[New-Poetry] Aram Saroyan

[jforjames at aol.com]

Sam,
I'll concede the definition of 'verse'. I concede no essential?magic in 'the turn'. Sydney said as much.
Finnegan?


-----Original Message-----
From: Rsgwynn1 at cs.com
To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
Sent: Mon, 21 Apr 2008 8:35 pm
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Aram Saroyan


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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