Prosaic

Question 11: Why is poetry not prose? Poetry today does everything under the sun to avoid being [prosaic]. There is an ardent desire to surprise, that won’t be learned from journalism. Prose-poems, as well, baffle the bureaucrats. The Syntax School re-arranges the furniture. The Neologism School overdoes the unheard-of. The Figurative School turns verse squares loopy. The ancients, people who have died, didn’t do this. Poetry was about memory. They timed rhyme, repeated meter, much toned touchstones, better late than never. Yet they shared a desire to articulate, not too late, the inarticulate. When you get it, you know it.

 

Photograph: An object statement against the prosaic, Patricia Piccinini’s Skywhale being inflated at Fitzroy Football Ground on the morning of the 8^th of May 2014. A report of this event is here: http://wordsbyphilipharvey.blogspot.com/search/label/Skywhale