07.27.08

Serious Sunday: Poetic prose

Posted in poetry, style, write tight, writing craft at 12:02 pm by Bill Brohaugh

This post is too long delayed:

A couple of weeks ago, I was once again honored to give a presentation at The Antioch Writers Conference, a venerable gathering with some fine instructors. The staff is marvelous, as well, and I thank them for their hospitality.

I also had the pleasure of co-presenting with mystery-writer Sharon Short. Her latest, Tie Dyed and Dead: A Stain-busting Mystery, was published in February of this year. We spoke about “The Writing Life: How to ‘Pitch’ to an Agent,” though we covered other types of submissions as well.

My stay at the conference was disappointingly short. It’s a week-long affair, and schedules allowed me to sit in on only a couple of sessions the first morning. But I managed to catch one of the more compelling presentations I’ve seen at a writers conference: Robert Morgan’s introduction to a week of lectures about poetry.

Morgan is the Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell University, and author of such poetry books as Topsoil Road: Poems, such novels as Gap Creek: The Story of a Marriage (an Oprah Book Club selection), and the recent Boone: A Biography. He spoke eloquently of traditional poetic forms from two standpoints: Memorability, and power. He told of a poetry class in which he asked students to recite lines of poetry off the cuff. Morgan was offered no free verse from the students, only classical meters and rhymes. Here was a group studying modern poetry, but had no modern poetry living at the tips of their brains.

As for power, one example. Morgan noted that “Language spoken with great emotion tends to become iambic.” For example: “Do not go gentle into that good night.” You can clearly hear the “da-DUM da DUM” rhythm, the “the-DRUM the-DRUM” beat of the iambs.

Note that Morgan didn’t say “poetry,” but “language.” Poetic tools and forms, rising from instinctive rhythms in how people express themselves, should be the prose-writers’ tools, as well. I have neither the space nor the poetic training to make this any sort of poetry class. Suffice to say that classical poetic forms are often more natural expressions of language than less-disciplined prose diction, and to write tight—to write so the reader swiftly understands—understand the power of infusing poetic diction appropriately into prose.

And because that’s pretty serious stuff there, and this is supposed to be something of a smart-ass blog, let me leave you with another memory from Antioch. Last year, Paul Dickson, author of many books, including several on word use (like The Hidden Language of Baseball), was talking about Hemingway covering the aftermath of a storm that had wrought horrific human damage. Dickson said, “Hemingway was so moved, he used an adjective.”

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