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

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