enlightening, very nice contribution…i’ll add a little ramble now

by denim_road

Posted to Utterances on 2003-02-16 07:17:00

Parent message is 383170
first off, i haven’t done a lot of prose and poetry reading,
so my position is rather basic.
i’ll state an opinion that’s been on my untutored mind regarding prose and poetry,
and i realize it has a lot to do with my own personal preferences when reading any writings.
…meaning, what i prefer, another reader may not….no big deal.

i’ve never really been able to “get into” certain types of poetry writings.
these would mostly be the type that have rhyming stanzas and
(for the lack of a better term) expressive exclamations similiar to
“hark, i can see the light (or dark)”.

(…though come to think of it,
i bet there’s a lot of pop music with similiarly expressed lyrics.
…songs that i like a lot and would listen to over and over.)

of course,
i realize that this isn’t the only type of poetry,
or
that i’ll never like any poetry that falls within this style i just mentioned.
there is something out there that will excite me sooner or later.
i just have to come across it.

ok, that said…
so for a humanities class we look at a few prose writings of baudelaire.
hmmm…well, interesting…it takes some thinking to pinpoint the meanings…
…sometimes vague but obviously brooding, etc…
then i read the one called, “The Soup and The Clouds”.
whoa, what a frigging masterpiece!!
totally brilliant humanistic story telling…i’m thinking: so this is prose?
i think it says a lot for the translator too.

reflecting on “The Soup and The Clouds”,
i remember getting a similiar flash of insight or an emotional connection
as from reading Ira Gitler’s opening paragraph on the jazz pianist, bud powell,
in his book, jazz masters of forties,
which briefly described a live performance,
the imagery of powell playing and the audience held captive.

the soup and the clouds, prose.
powell and his audience, a book chapter’s paragraph.
i suppose the boundries of classification could get over-academic and boring.

in fact,
related to a “definition” type of search
i was just perusing this webpage called, “Is it Poetry or Prose?”
http://www.artsreformation.com/a001/dr-prose.html

anyway, this is all i have to interject right now.
any more comments out there?
thanx.

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