The Place For My Writers Notes

Original Posting 18 December 1993

[drat - mr. ryan or someone posted a comment like this before I caught up, but I'm stubborn, I'm going to post this anyway. I think I used more words than he did to say it. what, no surprise there?]

Had a very, very strange thought about this today. Now, suppose we consider that both poetry and prose use words, pretty much from the same vocabulary, and for pretty much the same purpose. All right?

However, the difference lies in how much freedom the reader is given to rebuild the fringes of meaning around the wordy framework scribbled on the page. I.e., a word, somewhat like a magic phrase or computer code, usually excites at least one and maybe more associations and layers of meaning. Most prose leans toward mashing and constraining those fringes of meaning towards those the author intended, with the words marching in lockstep, avoiding the wilder wandering and veering that can easily occur. Most poetry, on the other hand, deliberately provokes those fringes, those clashing and growing extasies of invisible meanings in the reader.

I suppose one way to put it is that prose, while it allows the reader to rebuild the soft tissue around the bony words, usually keeps on tramping along the road, keeping the reader's notions skinny and muscular. Poetry may provide fewer words and leave out some of the connective tissue seen in prose, but it encourages and allows the reader to develop a far more extravagant personal undergrowth hung on the bony grating of those few words.

It ain't the words, so much, but the places they leave open for the reader to grow on. Prose, especially good prose, gives you some chances to fit your own meanings to the words. Poetry not only gives you the chance, it requires you to jump the gaps and fill the spaces around and in the poem with yourself.

Of course, things labeled either way could provide as fine
or poor a soil for the strokes of your personal brush
so I wouldn't go quite so far as to oppose them
just enjoy the pith of prose and the width of poetry
as the words dance their romance along your nerves

(I'm not sure this is the best way to say what I'm trying to say, as what you read may be much more and not at all what I wrote, all those little meanings snuffed when I quenched them in ink, but perhaps your's can fill in and over and around the edges)