Caught Between Prose and Poetry

.

Well, I started this post back on May 28th when it was to follow blithely after the “Composing Reality” post. But what is the old saying? “We plan and God laughs?” Hopefully the incidents that intervened between then and now will point the way to more harmonic and eventually more beautiful lives. I am usually pleased when life swirls around to a perspective that finally demonstrates the imperative of a world governed by the principles of Distilled Harmony. But I cannot help but be saddened that we had to take these few fragile steps forward at such a horrific cost in life and social solidarity.  But I think that part of that forward movement is to return, when possible, to pursuits that highlight that which is good, harmonic, and beautiful.  So I am going to step back to those quieter days of early May when I found myself caught between poetry and prose.  .  .  .

Initially, it was my intention to explore the differences between poetry and prose, but a quick jog down memory lane reminded me that Billy Collins, former US poet laureate, had beat me to it. I have already mentioned his poem titled “Poetry” in a previous post, and it is still just as frustrating to track down online. A friend gave me a copy of the Collins collection Aimless Love [Random House, 2013] and “Poetry” is in there - you see the problem? Trying searching Collins and Poetry and the problem becomes clear. Anyhow, the more I thought about it the more it occurred to me that Collins - the poet laureate - might be a tad biased in this particular comparison. Duh. So I am going to attempt a more objective analysis by stealing an analogy from a sister disciple - painting.

For this discussion let’s let realism stand in for prose, while poetry will put on the guise of abstraction. Yes, yes. I know. Simplistic almost to the point of childish - What manner of realism? Abstraction of what flavor? Picasso? Pollack? But remember, the third tenet of Distilled Harmony is distill complexity. Our objective here is not to delve into the complexity of artistic analysis, but rather to allow these basic visual motifs to guide our understanding of their literary kin.

To further distill the already simplistic, let us have Rembrandt’s The Night Watch (1642) and Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World (1948), do the heavy lifting for realism; while Pollack’s Convergence (1952) and Picasso’s Guernica (1937) will stand in for poetry. The reasons behind these selections are also rather simplistic. The Night Watch is currently undergoing a significant restoration and there are some neat online tools to let us peek over the shoulders of the restorers. Christina’s World was one of my mother’s favorites, and hence is one of mine as well. Convergence is here because it is so classically “of a type” while Guernica can distress even those far removed from, or ignorant of, its anti-war roots. The four works are grouped together because, despite one’s personal biases, these are exemplary works. Outstanding realism, moving abstractions, just as, regardless of personal preference, there are excellent works of both prose and poetry

OK. Enough setting of the stage. Let’s jump into my specific assumptions and no doubt unwarranted generalizations. Imagine I am still teaching and posed the the following essay question for my students: "In a single sentence, compare and contrast the artistic tasks of prose and poetry.” Here is the A+ answer.  "Prose seeks to bring clarity to experience, while poetry reveals the insights of the heart.” It is no doubt the simplicity of that sentence that most clearly reveals how insufficient it is. The “what abouts” and “how do you explains” bounce around like ping pong balls on lottery night.  So let me dodge those objections by stating that both forms can, and in their best examples do, take on the task assigned to their counterparts. Poetry can bring clarity to experience, and prose can touch the heart.  But only exceptional genius can condense, oh say, War and Peace into a single Haiku, or conversely clarify the emotional impact of that perfect Haiku by adding hundreds of pages of additional words.

But if we look at The Night Watch we get lost in the details, the expressions on each face, the way the light and shadow encourage us to guess about the feelings and motivations of each character. We wonder why they are there and what their relationship might be with the other characters in the painting. And then we wonder what the watchers are watching? Why are they there? Who is the guy in yellow? How about the guy with the red sash? There are a lot of guns and drums in the painting. Again why? And then, if we look long enough and let our minds wander, we begin to answer all those questions for ourselves. We begin to draft the novel ourselves. And it is a novel, not a short story. But it is prose. Not a haiku, at least. The Song of Hiawatha, maybe, but certainly nothing shorter.

Christina’s World takes us on a different kind of journey. There is not a single face to guide our reflections.  The sky, the field, everything is flat. Christina is seen from the back, stranded on the field, which the title tells us is her “world." Four structures share her world, all distant, each receding further toward the horizon. So our focus becomes the horizon, which, I suppose, takes on different guises depending upon our mood. It could be a hopeful horizon, portending the possibility of better things ahead. But that would demand that Christina could get there. Her outstretched left hand seems to indicate such a desire, but that wrist and hand seem rather frail to pull the more substantial mass of her body along. Which begs the question, why is she lying there in the field? Injured? Disabled? Or merely resting? Again the tense angle of the body argues for a less optimistic reading of the image. But like The Night Watch this is a novel. We can plot it along a variety of narrative axises, but none of them are simplistic, all require rather extensive exploration.

So let us turn to the poetic images. To unpack  Convergence  would require a trip into Pollock’s head, and I for one am more than a tad leery about making that trip. Nor, I think, would Pollock have been terribly concerned that were unable to follow in his footsteps. I used to opine to my students that artists were motivated by one of two driving forces. One was communicative, to express their thoughts, feelings, insights, what have you, in ways that externalized them and would allow the artist to share those motivating impulses with others, with an audience. The other school was more therapeutic. These artists used their art as personal therapy. Rather than screaming, or talking with a therapist, or marching, or taking pills, they made art, because their art calmed them, or assuaged their need to be “heard.” Convergence and Pollock would seem fall into this latter category. The painting is Pollock screaming. It includes none of the explanatory details of The Night Watch or Christina’s World. It is more haiku than novel. It is, however, written in a language I do not understand.

Guernica tells a different story. The painting makes me uncomfortable. There is not a piece of the huge canvas that does not reveal something terrible. Fear, pain, anguish, sorrow, Guernica has it all. It is more poetry than novel in that there is no real linear narrative, there is no explanatory theme of color. Each section of the canvas is a short grey statement of those terrible themes. Timeless, freed from explanations rooted in history or politics, each portion of the canvas creates its own condemnation of war, of hatred, of violence. Guernica reveals the insights of the heart.

Which does bring us back to what was supposed to be the major theme of this post: caught between poetry and prose. Well, perhaps with a bit of a detour - but here we are again. The thing I find refreshing about these detours is that they often bring me back to slightly different places than I had intended.

It strikes me that the difference between poetry and prose is not so much a difference in form, as it is a difference in content and intent, and that difference itself varies depending upon the “writer.” And the category of “writer” is a very large tent indeed - and has grown ever more so in the Internet-centric 21st century. Over the last few years I have read and been fascinated by both Mark Twain’s autobiography and a biography of Charles Dickens.  These two 19th century writers define one fairly discrete table under the tent; writers who used words to pay the rent and put food on the table, unlike their equally talented, quasi-contemporary Jane Austin, whose restraining lower gentry status prevented anything so gauche as a “career” focused on sales.  But Twain and Dickens had to keep a close eye on sales, often to our benefit, as Dickens penned A Christmas Carol: A Christmas Ghost Story, in 1843 to cover his increasing debts. The point is that these folks were professional writers whose attention to form and style far surpasses my insight and ability to offer clarity or advice. But they were novelists, wedded to prose and the complexities of Realism at which prose excels.  Sitting alone at a table all by himself is Shakespeare. The Bard’s problem is that he doesn’t fit comfortably at any of the genre specific tables. Today’s students know him best as a playwright, since they usually encounter his works in their 20th - 21st century cinematic or video versions. It is only English majors who enjoy the poetic brilliance of his sonnets and other works in the genre. The point is that professional writers, whether it is their intent or not, are most often considered novelists or poets. Switch hitters are a rarity.

That is not the case for casual wordsmiths such as myself. I love peeking under the tent to see what the folks at the big tables are up to, but I am much more a consumer of their works than a member of the club. But that is not to say that words are any less important to me than to the folks under the tent. And in a very important way I am luckier than they. I have published several books, “aided" by editors, for which people had to pay. I have also written books for the pure pleasure of it, driven by a desire to share insights and ideas [e.g. The God Chord: String Theory in the Landscape of the Heart from Feedbooks.com.] These latter endeavors have proven far more fulfilling, but do finally bring us back to the crux of the post: caught between poetry and prose. How do we, bastard children of the artform, decide how to bring words into the service of our literary impulses?

Again I would assert that for us the difference between poetry and prose is not one of form, but rather one of intent. Back to that A+ answer way up the screen: "Prose seeks to bring clarity to experience, while poetry reveals the insights of the heart.”  I can find self-confirming evidence of that assertion here on The Wall. There is poetry here, although it can get overwhelmed by these longer ramblings, which I am beginning to recognize as lectures I never got to deliver.  So how do we recognize whether a communicative impulse should put on the studied garb of prose or the more revealing rags of poetry? As I look back over the 2 decades of The Wall, I realize that question is best resolved in the act of writing itself.  An explicative sentence resists truncation. Huh? What I mean is if you find yourself writing a sentence that needs to go on and on to clarify your point, you are probably writing prose. On the other hand, if a phrase needs to pause, needs a bit of silence, maybe you should hit the return key. You may be on the verge of a poem.

.