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In this age of short attention spans when anything that doesn't fit onto a single screen is considered tediously protracted, "Flash Fiction" might bring readers back to short prose. But there are many types of short prose, some of which may merit greater attention. Here I'll try to disentangle a few of the types. Categorisation For a while the only category for short prose was "Prose Poem". The Prose Poem has been tried by many French poets. For the most part the pieces are (as Baudelaire described them) "poetic prose, without rhythm and without rhyme. ..". They are sometimes descriptive or anecdotal snapshots of a situation or event. More recently the form has been used in the US. When the genre was out of fashion authors who wanted their short texts published either had to make them fit the expectations of the poetic "prose poem" or, more often, add line-breaks and call their work a poem. Now that the term "Flash" has ...

Why Forms? Several reasons, some merely historical Sound is considered an important component of language and hence of poetry. To some it has a visceral effect. So it's natural to exploit patterns of sound and their interaction with meaning. Much poetry works by expectation/surprise or tension/release - in the plot, but also in the form. A regular form offers more chances to surprise the reader Sound-patterned verse is easier to remember Sound-patterned verse is easier to set to music The use of a form is an allusion to earlier uses of the form. Writers can expressively follow (or react against) the tradition Sounds are a structuring device that can relate distant words or hold semantically unrelated words close together Forms provide a technical challenge for the poet Readers like a mix of familiarity and novelty. Using forms one can give readers their dose of familiarity without having to compromise the content. On the minus side, some say that forms are artificial, interfering w...

Layers in literature Texts can be seen as having layers. From low to high these layers comprise The physical medium - atoms, molecules, chemicals (screen/paper). Note that these can change while level 2 remains the same (or at least irrelevantly different) to the reader, just as chessplayers rarely care whether the pieces are resin or wood. Letters - fonts, color and the quality of the handwriting can matter Units of meaning - words, phrases, sentences or lines. In a piece like Finnegan's Wake the letter->word phase is non-trivial Interpretation - which in turn is multi-level Reading through layers Upper layers can have emergent features absent from lower ones (and vice versa). For example Emotions only exist at higher levels A story full of jokes can be sad Interpretation is not a straightforward progression from lowest to highest level. A higher level interpretation can provoke a re-interpretation of a lower level. Often the lower levels (the choice of font, color...

Here's the first of 4 stanzas from "The Butterfly Farm" by Medbh McGuickian. The film of a butterfly ensures that it is dead: Its silence like the green cocoon of the car-wash, Its passion for water to uncloud The poem is discussed in Ruth Padel's "52 ways of looking at a poem" whose description of McGuickian's poetry makes it sound rather like mine. I can see resemblances in the way that we use unstated analogies to bind images together - I've written Critics wind up their gramophones for icing cakes, lift doors off their hinges to sleigh through slush But I've rather turned away from this style of writing. In poetry it's easy for the meaning of words to ramify. What's harder is selectively amplifying some meanings and muffling others. This is done by the control of context. Take as an example the isolated word "flower". It could mean many things though the reader may need to be provoked into thinking of many. In the context of...

Formal poetry typically includes the following features line-breaks - Most forms specify where these need to be. Making a virtue of necessity, poets discovered ways to exploit them, using enjambment, surprise, and varieties of end-rhyme. Rectangular stanzas - Most forms produce lines of near-equal length in stanzas of near-equal length, resulting in poems that are a series of blocks. Initial capitals - Early verse took from prose (especially religious texts) the idea of a complete thought per line, and with it, perhaps, the capitalizing convention. Also the capitals help to counter-balance the weight of the end-rhymes. The rise of free verse made the line-break a more flexible device. Numerous experimenters explored the potential of layout. Some poets used ragged-left as well as ragged-right formats - not as the Alexandrians, Herbert or Lewis Carroll did (making a shape on the page), nor to emphasise the rhyming pattern, but to guide meaning and control rhythm. At the same time ee...

Literary Order The idea that in a masterpiece everything contributes to the whole can be traced back through Hegel's principle of 'organic unity' to Aristotle's theory of tragedy. For Coleridge, "organic unity" was the manifestation of a poet's powers of synthesising. It was Baumgarten (1714-62, his Aesthetica was written in Latin) who coined the term 'perfectible beauty' according to which the beauty of an artwork or natural object corresponds to the degree of its organization or integration. In the ideal case no elements of an object should appear arbitrary, accidental, or irrational - it's a microcosm of the greater 'totality'. With order and harmony comes unity and a way to distinguish what "belongs" from what doesn't. Workshop criticism of short stories and poetry is often harsh on the apparently inconsequential - anything not contributing to the main theme is easily dismissed as not belonging. But the need for ...

It sounds better Sound has a strong, innate effect. Artists need a restriction to fight against. "Poetry without rhyme is like tennis without a net" - Frost Rhyme can be built into a poem without detrimentally affecting other aspects of the poem. It can be used to emphasise words or connections. It binds a poem together. Disadvantages It sounds worse - sing-song, jangly, childish. J. Jerome in a writers' guide says that "much of your effort in rhyming is to subdue it" by spreading the rhymes out, avoiding rare words, using enjambment, etc. Why bother in the first place? Even the experts can't please everyone: Kay Ryan's poetry has been described as "too rhyme-driven"; Frederick Seidel "even makes his admirers nervous ... unexpected, bathetic, clanging end-rhymes that critics have compared to those of Dr Seuss" Rhyme is the most superficial of sound effects. The English language isn't well suited to rhyme. Poetry writi...