Poor thing Popeye he had it sad of olives and brutes pipes and green big jaws but no lips or teeth or gums is he a poor thing or a spoiled thing
Or.*
2/15/09
Poor thing Popeye
he had it sad
of olives
and brutes
pipes
and green
big jaws
but no lips or teeth or gums
is he a poor thing
or a spoiled thing
*Author is considering the impact of formats. Dearest, if you have an opinion, do express it.
second version…
Somethings are obvious..like
Darkness
No
Lightness….
Shit
Im not even on a diet
Ahh you have discovered the many mysteries of line breaks. What do they do? How do they work? There is no answer, it is a lifetime’s study. In this case the linebreaks turn a strange sentence into a very cool poem.
In other cases they are used
by people who aren’t poets
but want to be
so that normal
sentences can masquerade
as poems.
(If you don’t like these people you can comment them with “prose with linebreaks’)
People will tell you that a linebreak is like a punctuation mark, that it indicates a pause, or are used for rhythmic effect. Both true but incomplete explanations. If you are like me it is a question you will ponderate every time you write anything. Linebreak or no linebreak, poem, prose poem, prosepoemthingy, a prose by any other name until finally you start tagging things, ‘genre isn’t dead yet but it should be’ at which point you will be able to sleep properly for the first time in decades. Welcome to the wonderful life of the poet.
Wow, you know, I was wondering the same thing. I was reading my latest post, Alternate 29, and I was thinking, if I just inserted linebreaks, this prose would be a poem. But then I felt that wasn’t being true to what I wrote, because I didn’t write it as a poem. But then, what’s a poem?
I originally wrote this in the second format with line breaks. When I pasted it into wordpress, the format was cleared and it showed up as one continuous sentence, which sort of appealed to me. I think it’s a poem either way; it just looks different. I tend to have an intuitive, pre-formulated idea of how the finished product should look, but it was kind of fun to consider another point of view.
Intuition is such bullshit. Forgive me.
Thanks for your discussion. It’s nice to get the perspectives of writers I very much admire.
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