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Hi Rowland
I do like your comments on poetry and prose and it is about emotional feelings and images. Outside my back garden is a forest where the wildlife reside and further along from that is a lake where the anglers sit, heron's, swans, ducks and other wild birds dwell. (There is a photo which I took, on my website, of swans and their cygnets) I base a lot of my stories and poems around the forest and lake. You are right about stimulating the imagination. This type of environment does just that.
The hedgehogs, woodpigeons, frogs and squirrels amble, fly hop or run into my garden to have a drink from a water feature, but there is one particular squirrel which digs
the plants out of the plant pots and hanging baskets and buries his nuts there making a mess all over the place as if a JCB digger had run amok, then sits on the fence looking at me with a grin on his face as if he has every right to bury his nuts where he pleases. I am trying to think of a name for him(it must be a him only males would do that sort of thing) females are too tidy. Can you think of a name for this squirrel besides the obvious? I would be very grateful.
Thanks
Jayeflo
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My simplistic way of defining the difference is that 'prose is a means of expressing a story' whereas 'poetry is a means of expressing oneself'. Of course there is certainly a blurring at the edge between the two. In particular, there are poems which do tell stories. However, poetry is not welcome in prose . Accidental alliteration should be routed out. Fancy phrases should be routed out. Prose should be descriptive yes, but above all functional. Prose with poetry in is poetic prose - i.e. poetry. Prose is not tolerant of poetry - which is a shame. [There are exceptions of course, e.g. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov]
Prose requires research, structure, rigour, a good plot and so on. In prose the writer should be absent or invisible; the writer is a conduit for the story, nothing else. Sure the writer can use his or her life experience to make the story interesting and believable but those life experiences must be ascribed to characters. A talented prose writer knows how to nullify him or herself. The finished work is set aside from the author. The finished work is a product, a bar code, a little sticker with a price on it.
Poetry to me - I'm talking modern poetry - contains many fewer strictures than prose. Poetry is all-inviting. The poet is allowed presence or absence as he or she sees fit. The poet is allowed to express him or herself in any way at all to achieve the desired effect. Poems often write themselves. In this case the poet is not the conduit for a well planned, well structured story; rather the conduit for something ethereal, psychological, something from the subconscious. In this case the writer is doing the exact opposite to nullifying him or herself. Personally I'm not one for rhyming verse or any kind of formality. That said, I still feel there are rules: a poem should be timeless, devoid of anything that will not still apply in a hundred years or a thousand years. In my opinion, a poem about a car or a computer (though it may be entertaining) is intrinsically worthless. A poem about a birth or death or grief is where it's still at. The finished work can be a work of art or it can be - more often than not - dross. The finished work is often not set aside from the poet; foreknowledge of the poet is sometimes important to inferring the full meaning of a poem. And yes, I probably have contradicted myself a little there: a poet is not timeless. The finished work is rarely a product, rarely a bar code; it is valuable nonetheless and enduring.
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