BURGOS NATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL

SUBJECT: CREATIVE WRITING

COURSE FACILITATOR: Jonalyn Piasan- Ngappol
EXPERIMENTAL TEXT POETRY
TYPOGRAPHY
(the style, arrangement, or appearance of printed letters on a page)

PROSE POEM
Prose is anything written down that does not possess any poetic meter.
Poetic meter is the rhythm of a poem. Whether you've heard any of Shakespeare's famous sonnets
or the latest hip-hop song burning up the charts, chances are that you've noticed that many poems or
songs have a certain rhythm to them. This rhythm is based on different factors, including the syllables
per line and what syllables are naturally emphasized or stressed if someone were to read the poem
out loud.
There is more to poetry than poetic meter, of course. Poems are often image-driven and emphasize
visual descriptions, including metaphors, while prose tends to focus on aspects such as narrative,
characters, and plot arc. In addition, poems also play with the sound of language using repetition and
rhyming.

Prose poetry is poetry that is not written in verse and contains other poetic attributes, such as
rhythm and metaphors.

Characteristics of Prose, Poetry & Prose Poetry

Prose
Written in paragraphs
Tells a story rather than describes an image or metaphor
Generally, has characters and a plot
Poetry
Written in verse
Written in poetic meter
Focuses on image-driven metaphors
Might have a narrative, but it might not or it might be harder to understand
Prose poetry
Looks like prose (written in paragraphs)
Focuses on images
Includes instances of poetic meter
Contains language play, such as repetition
Prose Poetry Form
Prose is the ordinary language that people use in speaking or writing. It does not treat the line
as a formal unit. It has no repetitive pattern of rhythm or meter.
In a prose poem:

The writing is continuous and without line breaks.

The piece may be of any length and may be divided into paragraphs. A single sentence
or sentence fragment can be a prose poem, as can multiple paragraphs.

The natural rhythm of thought can lead to rhythmical cadences in a prose poem.

Internal rhyme and alliteration and repetition can be used. Some such trait of poetry
must be present. Otherwise it is prose, not a prose poem.

It lies between free verse and prose.

Usually has compressed thought and intensity.

Poet Gary Young has a very concise approach to prose poems. In an October 2006 craft
workshop, his guidelines included:

Use the spontaneity and drive of the sentence. Allow your writing to be subtle and
subversive, to warp and seduce, so the reader accepts something in a prose poem that
they might resist in formal poetry.

Be concise. Ask yourself if you can justify everything that is in your poem, each phrase,
each word, each comma. If you're unsure, remove it.

The prose poem is a lyric. But embrace the trans-genre possibilities of the prose poem.
Commandeer the exposition, the recipe, the definition.

Embrace the surreal, "a bit of arsenic, a bit of starlight".

"It's the moves in the poem that excite me the most. In a prose poem you can travel
such distances."

Examples of Prose Poems

'I discovered a journal' (Gary Young)
'I discovered a journal in the children's ward, and read, I'm a mother, my little boy has cancer. Further
on, a girl has written, this is my nineteenth operation. She says, sometimes it's easier to write than to

talk, and I'm so afraid. She's offered me a page in the book. My son is sleeping in the room next door.
This afternoon, I held my whole weight to his body while a doctor drove needles deep into his leg. My
son screamed, Daddy, they're hurting me, don't let them hurt me, make them stop. I want to write,
how brave you are, but I need a little courage of my own, so I write, forgive me, I know I let them hurt
you, please don't worry. If I have to, I can do it again.'
Intoxication
Fr. Enivrez-vous (Eng. literal translation Be Drunk)
Charles Baudelaire (from Petits Pomes en Prose, 1869, translated by James Huneker, 1919)
One must be forever drunken: that is the sole question of importance. If you would not feel the
horrible burden of Time that bruises your shoulders and bends you to the earth, you must be drunken
without cease. But how? With wine, with poetry, with virtue, with what you please. But be drunken.
And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace, on the green grass by a moat, or in the dull loneliness of
your chamber, you should waken up, your intoxication already lessened or gone, ask of the wind, of
the wave, of the star, of the bird, of the timepiece; ask of all that flees, all that sighs, all that revolves,
all that sings, all that speaks, ask of these the hour; and wind and wave and star and bird and
timepiece will answer you: It is the hour to be drunken! Lest you be the martyred slaves of Time,
intoxicate yourselves, be drunken without cease! With wine, with poetry, with virtue, or with what you
will.

PERFORMANCE POETRY
Performance poetry uses the stage as the page, transforming poetry readings into theatrical events.
While the recent resurgence of performance poets is seen as a reaction against mainstream, printbased poetry, the style harkens back to the classic role of the poet, who recited notable happenings,
emotions, and perceptions.
And while traditional poems utilized standard structures, in part to serve as mnemonic devices,
contemporary performance poetry calls upon experimental rhythms as a means to engage an
audience in the listening experience.
The recent growth of performance poetry can be attributed to the popularity of slam, a self-identified
movement dedicated to creating real-time discourse between performer and audience. While poetry
slam cannot be categorized like a sonnet or a haiku, any form or style of poetry can be turned into
slam by virtue of the poets performance on stage. This inclusive art form invites all people to
participate, whether as a poet, audience member, or judge.
Ancient roots
While the term spoken word was not popularized until revival of poetry slams in the 1980s, the
focus on developing poems specifically for performances dates back to ancient times, when epic
poems like Homers Odyssey were recited for entertainment. Later, poetry was incorporated into
theatrical events, when forms such as the ode accompanied music throughout the acts. Over the
centuries, oral poetry gave rise to a variety of forms and styles. Chants and ghazals played major
roles in religious and spiritual worship. Ballads and villanelles captured the adventure and romance of
their day.
Although these oral forms of poetry were quite popular, the greater role of printed text transformed
many listeners into solitary readers, and new poets began to focus on the written presentation of
their work.

Modern rebirth
As early 20th century artists rethought longstanding perspectives on art, many poets abandoned
more accepted forms of poetry to experiment with combining various media. For example, Tristan
Tzara and his fellow Dadaists incorporated costumes and noisemakers into their public performances.

This experimentation with sound and performance was also embraced by Italian and Russian
Futurists, such as F.T. Marinetti and Khebnikov.
American experimentation with performance poetry lagged behind its European counterparts, as it
was largely limited to a few daring artists like Harry Kemp, who in 1909 entered a lions cage to read
poetry to 500 onlookers. However, both Louis Zukofsky and Charles Olson motivated artists to look
deeper into the performance of poetry. Thus, the Beat Poets of the late 1940s and 1950s, led by Allen
Ginsberg and his poem, Howl, twisted traditional chants and jazz rhythms into poems rife with
social and cultural commentary, helping explode the popular acceptance of performance poetry and
spurring on a new generation of artists like Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Amiri Baraka and Diane di Prima.

http://www.webexhibits.org/poetry/explore_21_performance_examples.html