In Seam 27 many 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. Only now can we acknowledge this development as part of the mainstream, having witnessed this interest in narrative structures filter through to the work of Andrew Motion and beyond.
I don't know how true it is, even if only UK poetry is considered, but I have read quite a lot of poetry for which this applies. What has changed over the fifty years - poets? the world? readers? the market? Poetry has expanded to accommodate more demotic language. And in the UK, the market for short stories has shrunk while the Flash scene has matured.
Nowadays if a short story writer started writing shorter stories, I don't think that the addition of line-breaks would be an obvious step to take, let alone an inevitable one. Micro prose is viable - Flash exists.
I can see why a narrative poet might cling to line-breaks so that they can continue sending their work to the usual places. Perhaps these writers feel that only by presenting their short pieces as "poetry" will readers approach the text with the appropriate diligence.
But the market is changing. More poetry magazines now accept "poetry/micros". Just as poets discovered that end-rhyme/form wasn't a defining feature, so nowadays we're freed of the obligation to use line-breaks, which doesn't mean we have to write "prose poetry".
But old habits die hard. In the most recent "Under the Radar" magazine, the first piece in the poetry section begins with "The world's population of violinists/ has decreased recently/ and the remaining musicians gather in Vienna./ They decide to create an archive of/ violin tunes.", ending with "The computer has been switched off/ and the bow has stopped moving./ Raindrops stroke the strings/ and the violin makes his own voice.". I like it. I think it would fit comfortably into most Flash magazines nowadays were the line-breaks removed. I can't see what purpose they serve.
My story collection "By All Means" (ISBN 978-0-9570984-9-7), published by Nine Arches Press, is on sale from 
My poetry pamphlet "Moving Parts" (ISBN 978-1-905939-59-6) is out now, on sale at the 
ReplyDeleteI've churned out close to 1700 poems and only one, written in the last year, is what I'd call a prose poem and it did not come easily. I've resisted the form although "resisted" is probably too strong a right word as I like the idea of the prose poem but even where there's no formal underlying structure I still find line breaks helpful in fact I've toyed with adding line breaks to my actual prose. That said, recently I can see my poems becoming more prosaic and the stanzas feel more like tiny paragraphs than verses. I think, with me, it's more of an age thing. I'm more concerned with meaning than form, in fact I think spending so much time structuring my poems in past years did my writing a disservice as I'm not sure it added enough to warrant the time devoted to trying to be clever.
I used to think that "prose poems" were what Russell Edson or French Surrealists wrote. But then I realised that "poems with the weaker line-breaks removed" needn't be "prose poems", though they could be poems written in prose.
ReplyDeleteIf you remove line-breaks it's tempting to try to compensate for their loss. But actually, it's often not much of a loss. And anyway, as you hint, paragraph breaks can take on a greater significance.