Aaaaah... prose poetry

[Tzara]

To be honest, I never really studied a lot of straight up poetry (it probably shows, and I must move it to a top priority). But I loved reading the old stuff that would likely stand no chance of publication today if it was presented as straight prose. Hesse comes to mind for one. The hour is early and others don't click... maybe Proust, even Faulkner... Miller's Tropics...
You know, the kind of stuff that you can just open to a random page and the language is so beautiful - if the tools of poetry are implemented, they are so subtly woven or balanced with the prose that you don't notice unless you really look for them, or it doesn't even matter. It doesn't even matter if it tells a story, maybe it's just an abstract scene or maybe the reader doesn't even uderstand what the writer really had in mind. The words themselves matter for their own sake and they even change depending on the light you read them under.

Now, whether that's prose poetry or just beautiful prose? Maybe it was beautiful prose then, and today we'd call it prose poetry?

Some novelists simply write beautiful prose. John Updike, for example, is sometimes hard for me to read because his sentences are so lovely that I will just stop reading and admire the elegance of his style. His sentences are so perfect that they are distracting.

Another, very different, writer whose style just astounds me is James Crumley. Here's the famous first sentence to The Last Good Kiss:

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.​

Is that evocative? For me, hell yes. Is it poetry? I don't think so, because the purpose of the sentence is to set up a fictive scene. Same with Updike. Same with Hesse or Proust or Faulkner, for that example.

I guess, to me, for now, to use contrasted examples, prose says, "just get to the point, spit it out" while prose poetry says, "why not take the scenic route"

There's something to that statement, but then you get prose fiction like much of Nicholson Baker's work. Hardly anything in the sense of action or plot or character development occurs. He's sometimes kind of like a very abbreviated Proust.

Or take Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, where the same very brief scene is repeated over and over through the book, written in different styles. Again, no plot, no development, all "scenery", but no one is likely to call it poetry.

 

[hmmnmm]

somewhat poetic prose as opposed to prose poetry?