A post this morning to plug a prose poem of mine which makes its’ first appearance on the Ink Sweat & Tears website today. It’s one of a 25 – 30 page sequence of prose poems / hybrid / flash fiction pieces with driving, childhood, loss, reconciliation and Tangerine Dream as running themes.
It does beg the question, what is poetry? One of my friends, on receiving a copy of Landings was disappointed that there wasn’t much, if any, line-ending rhyme in the collection. Whilst most published contemporary poetry dispenses with the obvious rhyming that many non-poets would think is an essential element of poetry, it does have an internal metre and rhythm. You could argue that a lot of performance poetry actually follows the end-rhyme tradition more frequently than non-performance poetry. Which is the more radical? It’s all moot though. Poetry is, or should be, a broad church.
As for prose poetry, it’s not exactly a new phenomenon – haibun anyone? But where does poetry end and prose begin? Where does poetry become hybrid writing or flash – fiction?
Let me know in the comments. Oh, I almost forgot. A link to the poem;