Prose Poetry and TimeSpace

Prose Poetry ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 128-150
Author(s):  
Paul Hetherington ◽  
Cassandra Atherton
Keyword(s):  
Relative Abundance ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
White Space ◽  
Prose Poem ◽  
Forward Movement ◽  
Prose Poems ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Narrative Progression

This chapter addresses prose poetry's distortion of space and time, exploring the effects created by prose poetry's simultaneously condensed and onrushing language. This is unlike lineated poetry because although lineated lyric poems, in particular, often create a sense of considerable compression and intensity, the relative abundance of white space in such works creates a countervailing sense that there is room to think and breathe. Prose poetry is also unlike prose fiction, in which the emphasis on narrative progression gives priority to a sense of directed forward movement through TimeSpace — an emphasis that is very different from the effects created by most prose poems. While a prose poem may create an impression of forward momentum as the grammar and sequencing of the prose poem's tightly packed sentences carry the reader forward, its poetic tropes simultaneously complicate or problematize any sense of one-way progression. As a result, prose poems usually yield for the reader a complex textual engagement in which ideas and motifs frequently fold back on themselves, or present unresolved issues for consideration.

Prose Poetry

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Hetherington ◽  
Cassandra Atherton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
English Language ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Prose Poem ◽  
Prose Poems ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Key Characteristics ◽  
Anglophone World

This is the first book of its kind — an introduction to the history, development, and features of English-language prose poetry, an increasingly important and popular literary form that is still too little understood and appreciated. The book introduces prose poetry's key characteristics, charts its evolution from the nineteenth-century to the present, and discusses many historical and contemporary prose poems that both demonstrate their great diversity around the Anglophone world and show why they represent some of today's most inventive writing. A prose poem looks like prose but reads like poetry: it lacks the line breaks of other poetic forms but employs poetic techniques, such as internal rhyme, repetition, and compression. The book explains how this form opens new spaces for writers to create riveting works that reshape the resources of prose while redefining the poetic. Discussing prose poetry' s precursors, including William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman, and prose poets such as Charles Simic, Russell Edson, Lydia Davis, and Claudia Rankine, the book pays equal attention to male and female prose poets, documenting women's essential but frequently unacknowledged contributions to the genre. Revealing how prose poetry tests boundaries and challenges conventions to open up new imaginative vistas, this is an essential book for all readers, students, teachers, and writers of prose poetry.

Orthodox Prose Poetry

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Admussen
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
The Political ◽  
Study Group ◽  
State Socialism ◽  
Prose Poem ◽  
Prose Poems ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Way

This chapter opens by studying the two most seminal prose poets of the 1950s, Ke Lan and Guo Feng. It shows that by faithfully ventriloquizing state socialism, they effectively subjectivize it, putting the words of the collective into the mouth of the individual. It demonstrates the way in which the political pressures of the 1950s provoked acts of definition and organization on the part of prose poets. The second half of chapter three reads the prose poetry community itself as a key text of orthodox art. It finds that an intentional modeling of prose poetry communities on the structures of the Communist Party has produced a set of dynamics that are hierarchical, inter-organizational, and self-reproductive. These dynamics influence the composition of prose poems through the interventions of educators, editors, and study group administrators, leading to the conclusion that many people participate in the writing of each orthodox prose poem.

Prose Poetry

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Desmarais ◽  
David Weir
Keyword(s):  
Essential Oil ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Prose Poem ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
Prose Poems ◽  
The World ◽  
Spleen De Paris ◽  
Fleurs Du Mal

This chapter treats the prose poem as the decadent genre par excellence by focusing on Charles Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris (Paris Spleen, 1869). The prose poem is well suited to the expression of decadent culture because of its formal subversion of conventional poetry, especially as adapted by Baudelaire to articulate “the bump and lurch” of urban experience. J. K. Huysmans certified the decadent credentials of the genre when he described it in À rebours (Against Nature, 1884) as “the osmazome of literature, the essential oil of art,” a literary distillation that makes it “an aesthetic treat to none but the most discerning.” The article analyzes “Any Where Out of the World” and other prose poems in relation to certain poems in Le Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857), observing no loss of metaphorical power in the more “prosaic” medium despite Baudelaire’s secular and subversive treatment of many of the same poetic material given more elevated, spiritual treatment in the earlier collection.

Ideas of Open Form and Closure in Prose Poetry

Prose Poetry ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 79-101
Author(s):  
Paul Hetherington ◽  
Cassandra Atherton
Keyword(s):  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Open Form ◽  
White Space ◽  
Prose Poems ◽  
Opening And Closing

This chapter focuses on ideas of open form and closure in prose poetry. While lineated lyric poetry is typically highly suggestive and open to various interpretations, it simultaneously tends toward conveying a sense of formal resolution and closure. The attention to formal elements in lineated lyric poetry, including the beginnings and endings of lines and the opening and closing of works, is very different from other kinds of less formalized writing — including prose poetry, where sentences are drawn together in paragraphs rather than separated. Prose poetry refuses lineated poetry's rhythmic closure even as it visually preempts its conclusion in the capacious white space that follows the last sentence of the paragraph. In other words, openness and closure are likely to be manifested very differently in lineated poems compared to prose poems. Prose poems have their own integrity as works, but their sense of completeness turns on their appeal to incompleteness in the same way as the literary fragment. Structurally, prose poetry's use of the sentence rather than the line as its unit of composition allows the poet to engage in “narrative digression.”

Women and Prose Poetry

Prose Poetry ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 199-223
Author(s):  
Paul Hetherington ◽  
Cassandra Atherton
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Prose Poem ◽  
Prose Poems ◽  
Critical View ◽  
Male Power ◽  
Comprehensive Study

This chapter highlights the tradition of English-language prose poetry by women. It explores what women's prose poetries may be — not only in terms of content and approach but in terms of technique and emphasis. The chapter begins by looking at Holly Iglesias's seminal text, Boxing Inside the Box: Women's Prose Poetry (2004), which is the most comprehensive study of women's prose poetry to date. Iglesias advocates for the liberation of women prose poets, using the prose poem box as a metaphor for their containment. Beginning with Carolyn Forché's famous and disturbing prose poem about male power and brutality, “The Colonel,” and ending with C. D. Wright's hybrid prose poem essay, Iglesias's book celebrates women prose poets by giving them space and prominence. Ultimately, the neglect of many women prose poets did not occur because women were not writing prose poems; it is just that many women were not writing the kinds of prose poems that fit the prevalent critical view of what successful prose poems might look like.

Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Prose Poem

Prose Poetry ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 177-198
Author(s):  
Paul Hetherington ◽  
Cassandra Atherton
Keyword(s):  
Figurative Language ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Prose Poem ◽  
Prose Poems

This chapter studies another central feature of prose poetry: the use of metonymy and metaphor. Metonymy allows writers to use phrases or individual words in ways that suggest an array of meanings, enriching and adding complexity to their writing — and there are many kinds and examples of metonymy, just as there are many kinds of metaphor. Metonymy is especially important to prose poems because it complements, enhances, and complicates their literal and metaphorical meanings. The chapter then discusses the importance of such figurative language to reading and interpreting individual works, allowing an understanding of the ways in which many prose poems simultaneously present a variety of possible (often shifting) interpretations. It also looks at prose poetry's resonant employment of intertextuality to enrich its content.

scholarly journals समकालीन नेपाली गद्यकवितामा वर्णविन्यासवक्रता [Characterization in contemporary Nepali prose poetry]

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 92-106
Author(s):  
Khil Prasad Baral
Keyword(s):  
Meaningful Use ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Theoretical Discussion ◽  
Study Analysis ◽  
Prose Poems ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
Deductive Method ◽  
Descriptive Method

पूर्वीय साहित्यशास्त्रमा आचार्य कुन्तकद्वारा प्रतिपादित वक्रोक्तिसिद्धान्त मूलतः एउटा समन्वयशील सिद्धान्त हो । पूर्ववर्ती आचार्यहरूका मान्यतासमेतलाई समाहित गर्ने गरी प्रस्तुत गर्न खोजिएको यस सिद्धान्तमा कुन्तकले वक्रोक्तिका विभिन्न छ भेद तथा तिनका उपभेदहरूको चर्चा गरेका छन् । यस लेखमा उनले प्रस्तुत गरेका वक्रोक्तिका छ भेदहरूमध्ये वर्णविन्यासवक्रताका आधारमा केही समकालीन नेपाली गद्यकविताहरूको अध्ययन विश्लेषण गरिएको छ । यसका लागि सर्वप्रथम वक्रोक्तिसिद्धान्त र वर्णविन्यासवक्रताका बारेमा सङ्क्षिप्त सैद्धान्तिक चर्चा गरिएको छ । त्यस्तै समकालीन नेपाली गद्यकवितामा वर्णविन्यासवक्रताको प्रगोग कसरी भएको छ भन्ने सन्दर्भलाई स्पष्ट पार्न विभिन्न समकालीन कविका कवितांशलाई उहाहरणका रूपमा प्रस्तुत गरी तिनमा पाइने वर्णविन्यासवक्रताको अध्ययन विश्लेषण गरिएको छ । विक्रम संवत् सत्तरीको दशकयता प्रकाशित कविताहरूमा केन्द्रित यस अध्ययनमा वर्णविन्यासवक्रताका छवटै भेदहरूका आधारमा कविताहरूको विश्लेषण गरिएको छ । प्राथमिक र द्वितीयक दुवै स्रोतका सामग्रीको प्रयोग गरी वर्णनात्मक पद्धतिअनुसार विवेच्य सामग्रीहरूको विश्लेषण गरिएको छ । मूलतः निगमनात्मक पद्धतिमा आधारित यस अध्ययनबाट समकालीन नेपाली गद्यकवितामा पूर्वीय काव्यशास्त्रमा वर्णित वर्णविन्यासवक्रताको सफल र सार्थक प्रयोग पाइने निष्कर्ष निकालिएको छ ।[In Eastern literature, the theory of curvature formulated by Acharya Kuntak is basically a coordinating theory. In this theory, which seeks to incorporate the beliefs of the earlier Acharyas, Kuntak discusses the six distinctions of satire and its variants. In this article, the study analysis of some contemporary Nepali prose poems has been analyzed on the basis of chromaticism out of the six distinctions of irony presented by him. For this, first of all, a brief theoretical discussion has been given about the theory of curvature and chronology. Similarly, in order to clarify the context of how the use of colloquialism has been used in contemporary Nepali prose poetry, various contemporary poetic poems have been presented as examples and the study of colloquialism found in them has been analyzed. This study focuses on the poems published in the seventies of Bikram Samvat and analyzes the poems on the basis of all the six distinctions of chromaticism. The material of both primary and secondary sources has been analyzed according to the descriptive method. Basically, this study based on the deductive method has concluded that the successful and meaningful use of the chromatic descriptions described in Eastern poetry in contemporary Nepali prose poetry has been found.]

Introducing the Prose Poem

Prose Poetry ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 3-27
Author(s):  
Paul Hetherington ◽  
Cassandra Atherton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Prose Poem ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
The Common ◽  
Common Observation ◽  
Intense Emotion

This chapter traces prose poetry's development in nineteenth-century France and its early reception and subsequent critical views about the form. The prose poem in English is now established as an important literary form in many countries at a time when the composition and publication of poetry is thriving. However, while poetry generally continues to be recognized as a literary genre highly suited to expressing intense emotion, grappling with the ineffable and the intimate, and while lineated lyric poetry is widely admired for its rhythms and musicality, the main scholarship written about English-language prose poetry to date defines the form as problematic, paradoxical, ambiguous, unresolved, or contradictory. The common observation that the term “prose poetry” appears to contain a contradiction is not surprising given that poetry and prose are often understood to be fundamentally different kinds of writing. The chapter then defines the prose poem's main features and discusses the challenge prose poetry presents to established ideas of literary genre.

The Prose Poem’s Post-Romantic Inheritance

Prose Poetry ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 28-50
Author(s):  
Paul Hetherington ◽  
Cassandra Atherton
Keyword(s):  
Prose Poetry ◽  
The Other ◽  
Prose Poem ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Romantic Movement ◽  
Contemporary Writers ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter discusses prose poetry's connection to Romanticism. Although contemporary writers take the fragmentary nature of the prose poem for granted, it was once an important innovation to celebrate fragmentary literary forms — an innovation that took hold with the Romantic movement. Given the relationship between prose poetry and the Romantic fragment, comprehending one offers the opportunity to better appreciate the other. Moreover, if “the extended influence of Romantic fragments into Modernist and even Postmodernist poetry” is uncovered, then this underscores the view that the contemporary prose poem is simultaneously a product of postmodernism, modernism, and Romanticism. While contemporary prose poetry is sometimes self consciously fractured and fragmentary, destabilizing and interrupting notions of TimeSpace in ways Romantic writers rarely attempted, the prose poem's Romantic inheritance remains.

What Is a Chinese Prose Poem?

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Admussen
Keyword(s):  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Reading Process ◽  
Prose Poem ◽  
Chinese Scholars ◽  
Poetry Reading ◽  
Definition Of

Chapter one traces a reading process that ends in a metaphoric and hermeneutic definition of prose poetry. Reading Heidegger through Celan, and engaging with western theories of genre, it moves from the much-discussed insufficiency of categorical definitions of the genre to the need to describe prose poetry as the product of particular compositional processes, then determines that we can describe those processes as the condensation of prose writing, the recitation of previous prose art, and the refusal to be identical to previous prose art. These processes are simultaneous, and complexly interrelated; they take place, as Chinese scholars point out, inside poems, and indirectly determine their exteriors. The chapter includes translations of compositions from the 1976 Tiananmen demonstrations, and recent prose poetry by Xi Chuan and others.

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