WRITING THE PROSE POEM

A WRITING BLOG About Playing Around with a Story Line in Different Literary Genres and Different Literary Categories

Writing Leap #27

Hi Writers,

The Prose Poem

It’s written as prose but reads like poetry. 

You can sit down and dismiss traditional poetry rules.  Like metered rhyme and specific groupings of words. 

There’s an emphasis on the narrative but the prose poem helps itself to the techniques of poetry like vivid images, heightened emotions and fragments.  I often find writing in fragments frees up my writing.  In the editing process I may change them to sentences or not.

I remember grade school when we were not allowed to use sentence fragments in prose.   We ignore that teacher.

What’s the difference between prose poems and free verse, I wondered?  Typography it seems.  Free verse tends to look more like a poem on the page with shorter lines.  Prose poems often, not always, go from one side of the page to another—like prose!

So Writers.  Have fun with fragments and write a prose poem. 

You can try this story line

Heaven

Here’s Mine.

The Twelfth of August Every Year

Happy Birthday my beloved Auntie

Up there in Heaven for a long time.  One hundred plus plus plus years old.

In the way of angels are you aware how your ever-flowing love was the sunshine to my blossoming?  Still is.

When I’ve floundered about who I am

I remember and feel your loving hand holding my child’s hand

Giving me grown-up manicures.  Talking to me with tenderness about my Cynthia-ness. 

I become happy with myself.

There were a never-ending collection of little moments, some faded in detail

That became huge with the love that created them.

You found me beautiful early editions of War and Peace. 

All leathery, book-musty and tissue-papery.   We both loved books.

You knew my passion for this Russian story.

How excited you were to find the grown-up me the entire collection of My Book House.  Fairy Tales you had read to me over and over long ago. 

I was Dolly in the Grass or Snow White.

You insisted.

My adored Auntie Ceil.

I feel who I am, Auntie, because you felt who I was.

And most of all, you told me.

Happy Writing Everyone,

 LINKING THE ARTS

A Prose Poem by Walt Whitman  (first two stanzas)

From A Family of Poems, compiled by Caroline Kennedy, 2005

Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road,

Healthy, free, the world before me,

The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good fortune, I myself am good fortune,

Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,

Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,

Strong and content, I travel the open road.

A Word

 Many of us might say the best word in the dictionary is LOVE, here thought  of as ever flowing generosity of spirit.

A Painting

Perhaps all paintings can be considered prose poems.  Vivid imagery, carefully chosen details, flexible techniques.

Here’s a watercolor my Auntie Ceil brought me back from Paris when I was sixteen.  She had asked the artist to paint in a young girl—me.