O pen -- October 18

Prose vs. Poetry:
What is the difference between a prose poem, a narrative poem, and a story which uses good language? What if writing were only collections of words that sting?
What hooks us in?

Here is the link (apologies -- fuzzy here) of Alan Ginsberg at RIT reading from “Howl”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gm3QodfkUKw&feature=related

Are there works like “hydrogen jukebox” in the poems and sentences below?

Merlin Enthralled by Richard Wilbur
OCTOBER 4, 2010
Hell, by Zbigniew Herbert
(discussed with Christopher Kennedy 10/9 at his workshop. Two paragraphs; an ordering of Hell. One wonders about the nature of life as joke.)

Antonina’s Education (runner-up for Cranston prize awarded by Calyx.
http://www.calyxpress.org/Cranstonprize.htmlprize -- for winning poems and other runners’ up.
(stanzas: part 1 of 6 lines; part 2: 3 lines; (initiation -- as girl, changing language/country) part 3: couplets. The juxtaposition of the German guard who shares his sandwich. Her surprise when she expresses sympathy to him on the loss of his son.)

Lines from Prose : (from Gary Lutz' talk 10/9)
Sam Lipsyte: Novelist – sentences that read like a string of epiphanies, glued with assonance, patterned repetitions, blends.
“Viola tones rose from a carved alcove.”
“So maybe I wanted all these memories, the sorrows and the hollows.”
“the blade bordered on sword.)

Christine Schutt:
“Mother had used overcooked bacon for a bookmark,
or a hair pin, stick of gum, sucker stick, twig –
whatever was at hand.

**
Two poems by Christopher Kennedy from "Encouragement for a Man Falling to his Death"
poems with a touch a strange, beautifully structured prose poems.
Speech Identification Procedure : beautiful crafting in 3 stanzas -- relationship -- of father to child, light, dark, absence, disappearance. How italicized "father" migrates to italicized last word, "bird".

The 3rd stanza:
A person can stand still for a long time moving about in the world.
My days are like this, a scarecrow in a field, trying to imagine "birds"


King Cobra Does the Mambo
Like Ashbery -- a view of chaos, with serpent power and clin d'oeil to Villon, Stevens' monocle.
Juxtaposition. Italics: "I love you,/but you never phone." non-italics: For this, our species waited centuries./ That's as far as I go today;

and the poem continues. Ends with a dream -- "I intuit the laughter/of trees. That, or a runaway train headed your way."
**

There's an irresistable humor, more pleasing than Herbert's "Hell";
Prose cannot be a simple kyrielle (string of Kyrie) of epiphanies. Nor poetry for that matter.
Well-constructed snapshots that capture more than the black and white.