Prose poetry what is it

There are no rules for how short or long a poem must be. Poems can be quite long. However, you do run the risk of losing the reader. I say that as someone with a personal preference for shorter poetry. But there are other readers who love long poems. Anyway, what matters is your willingness to experiment and put your poem into different shapes and formats.

This is the real work of writing! Red Rose, I love your response; it helped me to understand prose poetry more and appreciate it. How freeing and beautiful to keep the poetic traits in a prose piece. Your post is timely.

This morning I was just about to look up what prose poetry is, then I came across an email saying you were discussing it today. Thank you for making it clear, and for reading my mind, too! Your email address will not be published. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

What is Prose Poetry? An introduction to prose poetry. Robbie Cheadle on October 28, at am. This is very interesting. Thank you for sharing. Tracy Thomas on January 1, at pm. Melissa Donovan on January 2, at pm. Daniel Brenner on June 5, at pm. Melissa Donovan on June 18, at pm. Vivienne Sang on March 20, at am.

Jacki on September 14, at am. What would you say the difference is between prose and free verse? Red Rose on July 22, at am. This blog was really helpful. Such a poem combines and condenses the robust qualities of good prose with the figurative features of much lineated lyric poetry, and is an example of how the best prose poets pay the kind of attention to the resources and features of prose that good lyric poets pay to the resources of their poetic lines.

That is one of its apparently contradictory or paradoxical features. Although the innovations of the French Romantic prose poets transformed French and international poetry, their prose poetry remained a form of poetry despite its construction in sentences and paragraphs.

The tendency for this form of poetry to challenge or stretch our assumptions about what the poetic looks like is one of its strengths. Prose poetry implicitly states that the poetic penetrates further than perhaps any of us had previously imagined.

In successful prose poetry, the mode of prose is not used in the same way one finds in most conventional and discursive novels or nonfiction.

Now that meter and rhyme are not so often used in poetry, and now that free verse poetry may be very free indeed, poetry chiefly inheres in condensed and suggestive writing—some in lines and some in sentences—that is neither primarily aimed to accomplish a particular act in the world nor primarily directed toward narrative or explication.

Reprinted by permission. Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature. Via Princeton University Press. By Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton.

A distinguished poet, he is the founder of the International Prose Poetry Group. Cassandra Atherton is associate professor of writing and literature at Deakin University, Australia. As postcards often are, it is a short letter addressed to someone specific.

A poem that incorporates at least one piece of factual information. It can be a scientific fact, or an emotional fact. A good factoid often has a weaving of information and image which rub against each other to create friction. The deadpan narrative has story-like elements, but is also prone to leaps in time and reason, as well as sarcastic realizations. The surreal narrative, as I like to call it, is especially amiable when caged in the prose poem and no one really knows why. Surrealism is meant to produce the function of thought, outside of reason and outside of precaution.

It just goes and goes and arrives at a shopping mall surrounded by wild goats. A prose poem defies the nature of formal poetry. Instead of being restrictive, the prose poem is permissive. They are…solid blocks of text—dependable, accessible-looking little bricks—in which I am set free to be as fanciful as I like: My prose poems tend to be the ones that most heavily rely on folktale and dream imagery…They give me permission to be narrative or autobiographical…non-narrative and inventive.

They let me make poems that look like traditional prose, and they let me make poems with weird margins and blanks and other assorted surface oddities. They allow me to tell lies, to be abrupt, to be glib, to be wholly sincere. Write a postcard. As I suggested earlier, a postcard is a prose poem that captures a moment in time with a strong sense of place. It may obsess over this place; it may make leaps in time to and from this place.

As a letter would be, the postcard is addressed to another person, or features another person.