Saturday: Ian Seed‘s prose poetry workshop
A prose poem is a text which at first glance doesn’t look like a poem due to not having the line-breaks of a poem. Printed as prose, it may be a paragraph in length, or have several paragraphs (‘stanzas’). It may (or may not) be both right and left justified. It may (or may not) be laid out with more-narrowed-than-usual margins on the page. In surrendering the poet’s most valuable tool, the line break, access is gained to a broader palette of syntax and sentence structures. Prose poems are particularly accommodating to poems with a strong narrative line, or a lot of landscape detail – a lot of hard-to-digest data.
I float out of the first session on a high. He likes my prose poems.
…looks like prose but features the charged language that is characteristic of poetry, exploiting linguistic resources such as compression, poetic imagery, cadence, fragmentation, non-literal language, rhythms, figures of speech, rhyme, internal rhyme, assonance, consonance. It breaks some of the normal rules of prose discourse in order to achieve a heightened image or emotional effect.
At the bookstall I spend a week’s food money on Jane Monson’s edition of British prose poetry
A particular structural strategy employed in the prose poem is poetic closure.
Ian says I am good at closure.
I am so much more creative when not distracted by some cheap desperate affaire du coeur.
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