I often wonder, when trying to write my poetry, if I would be more suited to prose poetry, given that I like to write verse that (hopefully) paints a picture and evokes a feeling in as simple a way as possible, using straight forward words. Any connoisseurs of prose poetry here care to help me understand it more?
Prose poetry has taken a lot of turns but when the form started in western literature it was pioneered by romantics, decadents, and symbolists- not exactly simple, straightforward stuff (ancient Chinese prose poetry was pretty ornate too). Which isn’t to say it can’t serve your purpose. But I’m not sure prose poetry has an inherent advantage over verse in that regard. The removal of line breaks makes you think about sentences, rhythm, etc differently but does it make it simpler? Sometimes I think line breaks can help to simplify images/ thoughts
@Le Panda Du Mal - maybe simple does the form an injustice, although I didn’t mean it quite so literally. That said I’m not altogether sure how I did mean it. I was surprised when searching for examples after posting this, to find a lot of prose poetry that uses rhyme, be that end or internally, as I didn’t realise it was a device used in this particular area.
I don't know if you'd be interested in this, or how close it is to what you're looking for, but I really like what I learned about lyrical prose some time ago. I did a blog post about it: Beginning to explore poetic prose.
That made for very interesting reading! Thanks for sharing. I appreciate your post goes a little deeper and I’m perhaps not talking about the exact same thing, but whatever that ‘thing’ is that makes certain poems so effortlessly evocative and prose so beautifully lyrical, is so very elusive. Even when I find a poem or passage from a novel that does this, I still can’t pin down what they’ve done. And that’s with it right there in front of me! Margaret Atwood in her The Handmaid’s Tale writes very poetic prose, but ask me to explain why or how and I’m stumped!
I assume because there are many different things contributing. Alliteration, meter, rhythm, maybe internal rhyme now and then, imagery, and a sense of musicality in different forms.
Two absolute masters of the prose-poem are Lord Dunsany and Clark Ashton Smith. http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/prose-poetry-plays/13/ennui-%28in%29 https://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/dun/adta/adta04.htm
Second link is epic beyond measure, but first is broken. There might be a problem with Eldritchdark. When I google for Eldtricthdark Clark Ashton Smith all the links I try are broken and are trying to connect to a MyAT&T site of some kind.
I'll just paste it. This is one of CAS's more obscure prose poems, but I love the feeling it evokes. He was a master of fantastical imagery. He was a trained poet before he wrote Weird short fiction and it shows. Ennui In the alcove whose curtains are cloth-of-gold, and whose pillars are fluted sapphire, reclines the emperor Chan, on his couch of ebony set with opals and rubies, and cushioned with the furs of unknown and gorgeous beasts. With implacable and weary gaze, from beneath unmoving lids that seem carven of purple-veined onyx, he stares at the crystal windows, giving upon the infinite fiery azures of a tropic sky and sea. Oppressive as nightmare, a formless nameless fatigue, heavier than any burden the slaves of the mines must bear, lies forever at his heart: all deliriums of Love and wine, the agonizing ecstasy of drugs, even the deepest and the faintest pulse of delight or pain-all are proven, all are futile, for the outworn but insatiate emperor. Even for a new grief, or a subtler pang than any felt before, he thinks, lying on his bed of ebony, that he would give the silver and vermilion of all his mines, with the crowded caskets, the carcanets and crowns that lie in his most immemorial treasure-vault. Vainly, with the verse of the more inventive poets, the fanciful purple-threaded fabrics of the subtlest looms, the unfamiliar gems and minerals from the uttermost land, the pallid leaves and blood-like petals of a rare and venomous blossom-vainly, with all these, and many stranger devices, wilder, more wonderful diversions, the slaves and sultanas have sought to alleviate the iron hours. One by one he has dismissed them with a weary gesture. And now, in the silence of the heavily curtained alcove, he lies alone, with the canker of ennui at his heart, like the undying mordant worm at the heart of the dead. Anon, from between the curtains at the head of his couch, a dark and slender hand is slowly extended, clasping a dagger whose blade reflects the gold of the curtain in a thin and stealthily wavering gleam. Slowly, in silence, the dagger is poised, then rises and falls like a splinter of lightning. The emperor cries out, as the blade, piercing his loosely-folded robe, wounds him slightly in the side. In a moment the alcove is filled with armed attendants, who seize and drag forth the would-be assassin-a slave-girl, the princess of a conquered people, who has often, but vainly, implored her freedom from the emperor. Pale, and panting with terror and rage, she faces Chan and the guardsmen, while stories of unimaginable monstrous tortures, of dooms unnamable, crowd upon her memory. But Chan, aroused and startled only for the instant, feels again the insuperable weariness, more strong than anger or fear, and delays to give the expected signal. And then, momentarily moved, perchance, by some ironical emotion, half-akin to gratitude-gratitude for the brief but diverting danger, which has served to alleviate his ennui for a little, he bids them free the princess; and, with a regal courtesy, places about her throat his own necklace of pearls and emeralds, each of which is the cost of an army.
Two excellent pieces of writing so thanks @Teladan . In a way I find curious, this post causes me to look at your work a little differently, maybe appreciate your ambition more clearly. I haven't had opportunity to use it yet, but at least I know what a liripipe is, and the day will come! Nice job.
Those two writers are my favourites in terms of fantasy literature. I highly recommend them. They are pretty much the old masters of the fantastical and the weird. But look, I think I've given the wrong impression if I may say so! I do love a good bit of imagery, but it's not really my overall goal to write prose poetry or to be verbose. I think I once said on this forum that I don't think I'm nearly enough of a good prose stylist to even consider myself someone concerned with aesthetics. I don't know enough. In one thread recently I said I disliked some of the stylistic choices of Nabokov in favour of a more pragmatic and simplified writing. Hell, I dislike Lovecraft for his purple prose most of the time. I only used words like liripe because it was weird--which fit the story to which you're referring--but I also used it as it's precisely the article those characters were wearing. My latest story, which I've just today put on the workshop, is a character piece with really pared down language, relatively speaking. It's about two old men, outsiders in a country house in Devon. It does have some fantastical elements, but it's not like my last short story. Slightly indulgent post, I know, but it'd eat away at me if I didn't respond. Not that anyone cares... It must be that I just don't want to be pigeonholed into one particular type of writing on WF.org or something! Not that you were doing that, but I just wanted to clarify. Cheers.
I'm not sure I like the notion of pigeons in pigeon holes and that's not what I meant to imply. I just figured I may have been hasty in my reaction to that story of yours. It's all learning.
It might be worth mentioning that Clark Ashton Smith was writing in the vein, not only of Dunsany and English-language weird literature, but the symbolist/ decadent movement. In fact CAS was working on a translation of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal- he had gotten all the poems into prose translations, which he planned to convert to rhyming verse, I believe, but never got around to it. Baudelaire also wrote a collection of prose poems called Le Spleen de Paris (Paris Spleen)- he himself was inspired by Aloysius Bertrand's medievalist, often fantastic prose poem collection Gaspard de la Nuit (incidentally translated to English by CAS' friend/ disciple Donald Sidney-Fryer). Anyway here's one of my favorite of Baudelaire's prose poems: THE GIFTS OF THE MOON. The Moon, who is caprice itself, looked in at the window as you slept in your cradle, and said to herself: "I am well pleased with this child." And she softly descended her stairway of clouds and passed through the window-pane without noise. She bent over you with the supple tenderness of a mother and laid her colours upon your face. Therefrom your eyes have remained green and your cheeks extraordinarily pale. From contemplation of your visitor your eyes are so strangely wide; and she so tenderly wounded you upon the breast that you have ever kept a certain readiness to tears. In the amplitude of her joy, the Moon filled all your chamber as with a phosphorescent air, a luminous poison; and all this living radiance thought and said: "You shall be for ever under the influence of my kiss. You shall love all that loves me and that I love: clouds, and silence, and night; the vast green sea; the unformed and multitudinous waters; the place where you are not; the lover you will never know; monstrous flowers, and perfumes that bring madness; cats that stretch themselves swooning upon the piano and lament with the sweet, hoarse voices of women. "And you shall be loved of my lovers, courted of my courtesans. You shall be the Queen of men with green eyes, whose breasts also I have wounded in my nocturnal caress: men that love the sea, the immense green ungovernable sea; the unformed and multitudinous waters; the place where they are not; the woman they will never know; sinister flowers that seem to bear the incense of some unknown religion; perfumes that trouble the will; and all savage and voluptuous animals, images of their own folly." And that is why I am couched at your feet, O spoiled child, beloved and accursed, seeking in all your being the reflection of that august divinity, that prophetic godmother, that poisonous nurse of all lunatics. After Baudelaire there is Rimbaud whose great prose poem collection Illuminations begins with this: After the Flood After the idea of the flood had receded, a rabbit paused in the clock flowers and the holy clover, and said his prayers through the rainbow of the Spider's web. Oh! The precious gems hid themselves away,--and the flowers were already regarding the world. Down the sprawling main drag, stalls were erected, and high-tiered boats were hauled to the sea, as in old prints. The blood flowed at Blue Beard's place,--through the abbatoirs, and those houses where the Seal of Jehova blanched the windows. The blood and the milk flowed. The beavers built. "Mazagrans" smoked in the taverns. In the great houses of dripping glass, sad infants regarded their reflections. Clackety-clack goes the door, as in the village square, the idiot waves his arms. Understood he is by the weathervanes, and the squatting roosters atop steeples far and wide. Madame establishes her piano in the Alps. The mass and First Communion are celebrated amidst a hundred thousand cathedral altars. Caravans depart. Hotel Splendid was built amidst chaos, the ice and the polar night. The Moon, forever after, heard the jackals howl, across time's deserts;-- in the orchard, the eclogues grunt in their wooden clogs. Then, in the budding, burgeoning forest, bursting violet, Eucharist told me of the coming of the Springtime Secret pond, overflow!--Foam, roil, roll over the bridge, roil over the woods;--black palls and innards--thunder and lightning--rise and roil!--Watery sorrows, arise!--Return to us the Flood! It has been this way since they disappeared,--Oh! The gems hide their shining faces, while flowers spread into new life!--It's all so boring, somehow! And the Witch-Queen burns her incense in an earthen bowl; will never confess, nor speak to us of our ignorance. Rimbaud together with Lautreamont (whose epic prose poem Les Chants de Maldoror is too crazy and wonderful to do it justice with excerpts) had a tremendous influence on the surrealists who have done plenty of prose poetry in their turn. Here's one by Andre Breton: The Forest in the Axe Someone just died but I'm still alive and yet I don't have a soul anymore. All I have left is a transparent body inside of which transparent doves hurl themselves on a transparent dagger held by a transparent hand. I see struggle in all its beauty, real struggle which nothing can measure, just before the last star comes out. The rented body I live in like a hut detests the soul I had which floats in the distance. It's time to put an end to that famous dualism for which I've been so much reproached. Gone are the days when eyes without light and rings drew sediment from pools of color. There's neither red nor blue anymore. Unanimous red-blue fades away in turn like a robin redbreast in the hedges of inattention. Someone just died,—not you or I or they exactly, but all of us, except me who survives by a variety of means: I'm still cold for example. That's enough. A match! A match! Or how about some rocks so I can split them, or some birds so I can follow them, or some corsets so I can tighten them around dead women's waists, so they'll come back to life and love me, with their exhausting hair, their disheveled glances! A match, so no one dies for brandied plums, a match so the Italian straw hat can be more than a play! Hey, lawn! Hey, rain! I'm the unreal breath of this garden. The black crown resting on my head is a cry of migrating crows because up till now there have only been those who were buried alive, and only a few of them, and here I am the first aerated dead man. But I have a body so I can stop doing myself in, so I can force reptiles to admire me. Bloody hands, misteltoe eyes, a mouth of dried leaves and glass (the dried leaves move under the glass; they're not as red as one would think, when indifference exposes its voracious methods), hands to gather you, miniscule thyme of my dreams, rosemary of my extreme pallor. I don't have a shadow anymore, either. Ah my shadow, my dear shadow. I should write a long letter to the shadow I lost. I'd begin it My Dear Shadow. Shadow, my darling. You see. There's no more sun. There's only one tropic left out of two. There's only one man left in a thousand. There's only one woman left in the absence of thought that characterizes in pure black this cursed era. That woman holds a bouquet of everlastings shaped like my blood. By the way, American surrealists (e.g. Philip Lamantia, Franklin Rosemont) have been big fans of Clark Ashton Smith.
No, no, it's all fine. I've just been worrying about my image and my writing-- I've read his translation of The Flowers of Evil. The absolute best collection of CAS's work is Penguin's The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies. It includes many of his short fiction, prose-poems and poems. Great notes and research by ST Joshi, too.
Yeah, that Joshi volume is great. For just the stories though, the best collection was probably the out-of-print Emperor of Dreams. Unfortunately I gave my copy away to a friend years ago.
