Day 25: National Poetry Month
Ars Poetica
I am a time-traveler. I reach into the void of tomorrow and pluck a prompt: “to write your own ars poetica, giving the reader some insight into what keeps you writing poetry, or what you think poetry should do”—but by the time it’s posted, it is a relic of the past and overripe. I tuck myself into the velvet folds of time. Coffee-scented present lures me—shoving me into the harsh light of “now.” Reality is a bruising, concrete block of time, a fixed and aching point. The coffee grows cold and bitter. Ink is a river traversed with my pen, its winding tributaries flowing, branching, turning, rushing rapids, slowing – in conversation with a gathering of stones.
Poetry Forms Challenge: Prose Poetry
What is a “prose poem”? I dive down rabbit holes and come up for air in great gulps. “Nobody knows.” No matter how many burrows and warrens I crawl through, I keep arriving at the same conclusion—a prose poem is…a painting in words. It isn’t a story with a clear beginning, middle, and end. It is more what publishers once called a “slice of life vignette,” usually preceded by the word “no.” It is a fragment, a moment, a mood, an emotion. It is visual and visceral, but it doesn’t do all the work for the reader.
And isn’t that what all good writing ought to be, or at least to include? Isn’t that what the writer does? Paint images in a reader’s mind to show the reader what’s in the writer’s mind? Surely not with long, narrative passages describing each dust mote as it sinks and rises through the thermals of a slanted sunbeam to settle on a baby’s toes. Not short and choppy, like the heavy thwack-slice of a guillotine as the pale head with its slender neck and wide-open eyes hits the hay for the last time. It doesn’t tell a story, it unfolds one. It is not a destination; it is the red pin in a map that proclaims to the reader: “You are here.”
I once asked James Matthew Wilson, “What’s the difference between a prose poem and flash fiction?” He suggested that if you wanted to write prose poetry, you ought to call it flash fiction if you want it to sell and be read. That’s a good point. I see so many submissions guidelines and contest requirements that say, “NO PROSE POEMS” and yet, flash fiction is still popular. Write what you will; just be sneaky if you write prose poetry and call it something else.
People love to ask writers, “What do you write?” As someone who has written technical manuals, non-fiction articles, short fiction (any and every genre), children’s books, flash fiction, erotica, blogs, poetry—it might be simpler to ask, “What don’t you write?” Because I finally figured out an answer to that one: I don’t write about finance. I would rather wax poetic about the sound of paint drying.
Other National Poetry Month Posts
- National Poetry Month, Texas Style!
- Apricots: a Tanka Encompassing Three Prompts
- Bee Sting: Day 2 of National Poetry Month
- Cacophony and CBD: Day 3 in Nonsense Verse and Found Poetry
- Technically, a Writer: Day 3 of National Poetry Month
- Dive: Day 4 of National Poetry Month
- Storm Front: Day 4 of National Poetry Month
- Energized: Day 5 of National Poetry Month
- Grump: Day 5 ½ of National Poetry Month
- Future Frittered Away: Day 6 of National Poetry Month
- Hell, Hell, Hell: Day 7 (More or Less) of National Poetry Month
- Insomnia: Day 8 of National Poetry Month
- Juxtaposition: Day 9 of National Poetry Month
- Knife Edge: Day 10 of National Poetry Month
- Lost a Day: Day 11 of National Poetry Month
- Many Definitions: Day 12 of National Poetry Month
- New Form – Quadrille Quaiku: Day 13 of National Poetry Month
- Ode to Imagination: Day 14 of National Poetry Month
- Pixellated People: Day 15 of National Poetry Month
- Quintessential, Querulous Quintet: Day 16/17 of National Poetry Month
- Renewal: Day 18 of National Poetry Month
- Secrets of the Terrarium: Day 19 of National Poetry Month
- Tenacious: Day 20 of National Poetry Month
- Unruly: Day 21 of National Poetry Month
- Villainous Villanelle: Day 22 of National Poetry Month
- Waiting for the Chimes: Day 23 of National Poetry Month
- X: Day 24 of National Poetry Month
- You Are Here: Day 25 of National Poetry Month
- Z to A, a Reverse Abecedarian: Day 26 of National Poetry Month
Your Turn!
What are your thoughts on prose poetry?
What don’t you write?
I write family, friends, companionship, struggle. The tip of laughter before belly aches. Helping others. Caring for yourself. Sometimes I write fear and heart, lust and famine. I write truth through lies others call fiction and I write instruction and discovery and principle grouped as non-fiction. What I don’t write is the weave of hate, the spear into others safety. I try to craft words for creation, not destruction, and when I discover some of my words knifed instead of soothed, I try to do better the next time.
Prose poetry shares understanding through vibes; flash shares understanding through story. There is a distinct difference, but some people are capable of doing both at the same time.
🙂 I see what you did there…
I like your phrase, “the weave of hate,” though I think the warp of hate, the weft of love might weave the tapestry of life. I’d write that. I wouldn’t want to incite the hate, though or let it shine in the foreground – I’d weave it in the dullest pale and umbral shades and let the brighter colors kick it into hiding.
I kind of agree with you that flash fiction ought to have a beginning, middle, and end. To be a story. But does that mean prose poetry can’t be an entire story? I don’t think that’s the case. Doesn’t have to be, that much is certain. But I think there’s a lot of cross-over. I think that some paragraphs within a larger novel could count as prose poems, too, depending on the writer. Sometimes I wonder if we’ve blurred the lines past hope; other times, I wonder why we bother having lines.