... I have not really given it any serious thoughts until recently. But frankly, how do you distinguish between poetry and prose? Take the following piece for example,
When lives are at stake,
would you risk
not reporting it?
If you see anything
or anyone suspicious,
inform our staff
or call 999.
And don’t leave
your belongings unattended.
We all have a part to play
in keeping Singapore
Safe.
Do you consider it a poem? It is actually a copy of the notice put up at various MRT stations to remind commuters to stay alert. I chopped it up and arranged it to look like a poem. Okay, okay, this is not really a good example.
But what about this?
And then comes Spring.
The sun is bright,
the water sparkles,
and the lobsters are active again,
swimming about, eating
like kings, and vying
for a place in your
Butter-browned top-sliced
frankfurter bun.
Would you categorize it as poetry? Better than the previous one right? In fact it is a passage taken from one of the articles in “It must’ve been something I ate” by Jeffrey Steingarten. Again, I’ve chopped it up and try to pass it off as a poem. Oh boy I really love chopping up prose. Chop! Chop! Chop! *evil grin*
Basically, there are two things I look out for in a piece of writing before I decide whether it is a poetry or prose. Firstly is the existence of poetic devices such as meter, rhyme, imagery, metaphor, compression, etc. Secondly is its overall effect on me. I need to be delighted, to be surprised, and if you could stun me with it, heck that's even better; I will not hesitate to give you an A Plus. :)
To quote Emily Dicknson,
“If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way[s] I know it. Is there any other way?”
To illustrate the second point, two poems immediately come into my mind. Coincidentally both are very short poems. One is a haiku by Taniguchi Buson -
The piercing chill I feel:
my dead wife's comb, in our bedroom,
under my heel . . .
And the other poem is Accident by Gilbert Koh, a local poet I greatly respect.
Gilbert once told me,
“A poem has to show me something that I wasn't aware of; or it has to show me something that I was aware of, but in a way I'd never thought of before. If I don't discover anything new in a poem, then it doesn't work for me. It's not a poem to me.”
I have no problem with that. But what if instead of a poem, it is a prose that “show me something that I wasn't aware of; or it has to show me something that I was aware of, but in a way I'd never thought of before. If I don't discover anything new …” can I still consider it a poem? In fact many articles written by Mr Wang in his blog "Did Mister Wang Say So?" meet the above requirements, but they are definitely not poetry.
Maybe as suggested by Gilbert,
“And if it is a good piece, does it really matter whether it is more correctly classified as prose or poetry?”
Well sorry Gilbert, but it does matters to me because I am the stubborn type. :)
For example, both boiled and un-boiled water quench my thirst buut I still need to know what one I am drinking. Althugh the boundary between poetry and prose remind obscure but there is still hope; as Joan Houlihan in her reply to Fred Moramarco said
“While I agree that it is basically impossible to successfully and fully define a poem, I maintain that it is possible to define a non-poem – by its lack of poetic conventions.”
In my opinion, if you write a prose using poetic devices, if you insist, you can call it a prose poem. On the other hand, if you write a poem in the manners as if you are writing a prose, it will remain a prose, nothing but a prose.
4 comments:
I just wrote something - and like my earlier 'poem' on Books, I'm not sure if it's prose or poem. But anyway, it doesn't matter, I guess, as long as it serves one function - that of venting my frustations.
2 thoughts:
Some people do just chop up their prose and insist on calling it poetry. I remember a particularly fierce argument at one poetry forum. The quality of his work is more like your first example and he insisted it was free verse. It was learnt that day that there is no way to
convince an author otherwise if he insists that his work is poetry.
Personally, when I read a piece of poem, I feel like someone is pointing me to look at something from a different angle and sometimes to turn my head and see something I never seen or noticed before. A package of words that bring insight or bring out wonder. That's what poetry is to me.
Yup. Put it on paper, crush it! Burn it! Scatter its ashes along Singapore River! That my friend is how I vent my frustrations.
Nay, just joking, what I really do is … I start a blog. :)
Hi Liz,
In that case, he really needs to do more reading.
“Personally, when I read a piece of poem, I feel like someone is pointing me to look at something from a different angle and sometimes to turn my head and see something I never seen or noticed before. A package of words that bring insight or bring out wonder. That's what poetry is to me.”
That’s true.
If a poem does not delight its readers one way or another, the least it can do is to educate. If it couldn’t even achieve that, what more can I say.
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