Prose Techniques in Poetry
These are the rules for my poetry. I used to think I was writing prose poetry, and I suppose I am. But that distinction — prose poetry… I wonder if it still has as much weight as it did twenty years ago, when poets were still talking about it, and there were anthologies devoted to the form.
Anyway, I was sitting here going over the mess. The rules reign what it can of a poetry that has no lines.
Even though I don’t use lines, I do have stanzas. Stanzas hold everything together. Stanzas are demarcated by a line break. Inside a stanza, you will find sentences, not lines. You might even find paragraphs. Paragraphs are demarcated by an indentation. They sit right under the previous paragraph within a stanza.
An idea occurred to me as I was forming my rules. Have a stanza with two paragraphs. If I follow my rules of stanzas and paragraphs, each paragraph is indented. It will have the opposite look to traditional line stanzas that start without indentation and leave indentations for whatever lines spill over into a new typographical line. On the surface, it still catches the look of traditional poetry, even if it is still prose.
The stanzas could be of any size. If the entire poem is one stanza, and there are multiple paragraphs inside it, then it might look like prose poetry.
The stanzas could be one sentence each. With a line break in between, this could have the look of traditional lines that are not grouped into stanzas.
If a stanza has two paragraphs, and each one is just a single sentence, then it may feel like couplets.
I can take this idea further. If each paragraph formed by a single sentence is short enough to keep within the margins, the visual form may look close to metered poetry even if comprised by paragraphs that happen to be single sentences.
This has other possibilities. A list could be a sentence of three or so words per item. I could even include two or three columns in a page of such a poem, if needed.
There are other ways of establishing symmetrical unity outside of meter and rhyme. I have been toying with the idea of grammar rules set to a tempo. What would happen if you had a compound sentence before a simple sentence? What kinds of rhythms could you find when you vary this?
Or if a sentence had an object and another did not…
One paragraph could begin with a complete sentence. Every sentence after that will have its subject missing because it is borrowing it from the first one. When you need a new subject, move on to the next paragraph.
So many other variations based on this handful of laws have presented themselves to me, and I think there is something to this form that does not have to be based on the audial qualities of a language.
You see, I have always felt that poetry was not universal. This is another story, as they say, but the kernel here is that I wondered why poetry had to belong to a single language or culture. It became a banner for nationalism, not humanity! So, I went on an adventure, seeking out an answer to this. There had been prose translations of poetry for centuries. And of course, there were the inroads that prose poetry had been making for at least a couple of hundred years. (I have a theory, and it holds that the very first poetry had no lines with which to swing on; it was simply the language of speech.) Why did poetry need to find its way into some verse? Why not write it in the rules of prose?
I’m back from my adventure with not as many solutions to my puzzles as I would have liked. And I have been tinkering with the artifacts I did manage to find, and it has been engrossing. I found that poetry does not need to contemplate the single file of themes it has in recent centuries (like love and death and youth and such) because it could be about any human interest, including abstractions like patterns and numerical fantasies, and it could even be about the form of the poem, which can take qualities outside that of lines.