BJ’s Shadorma & Beyond – The Prose Poem – February 7, 2015

Hello … here we are again, and I’ve decided to take you into the “Twilight Zone” .. well, actually into a form of poetry that is a little controversial;  looking at it, it appears to be a piece of prose, but in reality it’s has most of the qualities of a poem but without being broken into verse lines, so it can have meter, repetition, rhyme etc..

Here’s a description of what prose poetry is, from one of the first to use and define this genre:

“…[It is a] controversially hybrid and (aesthetically and even politically) revolutionary genre… With its oxymoronic title and its form based on contradiction, the p. p. is suitable to an extraordinary range of perception and expression, from the ambivalent (in content as in form) to the mimetic and the narrative (or even anecdotal). … Its principal characteristics are those that would ensure unity even in brevity and poetic quality even without the line breaks of free verse: high patterning, rhythmic and figural repetition, sustained intensity, and compactness.

In the p. p. a field of vision is represented, sometimes mimetically and often pictorially, only to be, on occasion, put off abruptly; emotion is contracted under the force of ellipsis, so deepened and made dense; the rhapsodic mode and what Baudelaire called the “prickings of the unconscious” are, in the supreme examples, combined with the metaphoric and the ontological: the p. p. aims at knowing or finding out something not accessible under the more restrictive conventions of verse (Beaujour).”

The prose poem, was often used by such poets as Baudelaire and Gertrude Stein.  Here is s prose poem written in 1914 by Ms Stein:

A BOX.

Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection comes painful cattle. So then the order is that a white way of being round is something suggesting a pin and is it disappointing, it is not, it is so rudimentary to be analysed and see a fine substance strangely, it is so earnest to have a green point not to red but to point again.

For further information about the prose poem, please go to:  The Prose Poems Project.

So this week I would like to invite you, using the photograph above to write a Prose Poem or if you prefer a shadorma (a non-rhyming six-line poem in 3/5/3/3/7/5). You may wish to work with one of your own illustrations or something completely different and that’s fine.

After you’ve completed your post, remembering to ping to this page using the url you find at the top of the page as your link address, Tag your post: Mindlovesmisery’s Menagerie  and BJ’s Shadorma and Beyond, then add the information into the Mr. Linky app below.

Have a great week!  Ciao, Bastet!