Prose

by Gary C. Gibson

Created on: May 24, 2009   Last Updated: June 14, 2010

A computer program can turn out acceptable, structured poetry without inspiration. The writing of good prose is a more difficult, challenging subject; the paradigmatic axis is more evident than the syntagmatic-meaning and its presence or absence is explicit for prose more so than in poetry.

Poetry too may have meaning as much as amusement with style, yet it is difficult to imagine prose at book length that is purely non-sense, as can be found in poetry. Poetry may exploit sound patterns with fragmented morphemes and phonemes that can be repeated in fractal arrays or deformed as tensors yielding new meaning only as the prior meaning as raised the vantage point of experience high enough to perceive the subsequent. In poetry one may have an equivalence of a modus tolens and modus ponens structure that is true rather than necessarily false, while the case would be far more rare in prose than benefits from a logical advance of exposition of subject mater.

Lah lah lah, do dah, do dah...we enjoy such pieces of poetics lyrically set in song or simply versified, as we enjoy snowflakes falling in July...then we recognize the necessity to return to the plow and the work of conserving the field to enable the growing season to mature at harvest time under the Harvest moon. The overgrowth of tares sewed by the muse of sloth and dissipation can make prose writers over-indulge in the libation of liberal verse to the neglect of the calling of more serious work for the sustenance of personal interests and intellectual health. Only when the field is overrun by alien invaders must the prose writer retreat to the free verse of poetry where he might express at least the kernal of free thought while firing and maneuvering away from his secular assailants such as poverty and vice, government oppression and time. 

The cost of writing prose is greater than for writing poetry. It is possible to write poetry at a cafe table, in sailing and even scuba diving though not a novel. The drafting process for novels, rewrites and revisions requires much more time than for many kinds of poems. Poetry requires just inspiration and an idea of the form to express it in. Some of the great Chinese calligraphers wrote entirely in one fluid motion, and such may be the writing of poems. Writing fiction wants a stable creative environment without disruption. Inmates of the Gulag Archipelago composed poetry and committed them to memory on occasion as much as thousands of verses yet none wrote novels...that was too difficult. 

Writing prose fiction requires more work than does writing poetry. For those of us that like writing poetry it is a pleasure. It may capture brilliant ideas with brevity, while the effort to write good lines of prose continues for weeks, months or years ordinarily in the production of a work of literature. Keeping a high standard in prose is quite as difficult as it is in poetry. 

It is possible to write good poetry and prose that fall short of worthiness of being called literature-each are skills that demand inspiration and effort. Milton's 'Paradise Lost' is one of the greatest poems in the English language . He was a brilliant Oxford educated writer who spent a lifetime developing his skill and advanced the commission of larger works when a fellow poet and friend drowned at sea.

Some may be put off by the unfamiliar code that poetry has structurally. It is not even necessary to write dactyls, or blank verse, hexameter or haiku; one may just write free verse. Literature flows a story line for-itself even in the absence of good ideas. Some gifted writers can make a day spent in an apartment interesting if not exactly a page turning burn of a read. One may consider Sartre's short story -'The Condemned of Altoona', or play 'No Exit' as one-set story lines that are outstanding, and then the following excerpt from a science fiction novel in which we see the technical content and its references to historical facts written without the 'color' of the art of writing prose that makes it function as smoothly as the slide on a new, well sanded and lubricated semi-automatic pistol... 

"Floating in slow motion invisibility with Misner super-conductor levitation my wisp of optical alterity passage hadn't much potential for observation by dog soldiers or informants voluntary or involuntarily coerced by head rope tightening, eye-popping, brain crushing interrogators of the old woold school. Along the variegated slopes and building matter strewn ruins of neighborhoods recently subjected to invasive civil strife by canine trained new dog soldiery were thousands of decoy sensor attacking opposition Martian solar and wind powered scarecrows in sundry states of operability that served to distract pursuing dog soldiery during Martian counterattack and withdrawal for those militia able to survive before retreating perhaps to some of the valleys and caverns below sloped cities of the southern highlands. 

Perhaps they had made it to the Drake Sea resorts in order to rally or disbursed further into small squad sized groups to enhance survivability amidst the legions of Badtimes saturating the landscape. Electro-magnetic directed particle beam wave-fields are a simple method of evacuating planetary environments with moderate positive gravitational forces that can be assembled to dispatch an individual into orbit and beyond. The electronics are quite simple and portable with operations logic stored in a dime drive suitably configured for external plug in to super-conductor batteries and micro-fuel cell and nuclear power supplies. They are common enough in Martian military divisions necessary in global atmosphere mobile ops. 

My rendezvous with Colonel Foothills of the surviving Martian First Atmospheric Cavalry might let me learn something more about surviving Martian military elements and of their hopes for destroying Badtimes as well as of how I might commence my trajectory for Earth and the interesting Earth-woman Keisha Selkirk the MacArthur's had mentioned before I'd set out on this exit plan. Perhaps Foothills had information about the Snappers economic purging machines that Badtimes had used to decapitate captives unsuitable for collectivist programming. Ironically in the aftermath of the Imperial war in which Corporatist forces had been enablers of the destruction of democracy corporatists had been reduced to a very small number on Mars, so it could in essence be only democratic free enterprisers Martian heads that Badtimes' rovers were snipping electromechanically. In collectivist purges of the 20th and 21st centuries corporatist and communist collectivist recognized one another as dialectical opponents of a near matter-anti-matter mirroring symmetry-anti-symmetry political nature. 

Each sought to eliminate democracy and free enterprise and leave solely consolidated totalitarian power in control differing only slightly in the apportionment of executive compensation and elite party membership/shareholder socio-economic power. I was surprised to learn that Badtimes might be following along the old collectivist economic reductionist power trail since he was an alien, an individual rogue and without any obvious natural alliance with Earthly corporatists or communists while few of either existed on Mars. Is the dynamic for social restructuring such that purging creative, independent rivals with the snippers arises independently and phenomenally elsewhere in the Universe and coincidentally transferred to Mars, or was the snipping social deletion development a product of the Earth's contamination of Badtimes' otherwise corrupted nature?"-end of excerpt. 

Compare prose fiction excerpt with the difficulty of getting a poem perfected. Poetry can set its own rules, enabling a poet to work on production of a good verbal 'picture' of his idea. Its expression merely need be aesthetically satisfying, or otherwise consistent as a conclusion with the premises in his logical 'argument'. The following poem is perhaps of the same level of quality as the excerpt above, yet it's challenges were easier for the poet to 'solve'. 

Intervals and successions of singularities spring up like sound waves

because poetry is written like a Universe of Omega values packed down

in relation to the stars and galaxies clustered in four dimensions of space-time...

Even with a scalar field expansion of disorder from order

there is time and space as well as an axis of structure actualized now

as an infinity of discrete dots formed from strings and membranes...



Dimensions with structured arrays actualizing in time and space

D.N.A. in the twisted dialectic of space time progression

with a purpose toward the end, like some interval before always then...



Then and now before eternity, intervals and questions of temporality's permanent changing

the Universe comprised of membranes or monads always rearranging

seasons and springs and things of dreams...



Yet unto eternity is all before the One emanator of ideas

perfect in actualized lives and skies

spirits of self-awareness surging into being for wisdom's sake...


Eternity surrounds every universe that is actualized from eternity too like an infinite recursion of ever now each Universe structure is experienced along a tensor
without time the spirit becomes aware of each place time with space...

Dimensions of tensor trails of structure known the infinite succession of experiences from He who is worthy of the Throne of Being all things fulfilled, when all is understood...

Humanity was said with salvation to enter into God's rest. 

Poetry is a skill unified with inspiration that finds its best expression artfully selected. Original, entertaining and informative creations in styles of writings that allow a reader to find an emotional and simultaneously intellectual comprehension of the author's subject is a hope poets may have. Prose fiction requires not only larger structures of language construction selected to convey the meaning, story or ideas the author intends, it also offers the opportunity for construction of visual and emotional scenes such as in poems are limited in size and scope. 

'Jerusalem Delivered' by Torquito Tasso was a large volume of poetry, and Alexander Pope's 'Essay on Criticism' was seemingly the brilliant poem to surpass all brilliant poetic method. It is yet evident that the great works of prose fiction such as 'The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky required brilliance in insight, understanding, inspiration and construction. Prose fiction is a kind of poetry in the better writers sustained at book length. The inspiration of Lewis Carrol and James Joyce was quite remarkable in prose. Prose writers may be poets and vice versa. Poetry is a good place for writers to start and continue throughout life as they also work upon their prose projects increasing skill and writing short stories, then moving on to novellas and novels. 

Practically, even writing a small novel requires access to good writing environments over real time that isn't required for writing poetry. The time and cost of writing a good novel is quite a bit higher than for writing a single good poem. There may have been more than a few potentially good writers of prose fiction that were circumstantially limited to just writing dozens of excellent poems. That is one of the marvellous consolations of poetry that is a brilliant reward in the dark cloud of uncertainty.

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