Making prose into poetry - words, ideas, forms

How can you make prose look more like poetry?

Words

We all know about poetic words - lambent, shard, etc. There are poetic phrases too. They needn't contain poetic words. There are texts that are poetic, though they might be lacking poetic words and phrases. It might be difficult to quote a powerful phrase from them, and yet as a whole they work - "Adlestrop", maybe. It's sometimes their discontinuities (what they leave out) which give them their poetic air. The more you leave out, the more that readers can add in. So try to reduce the word count.

Images

If a writer adds imagery to prose, hoping it will pass as poetry the risk is that in such surroundings the imagery might draw attention to itself - it had better be fresh, especially if it's the punchline. There are clichés that only experienced readers will notice, clichés that writers will notice but not readers, and some that only tutors might notice. Some are so common that they're tropes/memes, used consciously - for example comparing a life to the passing of seasons. There are ideas that several writers might independently come up with - e.g.

• The idea that a wife in a sad marriage is a victim of Stockholm Syndrome
• The idea that when you switch on a light in a dark room there's a moment when you can see the darkness

One way to avoid the accusation of cliché and purple prose is to get a character (e.g. a pretentious literature student) to express the idea - easier to do in prose.

Forms

I think my aversion to some poems can be summarised by the belief that performing an automatic operation on a text isn't likely to improve it, especially if the operation's reversable (i.e. from the poem you can recreate the original prose). Here are 3 instances -

• anaphora - this can be added to many poems, and just as easy removed.
• multiple negation - a special case of anaphora.
• stanza/line length - chopping a text into regular chunks won't help.

In all these cases I suggest that readers mentally compare the "before" and "after" texts and consider whether incantation or eye candy are being over-used.

Line-breaks

Of course, adding line-breaks is the easiest trick. In Seam 27 some years ago Michael Bayley began his review of Helen Mort's "The Shape of Every Box" poetry pamphlet with

Perhaps one of the more interesting developments in poetry over the last fifty years has been its overlap with short story writing. It's unsurprising that poetic language has relaxed into an easy colloquial manner but maybe what wasn't expected is the way poetry's taken on the subject matter of prose forms. The evolution took a leap with Philip Larkin, but when Douglas Dunn published Terry Street, a book whose themes leant more to the 50s novel than its poetry, it seemed that poetry had taken a detour down a side road.

For some, that side road led to Flash and Novella-in-Flash, but that detour has become part of the main body of poetry. If in doubt, add line-breaks.