Poetry - is it just prose on short lines? Kathleen Jones thinks not
This is one of the trickiest questions on the Eng Lit syllabus - What is Poetry? As a published poet I should know, but ...... Thomas Gray had an answer to the question, but it's all a bit abstract. I’ve just done an interview on this for a former member of Authors Electric - Roz Morris, who hosts the ‘Undercover Soundtrack’ blog, runs a fiction course for the Guardian Masterclass series and produces a radio programme called ‘ So You Want to be a Writer? ’. Her questions meant that I had to think quite hard about the craft of poetry which, we discovered in discussion, isn’t that much different from the craft of fiction. Poetry is a bit more concerned with the rhythm and music of language than fiction usually is; the musicality of words and their percussion. This means that sometimes the syntax can get overlooked in the sheer exuberance of the lines. Poets are allowed to have a bit more fun with words than prose writers. So long as the meaning comes through, it’s...