> /ship writers 022820

>>> Item number 22820 from WRITERS LOG9312C --- (46 records) ----- <<<
Date:         Sat, 18 Dec 1993 18:35:01 JST
Reply-To:     WRITERS <WRITERS@NDSUVM1.BITNET>
Sender:       WRITERS <WRITERS@NDSUVM1.BITNET>
From:         Mike Barker <barker@AEGIS.OR.JP>
Subject:      TECH: Poetry or Prose

[drat - mr. ryan or someone posted a comment like this before I
caught up, but I'm stubborn, I'm going to post this anyway.  I think
I used more words than he did to say it.  what, no surprise there?]

    Had a very, very strange thought about this today.  Now, suppose we
consider that both poetry and prose use words, pretty much from the same
vocabulary, and for pretty much the same purpose.  All right?
    However, the difference lies in how much freedom the reader is given
to rebuild the fringes of meaning around the wordy framework scribbled
on the page.  I.e., a word, somewhat like a magic phrase or computer
code, usually excites at least one and maybe more associations and
layers of meaning.  Most prose leans toward mashing and constraining
those fringes of meaning towards those the author intended, with the
words marching in lockstep, avoiding the wilder wandering and veering
that can easily occur.  Most poetry, on the other hand, deliberately
provokes those fringes, those clashing and growing extasies of invisible
meanings in the reader.
    I suppose one way to put it is that prose, while it allows the
reader to rebuild the soft tissue around the bony words, usually keeps
on tramping along the road, keeping the reader's notions skinny and
muscular.  Poetry may provide fewer words and leave out some of the
connective tissue seen in prose, but it encourages and allows the reader
to develop a far more extravagant personal undergrowth hung on the bony
grating of those few words.
    It ain't the words, so much, but the places they leave open for the
reader to grow on.  Prose, especially good prose, gives you some chances
to fit your own meanings to the words.  Poetry not only gives you the
chance, it requires you to jump the gaps and fill the spaces around and
in the poem with yourself.
    Of course, things labeled either way could provide as fine
    or poor a soil for the strokes of your personal brush
    so I wouldn't go quite so far as to oppose them
    just enjoy the pith of prose and the width of poetry
    as the words dance their romance along your nerves

(I'm not sure this is the best way to say what I'm trying to say,
as what you read may be much more and not at all what I wrote,
all those little meanings snuffed when I quenched them in ink,
but perhaps your's can fill in and over and around the edges)
tink