[New-Poetry] Aram Saroyan

[Rsgwynn1 at cs.com]

In a message dated 4/21/2008 7:17:17 PM Central Daylight Time, 
jforjames at aol.com writes: 
> 
> Perhaps it's verse at an arbitrary turn? Thanks for the correction. 
> Finnegan
> 
> 
No, verse, by any measure, involves a decision where the line 
turns/ends/breaks.  Prose has that decided for it by the width of the paper, column, page, or 
word-processor margin.  Line, by whatever measure, is the unit of verse; 
sentence, which has no measure, is the unit of prose.  Verse is verse, and prose 
is prose, and ne'er the twain shall meet.  Free verse is lineated by some kind 
of choice; metrical verse is lineated by some kind of measure; prose is 
unlineated.  Cutting a passage of prose into lines, no matter how arbitrary the 
choices of break, changes it into verse (consider the verse that was made of Dick 
Cheyney's public utterances).  Printing lines of metrical verse with no 
indications of line breaks, changes it into prose.  There are passages of Melville 
and Douglass, which I have posted here before, that are in the prose mode.  If 
broken, by the measure of blank verse, they could be dealt with as verse; but 
because they were not printed as such, they will remain prose passages (with 
verse "imbedded" withing them).  A "prose poem," despite its seeming 
contradiction, is no contradiction at all: poetry (a genre) may be written in either 
prose or verse.  Fiction or drama, for that matter, may be written in either mode 
as well, witness a "verse novel" like David Mason's Ludlow or the many 
examples of verse drama.  Poetry, of course, has traditionally been written in 
verse, a fact which muddies the waters somewhat; still, there is no reason why 
poetry cannot be written in prose, as many have proven in the past.   
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