PROSE BASED POETRY

What is Prose?

How very different is generally the poetry of today. The three examples below come from The Academy of American Poets, {2} which spreads the net wide, but does try to present the best of modern and contemporary work. Copyright restrictions allow us only a few lines, but each poem can be read in entirety by clicking on the link.

What can we say of these styles: appropriate, unaffected, a trifle flat? Close to prose, in fact. Remove the line arrangements and the sentences would slip unnoticed into a contemporary short story. Something like: "I wonder if there are any catfish in this pond? It seems like a perfect place for them," she said, glancing up at the man who was now trying to retrieve the ball from the tangle of weeds into which it had fallen.

And that may be their intention. The poems tell a story, present a situation, extract something from a world familiar to us. Modest in their aims, the poems show things as through plain glass: life without overt shapings into grand narratives or marked by portentous underlinings. That is how life is, we admit, the way we are. We can read more into the incidents, but are not compelled to do so. Sympathetic observation of character, an ear for dialogue, creation of scene through telling detail — that is what we look for: the storyteller's art. Hardy showed the way, and Margaret Atwood is also a celebrated novelist.

But is this really all that poetry aims at? Wouldn't we be better off with the full story or magazine article of which these seem pared-down versions? We absorb prose at a more comfortable rate than poetry, and contemporary poetry is hardly popular. Why restrict the readership still further?

Because poetry today, or this type of poetry, focuses on the word itself. Just the word, without ornament or emotional shading, or any regimentation with rhetorical devices. And for these, among other reasons:

Click the links have these attitudes discussed. They are not built on sand, but they do make large assumptions.

But there is a further point. Even supposing these reasons were compellingly self-evident, the poetry would fail if it were simply as we have supposed: pared-down articles, filleted short stories. But it isn't. Once free of conventional usage, words can adopt new strategies.

Prose-Based Strategies

Here are a few, with sources on the click-through:

Successes

It is these strategies, and many others, that account for the modest successes of this style. A small sample:

Could these be phrased in more tradition forms? Yes, but they wouldn't be the same poem: their rightness depends on the way they reflect the awkwardness and general untidiness of life.

Shortcomings 1: Emotional Charge

Now for the debit side: what could be the shortcomings of so plain a style?

A first point to stress is the variety in the work, the very different themes, aims and levels of accomplishment in contemporary poetry. We cannot reasonably corral such abundance under one heading, and then stamp it with marks of approval or disapproval. Nonetheless, there remain two elements that readers may find largely absent: an emotional depth and a compelling truth.

Here, to introduce the first, is an anthology piece of a century back:

"Let us consider, too, how differently young and old are affected by the words of some classic author, such as Homer or Horace. Passages, which to a boy are but rhetorical commonplaces, neither better nor worse than a hundred others which any clever writer might supply, which he gets by heart and thinks very fine, and imitates, as he thinks, successfully, in his own flowing versification, at length come home to him, when long years have passed, and he has had experience of life, and pierce him, as if he had never before known them, with their sad earnestness and vivid exactness. Then he comes to understand how it is that lines, the birth of some chance morning or evening at an Ionian festival, or among the Sabine hills, have lasted generation after generation, for thousands of years, with a power over the mind, and a charm, which the current literature of his own day, with all its obvious advantages, is utterly unable to rival. Perhaps this is the reason of the medieval opinion about Virgil, as if a prophet or magician; his single words and phrases, his pathetic half-lines, giving utterance, as the voice of Nature herself, to that pain and weariness, yet hope of better things, which is the experience of her children in every time." {3}

Is this prose? In one sense, yes, but possibly poetry too. What it says is a commonplace, but readers may sense in it an emotional power that is largely missing from contemporary poetry. With its playfulness, its variety of subject matter and width of social register, poetry today has accomplished what no one will wish to undo. But with the populist tone has also come an unwillingness to take risks, or construct a heightened awareness of ourselves and surroundings.

Shortcomings 2: Larger Truth

Now what we might call a compelling truth. The somber splendour of the Newman passage does not lie wholly in the rhetoric, but what the passage says. We have to accept its meaning to admit the power. Literary wizardry can certainly set content off to its best advantage, but it cannot wholly create that content — not unless we accept that old jibe about poetry:

"Poetry is something which appeals to the emotions and feelings. The Quran, on the other hand is designed to inspire by arousing consciousness, conscience and will. When did poetry create a world movement, a civilization and empires? Orientalists who read the Quran as if it were poetry are worse than those who pick up a text book on science and read it as if it were a novel." {4}

Many novels are entertainments, creations where we can explore the possibilities of human behaviour without crippling responsibility, but they are not serious. Nor is much contemporary poetry. Original and entertaining in small doses, the poems can tire us in the end with their formulaic cleverness and connections too easily made — as in these examples from The Academy of American Poets:

Formulaic cleverness? These are the shortcomings, as I see them, of the poems tagged:

fc. formulaic cleverness: the piece follows the well-honed formula of presenting some incident and then of drawing a conclusion beyond any possible significance of the incident.

t. trite: a bald observation is tacked on rather than developed through the poem, making the ending trite and unconvincing.

ic. intellectual conceit: the intellectual framework is arbitrary and extended beyond what is illuminating.

v. vacuous: the poem ends up saying nothing of importance.

t. trivial: the subject or theme is not novel, or developed in any interesting way.

c. clichéd: a language not merely undistinguished but too clichéd for even a local newspaper.

n. naïf: not childlike but purposefully childish.

Perhaps their authors have written better, when the fault lies with the selections — those in Modern American Poets {5} seem better — but the shortcomings are common to this style of writing, which the very directness cannot hide. The subject matter is not the problem. When we turn to Academy poems that deal with truly harrowing themes, we are met with the same flat reportage:

Yes, but then the difficulties start: