Two Things

First, I just recently read "The Importance of Being Earnest" for the first time, and it is so definitely worthy of having my blog named after it.

Second, there's this thing called prosetry.
Long ago and far away, Danielle and I were very good friends, and one or both of us coined this term to describe very poetic prose which we did not feel was accurately described with just the word "prose" or just the word "poetry." Thusly came about the combination of the two.

I have recently been kicking around the idea of multiple literatures - oral, classical, pictorial, and so forth - not only to try and sort out what literature is and how to make wordless literature fit but also as a possible dissertation topic. Naturally, I started thinking about prosetry again as well.
Today, Bethany read a personal essay to our Creative Nonfiction class that did not seem really to be prose. Its arrangement on the page added to its meaning, making the fonts and even the page itself part of the work. And as we sat discussing the piece in class, our instructor called it both personal essay and verse. I could not quite wrap my mind around this, especially when the same instructor seemed unwilling to admit that the same piece she was labeling both prose and poetry (by calling it a personal essay in the form of a free verse poem) could be a combination of the two: prosetry. After being frustrated at not being able to voice my thoughts, I came home, took a nap, let the PMS wear off, and then talked to Andrew about it over dinner. After I gave a few more examples of what prosetry might be, we both agreed the idea was worth researching and may have merit, but we also agreed it is/would be controversial.

The thing is that it does not seem right to me to classify Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Beowulf into the same categories as my work, which consists of words that happen not to make paragraphs or - necessariily - sentences. To call my work poems because of they way my words are arranged on the page seems wrong to me. I use no rhyme, no rhythms, no bob and wheel technique, no iambic pentameter. All I do is make my prose look like a poem. Putting the two in the same category is like The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy is the same kind of epic story as The Godfather movie trilogy; they just aren't the same, so why force them into the same category? An analogy I made this evening was to a glass: It is not inaccurate to call a glass a cup, but a more accurate description of it is to call it a glass.

Thus, it seems to me, poems are not the same as prose are not the same as prosetry.