|
About This Author
My name is Joy, and I love to write.
Why poetry, here? Because poetry uplifts its writer, and if she is lucky enough, her readers, too. Around us, so many objects abound to write about. Once a poet starts with a smallest, most trivial object, he shall discover that his pen will spill out what is most delicate or most majestic hidden inside him. Since the classics sometimes dealt with lofty subjects with a lofty language, a person with poetry in his soul may incline to emulate that. That is understandable. Poetry does that to a person: it enlarges the soul and gives it wings. Yet, to really soar, a poet needs to take off from the ground.
 
|
Everyday Canvas
"Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself."
CHARLIE CHAPLIN
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
David Whyte
This is my supplementary blog in which I will post entries written for prompts.
August 15, 2016 at 6:33pm August 15, 2016 at 6:33pm
| |
Prompt: “Always be a poet, even in prose’” Charles Baudelaire
Are you getting Baudelaire’s drift? Does your prose turn poetic always, at times, or rarely?
==========
Prose poems I consider poetry, so I am not going to address them here, for poetry is poetry. As to the other types of prose that turn into poetry, I guess I could call some pieces of prose a poem, mine or belonging to others, from time to me.
For example, in my unedited, unrevised 2015 NaNo novel, the following excerpt focuses on leaves: “My greatest adoration and astonishment lies in the greens of the earth that billow and sway at will, on plains and hills, to vocal winds, rising storms, confident rains that leave tiny drops on leaves and grass. Then from all that greenery burst multicolored beauties, flowers like dreams, not knowing death yet, but daring to live between the storms and the sun.”
The above excerpt might qualify for a poem, but I think I was only experimenting with lyricism with this entire novel, and if I wanted to do anything at all with this work, I might edit a lot of it out, because I think, ‘the story’s the thing’ and stylistic anything may run the risk of looking like a blotch of blood on the plot. How about my accidental assonance and dissonance on the last part of the last sentence! 
As for the quote in the prompt, Baudelaire is one of my favorite poets, but he wasn’t the only one to think in poetry. Flaubert was among those authors who first made fictional prose inflexibly style-conscious. Vladimir Nabokov said, “Gogol called his Dead Souls a prose poem; Flaubert’s novel [Madame Bovary] is also a poem but one that is composed better, with a closer, finer texture.”
I think this is because the romantic writer was stronger than the realist one in Flaubert’s psyche. After him, for a long time, everyone became a stylist one way or the other, into our time. By the way, Nabokov also takes after Flaubert.
In today’s novels and stories, I come across beautiful passages of poetry. These are just fine if they have some relevance to the rest of the novel or to a story’s elements. On the other hand, turning a piece of prose into poetry, especially when too strong a plot exists, inserts some painterly brushing and masking to the text, thus threatening the work to become irrelevant.
|
© Copyright 2024 Joy (UN: joycag at Writing.Com). All rights reserved.
Joy has granted InkSpot.Com, its affiliates and its syndicates non-exclusive rights to display this work.
|
Comment 
