Poetry and Prose Embrace
As writers, how we engage the reader on our journey is essential whether we write poetry or prose. There are a variety of techniques from which we can choose, and when we broaden our knowledge about the techniques available to us, we enhance our success: we use the best tools to serve a particular piece of writing.
Yet poetry and prose can embrace in the Elysian Fields of a text. Robert Bly observes that "the eye reports to the brain, and the ear reports to the heart." We can hear how the power of music works in poetry when we read Galway Kinnell's poem "Blackberry Eating." The verbal repetition of the consonances roll off our tongues: "knowing the black art of blackberry-making…which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well in the silent, startled, icy, black language of blackberry-eating."
We find an electric cross-current of poetry in the micro-fiction prose of Stuart Dybek's "We Didn't":
We didn't in the light; we didn't in darkness. We didn't in the fresh-cut summer grass or in the mounds of autumn leaves or on the snow where moonlight threw down our shadows. We didn't ... in the backseat of my father's rusted Rambler, which smelled of the smoked clubs and kielbasa he delivered on the weekends from my uncle Vincent's meat market. We didn't in your mother's Buick Eight, where a rosary twined the rearview mirror like a beaded, black snake with silver, cruciform fangs ... . At the end of our lover's lane—a street of abandoned factories—where I perfected the pinch that springs open a bra; behind the lilac bushes in Marquette Park, where you first touched me through my jeans and your nipples, swollen against transparent cotton, seemed the shade of lilacs; in the balcony of the now defunct Clark Theater, where I wiped popcorn salt from my palms and slid them up your thighs and you whispered, "I feel like Doris Day is watching us," we didn't.
Galway Kinnell's poem and Stuart Dybek's prose are just two examples of how rhythmic verse can elevate the text in a symphonic performance that stimulates the mind and excites the heart.
(Jensea Storie, Poetry Editor)
Yet poetry and prose can embrace in the Elysian Fields of a text. Robert Bly observes that "the eye reports to the brain, and the ear reports to the heart." We can hear how the power of music works in poetry when we read Galway Kinnell's poem "Blackberry Eating." The verbal repetition of the consonances roll off our tongues: "knowing the black art of blackberry-making…which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well in the silent, startled, icy, black language of blackberry-eating."
We find an electric cross-current of poetry in the micro-fiction prose of Stuart Dybek's "We Didn't":
We didn't in the light; we didn't in darkness. We didn't in the fresh-cut summer grass or in the mounds of autumn leaves or on the snow where moonlight threw down our shadows. We didn't ... in the backseat of my father's rusted Rambler, which smelled of the smoked clubs and kielbasa he delivered on the weekends from my uncle Vincent's meat market. We didn't in your mother's Buick Eight, where a rosary twined the rearview mirror like a beaded, black snake with silver, cruciform fangs ... . At the end of our lover's lane—a street of abandoned factories—where I perfected the pinch that springs open a bra; behind the lilac bushes in Marquette Park, where you first touched me through my jeans and your nipples, swollen against transparent cotton, seemed the shade of lilacs; in the balcony of the now defunct Clark Theater, where I wiped popcorn salt from my palms and slid them up your thighs and you whispered, "I feel like Doris Day is watching us," we didn't.
Galway Kinnell's poem and Stuart Dybek's prose are just two examples of how rhythmic verse can elevate the text in a symphonic performance that stimulates the mind and excites the heart.
(Jensea Storie, Poetry Editor)
posted by Robert Woerheide at 1:44 PM
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1 Comments:
This is a wonderful reminder of how prose can be elevated by a poetic voice: by careful word selection, rhythm, and a specific kind of pace, which—as in the best verse—propels the reader forward.
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