How Do You Tell the Difference between Poetry and Prose?

‘How do you tell the difference between poetry and prose, unless it rhymes?’ asked a group member, confessing that he gets confused, particularly when it comes to free verse.

A fair question. It does get confusing, and these days the boundaries are blurring more and more. We have distinctions such as prose poetry and poetic prose. It’s even more confusing that the word “poetry” is used in different ways. It can mean verse as distinct from prose, or it can mean something especially beautiful or artistic, as in, “That [piece of music / dance performance / item in nature /etc.] is pure poetry!” Even when it comes to verse, a distinction is made between poetry and doggerel. “Good” poetry is described as poetry; “bad” poetry is considered not to deserve the name: “That’s not poetry!” Or you can think about it in the way someone recently suggested to me, “Poetry’s like a fine wine.” So bad poetry, then, would be like rotgut?

Well, let’s leave questions of good and bad for now, and just explore the difference between poetry and prose in the sense of different genres. I still like the legendary (and perhaps mythical) schoolboy definition: “Poetry is that stuff where the lines don’t go right to the end of the page.” It’s a good starting point anyway. But there needs to be something more to make it poetry and not just chopped-up prose. My answer to the question, boiled right down, is …

Patterns

Poetry involves patterning. Regular rhyme schemes and metres are patterns, and it’s easy to see that. You can count the number of beats to a line, or map the arrangement of rhymes.

Free verse doesn’t hold to a regular metric pattern, but when I read some aloud to the group and asked them what made it poetry, they could hear it: “Rhythm!”
This does involve reading the poem as it’s written on the page, taking note of pauses and punctuation. But also, when I read them one particular piece that way, doing my best to read it as poetry, they could hear that it wasn’t. The rhythm – or lack of – simply didn’t work as verse. “That’s chopped up prose,” they insisted, and I had to agree. (It would be helpful to give the example here, but I don’t want to risk publicly offending the writer!) It’s true that good prose writing also employs rhythm, but the rhythm of a prose sentence works somewhat differently.

Similarly with rhyme – in free verse it can happen in looser ways than in more formal verse. There may be “slant rhymes” of various kinds, or an echo effect of particular sounds repeated even more irregularly. Of course, some free verse doesn’t use rhyme at all. However the music of the words – the way the sounds work together, and the effect they have in creating mood – is still, usually, taken into consideration. (And incidentally, even formal poetry doesn’t always rhyme. Blank verse, which Shakespeare made famous, was specifically NON-rhyming iambic pentameter.)

Sound is not the only kind of patterning. Some poems work instead on visual patterns such as a harmonious, balanced arrangement of line lengths. There might be a certain number of lines per verse, or a certain average length of line. Some have patterns of syllable counts, per line or verse. Shape poetry makes very specific visual patterns and concrete poetry takes that even further.

Now let’s get back to the “fine wine” analogy. I don’t really want to get into notions of “good” or “bad” verse, but I do think poetry often uses a more heightened language than prose. Every element of a poem, even a space between words, has purpose, is essential. Prose, I think, can be more discursive. But here I’m treading on thin ice, as some prose may use heightened language and some poems may be deliberately discursive.

Prose poems / poetic prose

I think it’s fair to say that prose poetry abandons only one feature of poetry: the importance of where the lines begin and end. In a poem, that matters; it’s crucial. In a prose poem, the piece works no matter how it’s set. (Which might be said of prose too, except you wouldn’t normally wish to set a piece of prose as verse in any case.) Here I think I have to use examples. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck contains some of the most poetic prose I can think of. Check this excerpt!

Margaret Atwood, in a book called True Stories: Poems, includes the following:

My friend called me on the telephone and said, I’m going to kill myself. Why? I said. He’s left me, she said, I have nothing to live for. All right, I said, how are you going to do it? Pills? No, she said, that would make me sick. If it doesn’t work, I mean. I can’t stand having my stomach pumped out, it’s humiliating. Well, a gun then, I said. Think of the mess, she said. It’s indelible, and I hate loud noises. Hanging, I said. You look so awful, she said. You could say the same of drowning, I said. Well, I guess that’s that, she said, but what am I going to do, now that he’s left me and I have nothing to live for? Who told you it has to be for anything? I said. But were you living for him when he was there? No, she said, I was living in spite of him, I was living against him. Then you should say, I have nothing to live against, I said. It’s the same thing, isn’t it? she said. I said No.

There’s a very fine difference between that and a piece of prose! The language might at first glance seem prosaic, consisting as it does of quite plain, ordinary words. It‘s not so much heightened as tightened. However, if you read the piece aloud, you can hear the rhythm building in a non-prosey way. The beautiful rhythms of Steinbeck, though, are the rhythms of prose. I hope you can hear this, because otherwise it’s a bit like trying to explain the finer points of music to someone tone-deaf. Like an ear for music, one also needs an ear for poetry. Luckily, both can be developed.

What does poetry do?

Another way to examine the question is to ask what poetry does, as dinstinct from prose. It might seem a strange question, considering that there are so many different kinds of prose with different functions – fiction, drama, and non-fiction of all kinds: journalism, essays, how-to manuals and so on. And there are exceptions to every rule, including the one I’m about to formulate. Nevertheless, I think that poetry gets to the essence of things, or at least attempts to. An unsubstantiated assertion! What do you think?

- Rosemary (Facilitator)