It’s a common criticism of a would-be poet’s oeuvre that “you’re not writing poetry, you’re just writing prose chopped up into lines.”

Do we know what we mean by that? Well, sure, of course we do. Don’t we? After all, we talk about poetry all the time, and we don the mantle of authority. We talk about it in classrooms, and when we do, roomfuls of students take notes. Occasionally, it occurs to us that as we are talking, they are actually writing down what we’re saying, which is a dangerous realization, because it is all too often followed by the appalling realization that we have no idea what the hell we’re talking about, and we have to clamp down on that line of thought pretty quickly.

Some of us actually get hoodwinked into to writing columns about poetry, which means we’re really donning that mantle of authority, sewn for us by a group of tailors who themselves have the finest credentials – they last worked for an emperor.

So what do we mean when we say that “you’re not writing poetry, you’re just writing prose chopped up into lines”? Maybe we mean that you’re not using poetic diction, or you’re not using imagery. Maybe we mean that your lines have no internal logic, whatever that means.

Maybe it’s just a circumlocuitous way of saying “You don’t get it.” But we don’t want to come right out and say that, because it suggests that we belong to some secret mystic cabal to which you will never gain admission, and we certainly don’t want to suggest that, because (a) poets being a snobbish bunch, we secretly believe it’s true, and (b) poets being a basically insecure bunch, we are secretly afraid that we’re not members of that inner cabal, and that any day now we’ll be found out.

That fear is pretty much universally true. You’d think that formalists would be free of it. Surely, they can’t be told “You’re just writing prose chopped up into lines.” No, but there’s a reverse side to that coin – “You’re just writing doggerel.”

But I digress.

Is there a difference between poetry and prose chopped up into lines? I’ll go out on a limb here, and say yeah, sure, maybe, probably, I guess so.

For me, the distinction goes something like this. If you’re writing poetry, you’re aware that you’re making something that’s constructed of lines. You’re using sentences, and grammatical constructs, but they are subordinate to your most important structural unit, which is the line.

However…the best definition of poetry I have ever heard comes from Johh Dehner, as the fencing master Doutreval in Scaramouche, coaching Stewart Granger as the title character in the philosophy of swordplay: “The sword is like a little bird. If you clutch it too tightly, you choke it - too lightly and it flies away.”

So with constructing a poem. If you’re writing in sentences, and just chopping them up into lines so it’ll look like a poem on the page, you’re choking it. If you ignore grammatical constructs altogether, and are just stringing together words, it will fly away.

The big difference there is: in swordplay, you’ll know that you got it wrong because you’ll feel the point of a sword between your ribs, and like the aristocrats from France’s chamber of deputies who challenged Scaramouche, you will be “absent from the Assembly…permanently.” In poetry, you can pick yourself up and write again, and there will not even be any general agreement as to whether you were struck.

In fact, there’s not even any general agreement as to whether chopping prose up into lines is necessarily a bad thing.

Which is not what I intended to write about, but I find I can’t escape from it. What about the novelists who’ve tried their hand at poetry, and come up with chopped-up prose? Some of them were awful, like Norman Mailer. Hemingway and Faulkner both wrote poems (thanks to Terry Hummer for reminding me) that may not have been awful, but they weren’t exactly poems, either. Why not? I have an answer, perhaps the best answer possible: they just didn’t get it?

Stephen Crane wrote chopped-up prose, but often he did get it:

Jack Kerouac wrote quite a number of poems, and mostly didn’t get it:

What about those short prose passages that are called “prose poems” mostly by virtue of their being too short to call them anything else? That problem has mostly been solved by finding another name for them. Today they are “flash fiction.”

More of a problem—what about those contemporary poets who do get it, and who choose to write in sentences—that is, in non-chopped-up prose? Russell Edson was certainly one of the most prominent of these.

	A little girl made of sugar and spice and everything nice was eaten by someone with a sweet 
	tooth the size of an elephant’s tusk.
		Ah, he said, this darn tooth, it’s driving me nuts.

        Then another voice is heard. It’s the little girl’s father who says, have you seen a little girl
	made of sugar and spice and everything nice?—Incidentally, what’s that thing sticking out 
	of your mouth like an elephant’s tusk? (complete poem here.) 

Edson had a precursor, and I’ve often wondered if Edson saw him as a model. Ogden Nash is best known for his rhymed poems that defy scansion, but he also wrote poems in non-chopped-up prose, with a sense of humor that Edson may well have found as a kindred spirit. Here’s an excerpt from his poem about the wise child who thought he knew his own father, until he was informed that the child is father to the man:

Marvin Bell, a subtle master of the free verse line, in his later poems about the Dead Man, used the complete sentence as his line, adapting the cadence of the Song of Solomon:

And finally, a poem I was just introduced to by my alternate-monthly counterpart, Tricia Knoll writing Poetic License, and offering “’38’ by Layli Long Soldier which I read out loud to myself every few months,” a poem about the death by mass hanging of 38 men from the Dakota tribe. Here’s an excerpt from the middle of the poem: