Sound is perhaps the strongest reason why I love poetry. I've talked about this before, and I'm not going to repeat myself now, other than stating the fact that I just watched the marvellous movie called August Rush, so music is on my brain. After our discussion of prose poems today, I kept thinking about why I liked them so much. They are such a unique form, and I have realized that you either love or hate them, as you could tell from the polarization of our class discussion. I loved how they embraced the quality of a narrative while still maintaining unique sounds in order to be classified as a poem. Now, I know it was refuted that even narrative poems have stanza structure applied to them, so why can't this form have some sort of structure as well? I think that the prose poem often looks like a block on the page because that is how the author wanted the thoughts to be heard. They are a lot more like thoughts when they are blurted out on a page, exposed to the reader exactly how they were envisioned, and this block creates unique opportunities for sound as well. In the final scene of August Rush, August performs his Rhapsody, which actually reminded me of a prose poem. It is a lengthy song, and sounds arbitrarily thrown together, but, in reality, each note was placed in the perfect position to tell the story. There is build-up, background noise, a fall, and a grand finale. This is just like a poem in many ways, and this is the best correlation that I can draw to illustrate just why I love this form and think that it is the most useful one that we have studied so far. Below is the cd version of August's Rhapsody, if you are interested in hearing what a prose poem sounds like in musical form.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
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