have written "...;both heels resting firmly on banana peels."? The meaning would be as clear would it not?

[gurukalehuru]

Too many write confessionals, or rant
the reason they don't rhyme is 'cause they can't

[tulsey]

What a charming entry in these last dumbed down days of the empire, Be drunk indeed, on virtue or vice, woudn't it be nice( sorry Brian Wilson). Take what comfort you can I say, for as to what this all may signify, that's yet to be revealed, if ever. Meanwhile, let's take a ride. ps, I think Carney Wilson has that pork chop.

[Superfelo]

There is a kind of subtle difference between prose and poetry; although prose may be poetry, poetry cannot be prose. Where does the distinction lies? Well it would seem as though poetry, and prose that is pure poetry, come from true inspiration; inspiration is born when the poet perceives reality, with clarity inside his spirit.
Rhyming is all well and good; but many think that because they can make words rhyme and arranging the lines in poetic form that they are writing a poem. There are others who think that because they state bare facts, in prose, and line those facts as the lines in poem that it is poetry. Rhyming is a good exercise in the ability to use language; but true poetry is only born out of true inspiration. Thus the Spanish poet
Gustavo Adolfo Becquer states about poetry: "but with genius only few write it." It would seem genius is that elusive spirit called inspiration.
Those examples you give of prose bordering on poetry is because purely they were inspired. Thus it has been; and thus it will always be. Enough said.

[jubo]

Verse, not prose.

[felixrandom]

as photography ate the portrait, rhyme wandered off into songwriting and evaporated from poetry. so dylan, the shakespeare of pop, isn't seamus haney. then again after inventing language we haven't done much until you get to running water.

[Blutus]

You seem to be searching for a poetry controversy
and keep coming back to a 200 year old debate regarding prose vs. poetry.

Boring. Prose is obviously not poetry. People who don't think so are not trying hard enough.

Garrison versus August. That is the sweetest bit of poetry dust -up since Ole Ezra
won the first Bollingen and Bobby Frost wanted him hung.

[antaeus]

Go find your own depth! This is a fine introduction for a general audience unschooled in in the topic.

[Superfelo]

I disagree. I think this is a legitimate topic; especially in a world
where poetry is inundated by many would-be poets, mere poet-tasters,
that makes it difficult to find the true quality poetry that exists, and alienate
many from reading poetry worth reading; and from reading any poetry
at all.

[Blutus]

I totally agree.

"Unschooled" indeed.

[andygaus]

You seem to be giving us the news that 1910 has arrived.