EXPERIMENTAL TEXT POETRY

TYPOGRAPHY
(the style, arrangement, or appearance of printed letters on a page)
PROSE POEM
Prose is anything written down that does not possess any poetic meter.
Poetic meter is the rhythm of a poem. Whether you've heard any of
Shakespeare's famous sonnets or the latest hip-hop song burning up the
charts, chances are that you've noticed that many poems or songs have
a certain rhythm to them. This rhythm is based on different factors,
including the syllables per line and what syllables are naturally
emphasized or stressed if someone were to read the poem out loud.
There is more to poetry than poetic meter, of course. Poems are often
image-driven and emphasize visual descriptions, including metaphors,
while prose tends to focus on aspects such as narrative, characters, and
plot arc. In addition, poems also play with the sound of language using
repetition and rhyming.
Characteristics of Prose, Poetry & Prose Poetry
Prose
 Written in paragraphs
 Tells a story rather than describes an image or metaphor
 Generally, has characters and a plot
Poetry
 Written in verse
 Written in poetic meter
 Focuses on image-driven metaphors
 Might have a narrative, but it might not or it might be harder to understand
Prose poetry
 Looks like prose (written in paragraphs)
 Focuses on images
 Includes instances of poetic meter
 Contains language play, such as repetition
Prose Poetry Form
Prose is the ordinary language that people use in speaking or writing. It does
not treat the line as a formal unit. It has no repetitive pattern of rhythm or
meter.
In a prose poem:
 The writing is continuous and without line breaks.
 The piece may be of any length and may be divided into paragraphs. A single
sentence or sentence fragment can be a prose poem, as can multiple
paragraphs.
 The natural rhythm of thought can lead to rhythmical cadences in a prose
poem.
 Internal rhyme and alliteration and repetition can be used. Some such trait of
poetry must be present. Otherwise it is prose, not a prose poem.
 It lies between free verse and prose.
 Usually has compressed thought and intensity.
 Poet Gary Young has a very concise approach to prose poems. In an October
2006 craft workshop, his guidelines included:

 Use the spontaneity and drive of the sentence. Allow your writing to be subtle
and subversive, to warp and seduce, so the reader accepts something in a prose
poem that they might resist in formal poetry.
 Be concise. Ask yourself if you can justify everything that is in your poem, each
phrase, each word, each comma. If you're unsure, remove it.
 The prose poem is a lyric. But embrace the trans-genre possibilities of the prose
poem. Commandeer the exposition, the recipe, the definition.
 Embrace the surreal, "a bit of arsenic, a bit of starlight".
 "It's the moves in the poem that excite me the most. In a prose poem you can
travel such distances."
Examples of Prose Poems
'I discovered a journal' (Gary Young)
'I discovered a journal in the children's ward, and read, I'm a mother,
my little boy has cancer. Further on, a girl has written, this is my
nineteenth operation. She says, sometimes it's easier to write than to
talk, and I'm so afraid. She's offered me a page in the book. My son is
sleeping in the room next door. This afternoon, I held my whole weight
to his body while a doctor drove needles deep into his leg. My son
screamed, Daddy, they're hurting me, don't let them hurt me, make
them stop. I want to write, how brave you are, but I need a little
courage of my own, so I write, forgive me, I know I let them hurt you,
please don't worry. If I have to, I can do it again.'
 Intoxication
Fr. “Enivrez-vous” (Eng. literal translation “Be Drunk”)
Charles Baudelaire (from Petits Poèmes en Prose, 1869, translated by James Huneker, 1919)

One must be forever drunken: that is the sole question of importance. If you would not feel the
horrible burden of Time that bruises your shoulders and bends you to the earth, you must be
drunken without cease. But how? With wine, with poetry, with virtue, with what you please.
But be drunken. And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace, on the green grass by a moat, or in
the dull loneliness of your chamber, you should waken up, your intoxication already lessened or
gone, ask of the wind, of the wave, of the star, of the bird, of the timepiece; ask of all that flees,
all that sighs, all that revolves, all that sings, all that speaks, ask of these the hour; and wind
and wave and star and bird and timepiece will answer you: “It is the hour to be drunken! Lest
you be the martyred slaves of Time, intoxicate yourselves, be drunken without cease! With
wine, with poetry, with virtue, or with what you will.”
A BOX.

Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid

same question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection
comes painful cattle. So then the order is that a white way of
being round is something suggesting a pin and is it
disappointing, it is not, it is so rudimentary to be analysed and
see a fine substance strangely, it is so earnest to have a green
point not to red but to point again.
A RED STAMP.

If lilies are lily white if they exhaust noise and distance and
even dust, if they dusty will dirt a surface that has no extreme
grace, if they do this and it is not necessary it is not at all
necessary if they do this they need a catalogue.
 REFINISHING
Wood has no future. It saves all scratches. At twenty-three I
helped a woman sand her table down to grain. I touched every
inch of that table, used a belt-sander but took the corners by
hand, not wanting to burn through. I had it clean in days, then set
to clearcoating. I could count my years in its surface as the tiny
histories of the people who had eaten there vanished.

When we lie together at night and I'm asleep, do I ever run my

fingers down your back? I have the sensation sometimes of
running underneath the skin, like a splinter.
PERFORMANCE POETRY
 Performance poetry uses the stage as the page, transforming poetry readings
into theatrical events. While the recent resurgence of performance poets is seen as
a reaction against mainstream, print-based poetry, the style harkens back to the
classic role of the poet, who recited notable
happenings, emotions, and perceptions.And while traditional poems utilized
standard structures, in part to serve as
mnemonic devices, contemporary performance poetry calls upon experimental
rhythms as a means to engage an audience in the listening experience.
The recent growth of performance poetry can be attributed to the
popularity of slam, a self-
identified movement dedicated to creating real-time discourse between
performer and audience.
While poetry slam cannot be categorized like a sonnet or a haiku, any
form or style of poetry can
be turned into slam by virtue of the poet’s performance on stage. This
inclusive art form invites all
people to participate, whether as a poet, audience member, or judge.