Prose poems
What are Prose Poems? Purple prose? Vignettes? Free verse without line-breaks? Flash Fiction? Whatever, they're staging a mini-comeback lately. Layout serves several purposes in poetry. Sometimes it merely echoes the sonic organisation (as in sonnets); sometimes (as in shape poems) the appearance has a meaning for the eye but not the ear; sometimes words are in a 2-dimensional arrangement (the white space speaks); and sometimes the text is a script for performance, the line-breaks showing where to breathe. Line-breaks are sometimes added as "speed bumps" in the hope that by slowing down reading the text will be taken more seriously, but readers can - and should - call the text's bluff if they think they're being hoaxed. With prose-poetry the appearance isn't significant, and punctuation guides the reader's breathing and rhythm. Although dozens of French writers experimented with them in the 1700s, it was not until Baudelaire's work appeared in 1855 tha...