Creative Writing Prompt: Prose or Poetry?

Creative Writing Prompt #3
Prose or Poetry?

Some people have made an entire career out of writing their poems in prose form. (Russell Edson, for instance.) Some people shun the form entirely. I say, give it a shot at least a handful of times.

While a prose form will work for some poems and not others, it’s up to you as the poet to determine what gets your message across most effectively.

Part I

To get a feel for the form, take one of your existing poems, strip it completely of the line structure it’s currently in, and put it into prose form.

How does this simple shift change the meaning of the poem? Do you like it? Will you keep the poem this way or is it better in stanzas and structured lines? Experiment with any or all of your poems.

Part II

Write a new prose poem. Resist the urge to put your lines into stanzas, or to create lines at all.

Write the same prose poem again… this time, rearrange or scramble the sentences.

Write the unscrambled version again, this time moving the nouns around (not all of them, but until something happens).

Compare these three versions and also look at them individually. What’s worth keeping? Was your original version the best? Or did the scrambling and noun-shifting change the poem (and its meaning) into something stronger than before?

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