What is prose?

FinsburyParkCarrots

Haha, I can't recall making that post. I was either drunk, or possessed by an alien slug form travelling through the cosmos via radiowaves, which my modem accidentally intercepted. Yep, I think it was the latter.

catefrances

hah! nice disclaimer fins.
so does that mean you don't think bukowski is shite then?

FinsburyParkCarrots

catefrances wrote:

hah! nice disclaimer fins.
so does that mean you don't think bukowski is shite then?

Not necessarily.

catefrances

FinsburyParkCarrots wrote:

Not necessarily.

perhaps you are also of the opinion that a lot of contemporary poetry is 'rhymeless masquerading in the typography of poetry.' bukowski would certainly fit.

i can't remember who i borrowed that quote from but it clarified for me how to describe my own 'poetry'

FinsburyParkCarrots

catefrances wrote:

perhaps you are also of the opinion that a lot of contemporary poetry is 'rhymeless masquerading in the typography of poetry.' bukowski would certainly fit.

i can't remember who i borrowed that quote from but it clarified for me how to describe my own 'poetry'

There was a structural linguist called Roman Jakobson, who had a go at trying to explain the differences between poetry and prose. He would say ypographical layout isn't a determining factor distinguishing the two; this distinction between poetry and prose is a matter of two key, different ways in which language communicates ideas. In prose writing, "meaning" is generated by the syntactical ordering of nouns, verbs, prepositions, adverbs, adjectives and conjunctions. Jakobson would call this prose language that works on the horizontal, syntagmatic axis of communication (horizontal, because it works on a straight, forward-going line of logic, combining parts of a sentence in a conventional way). Now, poetic writing might also use syntax to communicate but this isn't absolutely necessary. In poetic discourse, meaning is generated by a more abstract ordering of sound, rhythm, image, simile and metaphor: these effects are brought to the foreground, over the ways in which meaning is gernerated by syntax. This language works on a vertical, paradigmatic axis of communication (vertical, because rather than following a forward logic, it builds different poetic techniques up on one another, to create a sense of meaning that is suggested through the physical effects of sound patternings, or the alternative logic of associated similes and metaphors to our understanding of reality and experience).

I love so much modern poetry, in resisting some of the formal and ideological straitjacketing of conventional rhyme and metre; however, though I have many qualms with Jakobsonian structuralist thinking (mainly the idea that any fixed meaning could be determined from analysis of language), I can see benefit in the idea that literariness, or what makes poetry poetry, depends on a foregrounding of these equivalences and patternings of sounds, images and tropes, over prose. For example, The Iliad tells the story of Agamemnon's quarrel with Achilles, and its disastrous consequences for both Achaians and Trojans in the ninth year of the Trojan conflict, and in that respect it lends itself well to prose translation. However, many of its richest passages are those describing the horror and pathos of war, which use simile and metaphor (such as cut flowers, for example). It is this use of poetic device that evokes the full horror of war. As Wilfred Owen once said, "the poetry is in the pity", and it's a good simile or metaphor that can "show" an emotion much better than prose that just "tells" how things are.

My reason for not thinking much of Buk is that I don't get a sense that he cares about constructing a metaphor in human interest. Take "Bluebird". It's very surface level, cod-profundity in a little vignette, isn't it? Or "Are You Drinking?" It reminds me of E.J. Thribb (aged 17½), but not as good!:

In Memoriam Kenneth Wood, inventor of the
"Kenwood" Mixer and the Reversible Toaster.

So. Farewell then
Ken Wood.

Inventor of the
Reversible
Toaster.

Reversible the of
Inventor
Wood Ken.

Then farewell
So.

E.J. Thribb, inventor of the
Reversible Poem (½71)

Byrnzie

FinsburyParkCarrots wrote:

My reason for not thinking much of Buk is that I don't get a sense that he cares about constructing a metaphor in human interest. Take "Bluebird". It's very surface level, cod-profundity in a little vignette, isn't it?

'As a writer, one must write what one sees and feels regardless of the consequences. In fact, the more the consequences the more one is goaded into going for it. Some call it madness, I call it near-truth. You know, there is nothing more entertaining, funnier than near-truth because you see it, read it so seldom. It hits you with a refreshing blast, it runs up the arms, into the head, it gets giddy, god damn, god damn, so rare, so lovely. I saw some of it in Celine, in Dostoevsky, in Hamsun, I started laughing as I read them, it was such a joy...Basically, i only want to say that at this time it is tough for the writer who wants to put it down as it is, or was. The 90's have far more strictures than the 50's ever had. We've gone back, not so much in how we think but in what we can say. Each Age has borne its own contradictions but the end of the 20th century is a particularly sad one. We've lost our guts, our gamble, our heart. Listen, believe me, when we say it and say it true, the women will love it, the blacks, the browns, the yellows, the greens, the reds and the purples will love it, and the homosexuals and the lesbians and all the in between will love it. Let's not crap ourselves, we are different but we are one. We bring death to each other and death brings it to us. Did you ever see that flattened cat on the freeway as you drove by at 70 m.p.h.? That's us, baby. And I scream to the skies that there should be no way, no word, no limit. Just a roll of the dice, the tilting of the dark white light and the ability to laugh, a few times, at what has trapped us like this.'

Byrnzie

I forgot you can't edit on here. For the record, the above is Bukowski. I love him like a friend out of nowhere. There is no pretence in Bukowski. No fakery. There is more soul and more music in his poetry than I've detected in the multitude of literary wordsmiths out there with their academic, learned trickery.

Charles Bukowski - The Laughing Heart

Your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

FinsburyParkCarrots

Bukowski did some writing courses in LA, though, before he went and joined the postal service in his early twenties. He did model himself as the opposite of the bourgeois literary publishing world, and he's been championed as a rebel writer, of sorts. But I don't really find anything particularly deep in his work. He doesn't have "soul" in the way that Wilfred Owen had; and Wilfred Owen understood and practiced different conventional formal techniques. He extended them with his own innovations, to find new language to convey the horror and pathos of a new kind of mechanised war, and its effect on living beings.

For example: here's Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth". It's "academic" in the sense that it's a sonnet. But there's nothing fake here:

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,--
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Byrnzie

'An intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way; an artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way.'

CHARLES BUKOWSKI, Notes of a Dirty Old Man

Byrnzie

'Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.'
Albert Camus