My last post stirred up a terrific discussion about prose vs poetry. You can read it here. One of the many ideas it made me think about is the idea of old vs new. Poetry has always been with us, in all languages and all cultures, from the moment we could reflect upon our world through language, poetry took hold of our collective imaginations. Poetry is old. But prose poetry, not to mention flash fiction, is new. To me those forms represent evolution and reveal ways in which language and our use of language changes over time.
As I was thinking I was surfing in a very new sense of the word. And I came across an amazing recording of Virgina Woolf talking about her approach to writing and the way she uses the English language. She is speaking about old vs new words and her thoughts still seem very wise and true to me. (Thanks to the Writers Movement Blog):
Erm – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Spleen_de_Paris better in the French – never quite so resonant in translation, maybe. I’ll bring you a copy on 15th!
Baudelaire…I must admit I didn’t know about Le Spleen, and clearly I should have. Thanks!
Strange pieces, fascinating, Im not sure he actually ‘invented’ anything, which seems to assume some deliberate act -but he called them ‘poems in prose’. Copy bought for you – suitably dog-eared I’m afraid!
I was going to say I think prose poetry is a very ancient form, but I think I’ve been beaten to it.
I think that the way so much of this is an ancient oral tradition shows why poetry is still so popular when people participate at events.
The reason why it’s so incredibly popular in the virtual world is similar – people love to tell their tales and share their short bits of prose and their poems. None of this sells books or keeps publishers going, but the main thing is that it proves what I already knew. Poetry can be incredibly popular – whether or not it has line breaks.