From: millie@gondor.math.columbia.edu (Millie Niss)
Subject: poetic diction, prose vs. poetry
Organization: Mathematics Department, Columbia University
Followup-To:  millie@math.columbia.edu 
Date: Sun, 6 Sep 1992 13:44:02 GMT
X-Posted-From: gondor.math.columbia.edu
X-Posted-Through: sol.ctr.columbia.edu

	Yes, I was trying to say that I am bothered by poetry which
loses nothing when read as prose.  I am glad someone paraphrased my
argument in a coherent form!  I don't really know anything about David
Shapiro (perhaps I got the wrong impression from the few lines I
read), but I'll try to find other examples to illustrate my point.

	First of all, I want to make a slight disclaimer.  I don't
have anything against prose poems or poetic prose (which are possibly
the same thing).  Some of Virginia Woolf's prose is perfectly good
poetry in my opinion.  For example, at the moment I'm reading _Mrs.
Dalloway_ and I fell upon this wonderful passage (which occurs just as
a car carrying some unidentified important personage has passed
through London):

		Yet rumours were at once in circulation from the
	middle of Bond Street to Oxford Street on one side, to
	Atkinson's scent shop on the other, passing invisibly,
	inaudibly, like a cloud, swift, veil-like upon hills, falling
	indeed with something of a cloud's sobriety upon faces which a
	second before had been utterly disorderly.  But now mystery
	had brushed them with her wing; they had heard the voice of
	authority; the sprit of religion was abroad with her eyes
	bandaged tight and her lips gaping wide.  But nobody knew
	whose face had been seen... (p. 14 ofthe HBJ paperback)

I would tend to accept this passage as poetry.  It uses some poetic
techniques (alliteration) and has a poetic purpose in the sense that
the words are supposed to have an aesthetic or musical impact on the
reader quite aside from the literal meaning.  Also, the passage can be
interpreted in several ways other than literally.  (What are we to make
of "the spirit of religion with her eyes bandaged tight"?)  In any
case I could probably find better examples of prose which have poetic
value (some of the middle section of _To the Lighthouse_ is more
obviously poetic).  In any case, Virginia Woolf certainly had a poetic
intention in forging her prose style.  In _A Room of One's Own_, she
writes that woman needs to forge her own type of novel "to express
the poetry in her."  I think her experimment was succcessful.

	I don't think that the passage form _Mrs. Dalloway_ would have
been improved by being broken up as lines of verse.  Maybe that would
even destroy it.  But, to return to my main point, "poetry" which is
really prose scissored into short fragments really irritates me.  If
that tendancy became dominant, much of the richness of poetic language
would be lost.

	I mentioned the "strangeness" of language in poetry in my last
post.  I liked the discussion about that but mbmacdonald (is that your
name?  I am still not clear about how to refer to people on this
list...) was right in saying that that wasn't my main point.  Poetry
doesn't have to be "strange" to use the language in specifically
poetic ways.  For example I really like Randall Jarrell's poem "The
Woman at the Washington Zoo."  It is in written in the first person
and the woman compares her lack of freedom (a boring joob, the cage of
her middle-aged body, etc.) with the cages of the animals in the zoo.
I'll quote a little piece (not my favorite part, but one which can be
understood without the rest):

	The world goes by my cage and never sees me.
	And there come not to me, as come to these,
	The wild beasts, sparrows pecking at the llamas' grain,
	Pigeons settling on the bears' bread, buzzards
	Tearing the meat the flies have clouded. . . .

	[the dots are in the poem -MN]

This stanza doesn't use bizzare language or permuted word order (my
examples of strangeness last time), but it is clearly verse.  The line
breaks are there for a reason.  Each line has a meter which is clearly
intentional and not accidental as in prose.

	It's harder to find an example of the thing I'm arguing
against since I don't want to be unfair to some poem whose techniques
I just don't understand.  But I've certainly read poems which really
seemed like banal prose paragraphs stripped of punctuation and broken
into lines.  I will really put my foot in my mouth if I say I put a
lot of Whitman in this category...  Oh, well, I'll dare to say it.
What would the following excerpt from "Song of Myself" lose by being
recast as a prose paragraph?

I swear I will never again mention love or death inside a house,
And I swear I will never translate myself at all, only to him or her who
	privately stays with me in the open air.
If you would understand me, go to the heights or watershore;
The nearest gnat is an explanation, and a drop of motion of waves a key;
The maul, the oar, the hand-saw, second my words.
(From SOM 49.  What are the pieces of SOM called anyway?)

	As I typed this passage, I realized that the lines were more
carefully constructed than I had originally thought.  And I certainly
accept "Song of Myself" as poetry, as poetry that I like.  But I think
that the freedom with which Whitman used prose diction in his poems,
while a strength in his work, may have encouraged others to forget
about the special qualities of poetic language. 

	Can someone else come up with an example of a _bad_ poem which
sounds like prose?  I can't find one today, and it's always scary to
stick one's neck out and call something "bad."

Millie.

P.S. People will stare at you if you read poetry on the subway.
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