Comments on: Do You Write Poetry and Prose?

By: Prabha Salimath

Prabha Salimath — Wed, 09 Oct 2013 15:49:34 +0000

Poetry is a form you can hide your feelings after being expressed & some things really need to concealed after being expressed..

Prose is a form with complete detail not get time to understand,, we need only to swallow it..

Anyway we’ll get bored soon. It’s really good to write in both form to get back to a perfect pitch..

By: Lyn G Farrell

Lyn G Farrell — Sun, 06 Oct 2013 12:28:43 +0000

I mainly write prose. I am just finishing the second draft of my first novel. It is autobiographical fiction (emphasis on fiction). It is, in parts, bleak, gritty, painful. Some of my short stories are happy tales but the myriad ways in which we can feel the pain of existence shows through in a number of others. It’s just what I write, right now. My poetry is nothing like my prose; my poems are highly silly things, setting free the clown in me. I mean clown in a positive sense – think Pam Ayres or Spike Milligan. Poems such as ‘The Jelly of Damocles’ or ‘Ode to a Grouch’ are written for my own amusement, to look back on events or feelings and belly laugh.

I think that my writing has to take this stark and absolute form right now, until I have this first novel finished and I feel that my poetry balances out these raw and difficult emotions stemming from my current prose. I think the poems are a form of self therapy, so that even when my prose presses down on me, the poems have me floating upwards again.

All of this might well be a transitory stage of writing. My poems could develop sadness, my stories absurdity. I might write sci-fi or horrow or romance – who knows? For now I have these two hugely distinct aspects to my writing. Writing harasses me constantly. The poems pop up far less frequently. I love both equally.

By: Andrea

Andrea — Sun, 22 Sep 2013 15:05:35 +0000

In reply to Anora.

Specifically, the poems in my first poetry collection, Natural Disasters (Palimpsest Press) informed my first novel, When She Was Electric (Raincoast Books).

Some of the poems in my second collection, Away (Signature Editions) were early ruminations on the research that became my next novel, Beyond the Blue (Random House).

All published in Canada, When She Was Electric and Beyond the Blue also available in the US.

By: Andrea

Andrea — Sun, 22 Sep 2013 15:00:21 +0000

I had a student ask me why I wrote in both forms. He was in a fiction class, and he didn’t think there was any reason to write poetry when you could write a story. I tried to explain the nuances of form, and how they affect the reader, without much luck until I compared it to something visual: a poem is a photograph, a novel is a movie.

Writing in both poetry and prose allows me to decide the lens through which I express myself. Sometimes it’s a snapshot I need, that specific moment in time that I want to document. Other times, it’s another beast entirely. Poetry makes me focus on the minute, amd fiction writing demands breadth. It’s a balancing act, really.

Fiction was my first love. I came to poetry later, specifically in a graduate workshop. There were five of us, and the incredible George McWhirter was the professor. I’d find his blue notes all across my poems–‘This image here’, ‘Dig deeper’–and I’d stare at them, and the poem, until I saw what he saw. The breathless clarity of a single, right image. The punch to the heart. I fell in love with poetry, then. Hard.

Poetry and prose overlap for me. Prose helps me to recognize and reveal the narrative in poetry. Poetry makes me more aware of language, imagery and rhythm in prose. I can’t imagine one without the other.

By: Jess Mahler

Jess Mahler — Sun, 22 Sep 2013 00:02:28 +0000

I started out writing poetry. For years I didn’t write prose unless it was a school assignment. But I always loved storytelling, and over time started writing down my stories, and started writing less and less poetry. Now I hardly ever write poetry but always have at least 3 prose pieces in various stages of development.

I don’t know what influence my prose will have on my poetry, if and when I start writing verse again. But I can clearly see the impact poetry had on my prose. I remember reading somewhere, “In poetry, the wrong word can kill you.” Yes, completely. I would agonize for hours over word choice, flow, structure.

I don’t give my prose the same attention to detail – if nothing else, spending hours on each sentence would mean I never finished anything! But poetry taught me how beautiful language can be. How it flows, has rhythm, movement, voice. It taught me that sometimes grammar needs to be set aside so meaning can shine.

And now my prose writing, my best prose writing, takes on some of that feeling. The words flow, or chop, or scatter to fit the mood and scene. I notice it most often in my short/flash fiction, but it comes out in my longer fiction too. In my novel, the climax has a section that if it were stand-alone I’d call a prose poem, though the prose aspect was strengthened in the revisions.

By: Oonah V Joslin

Oonah V Joslin — Mon, 16 Sep 2013 11:02:28 +0000

Within the spectrum of writing, most writers choose a narrow bandwidth. It is easy to determine the difference between the novel and the sonnet. But as with blue and indigo, there is a place where prose and poetry cross over and it is difficult to see the gradations within. That ‘liminal’ area is my field. I like writing ‘short stuff,’ not because I am lazy; it takes more effort to use fewer words, but because I prefer density of expression. To write ‘Drabble,’ a story of one hundred words, succinct grammar and syntax are as important as in short poetry. You cannot afford the luxury of description or repetition unless they serve the narrative. Yet a metaphor, a well placed pause, a little alliteration, can go a long way in flash fiction and some small detail, a word or two, can fill in a lot of back-story. A story need not be linear but it must be narrative. It must have a beginning, middle and end: whereas Poetry can be narrative, but that is not its primary function. As an editor I feel sometimes despondent when I read a poetry submission that is clearly chopped up prose; flawless sentences, line breaks given no thought, often no use of any poetic strategy. When I began writing flash fiction I quite often ended up with a cameo, not a story and now when I reread some of my work, I see it as more poetry than prose so I can forgive the inexperienced writer and would-be poet their trespasses but these days I am more careful as to intent. And therein, I think lies the key. Whatever we write, we write to convey meaning. How we do that is determined by intent. What a story does is to tell a story. There may be underlying messages and philosophies and beautiful language within it, but the story is the thing. In a poem you can use language and syntax differently and rhythm and rhyme to contribute to the message so that the poem works as a unity and speaks more directly to, “the heart in hiding.” Perhaps form may disclose intent and the poem is much more about language.
“The achieve of; the mastery of the thing!”
(The Windhover; Gerard Manley Hopkins 1918)

By: Jo Carroll

Jo Carroll — Mon, 16 Sep 2013 08:56:58 +0000

In reply to Women Writers, Women’s Books.

Just caught up with this (how tardy of me!).
If you’re feeling brave, Anora, I blogged the poem here:

http://gapyearsthebook.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/poem-from-cambodia.html

By: LM Steel

LM Steel — Mon, 16 Sep 2013 05:41:31 +0000

Poetry was always my first love. I’ve written it since I was a child and honestly believe you can see a little girl grow up into a young woman when you read through them all.
Writing poetry has made everything else I write quite lyrical. Prose is something I want to do and work hard to do. Poetry is something that comes very naturally, like turning to an old friend.

By: Laila

Laila — Sun, 15 Sep 2013 13:28:57 +0000

In reply to Laila.

I can’t believe I wrote “I am a master writer” in that post. It’s my best friends favourite joke about me – that I am so incapable of saying no or not, it’s the word I constantly forget to type and it happens to be the one word that can change the content of anything. *shakes head*

By: Laila

Laila — Sun, 15 Sep 2013 13:20:22 +0000

Prose is my first love, my high-school sweetheart, my marriage. Prose is stable and something that keeps me safe, if that makes sense. I am a master writer but I know what I’m doing and I know how to get better, what to strive for, what the goals are. I can write prose every day, I can force it without killing or even hurting it.
Poetry is different for me. It’s the rare moment of sudden inspiration. I write poetry only when it comes to me, usually through one central idea or metaphor and often, months pass before I write another poem, but the few that I have written in the last years mean a lot to me, express something rather fundamental about who I am in a way that prose can’t.