Playing Around with Your Words
"Prose is words in their best order;
Poetry is the best words in their best order.”
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The dreaded writer’s block can strike at any time. It tends to surface when writers start on a new topic or get bogged down trying to conform to a particular expectation or structure. Sometimes all it takes to get the creative juices flowing again is experimentation in a new form or genre, which allows you to play around with your style and word selection and return to your work with fresh ideas and a new perspective.
In The Train-of-Thought Writing Method, Kathi Macias discuses the problem some readers face when writers are under pressure to perform and neglect the style of powerful descriptions. “The facts and figures are all there; the material is well organized, documented, and presented; even the author’s name gives the manuscript credibility,” writes Macias. “But the average reader wouldn’t make it through the first chapter without dying of boredom.”
In this situation, readers want one of two things: to get off at the next stop, or to get to their destination as quickly as possible. Macias is also quick to point out that “The age-old writer’s maxim of ‘show, don’t tell’ is good, solid advice, but simply sprinkling your work with a few more adjectives and adverbs is not the way to accomplish it.” Writing in a new less-structured form, like poetry, can help you experiment with descriptions, add some flair to your writing and put the best words in their best order.
Poetry emerged centuries ago as a medium in which the aesthetics of the written word held more value than utility, uniformity and explicit meaning. But over time, poetry became as rigid and structured as any other form, with poets focusing on rhyme, meter and rhythm rather than ambiguous interpretations and surreal playfulness.
Embracing the Best of Both Worlds
In response to these strict forms, prose poetry emerged as a form with all options on the table, where writers can flow in any direction the written word takes them. Prose poetry embraces the best of both worlds, combining the narrative structure of prose with the metaphorical and aesthetic language of poetry. The prose poem resembles a short story, using sentences rather than carefully chosen line breaks, but can employ all the other techniques of poetry.
More recently, prose poetry has become a popular medium for writers longing to shrug off the restrictions of all genres and embrace the results of free-flowing imagery, layered meanings and ambiguous themes that are left for each reader to interpret and enjoy individually. John Crespin’s Indian Style: A flower grew in my mind explores the limits of prose, poetry and a combination of the two that tells a narrative story full of metaphors about culture, identity and stereotypes.
Crespin explores a number of metaphors in his prose poetry and uses imagery that forces his reader to look at the subject in a new light. He examines how young children cannot escape their family’s past, but continue on with hope for the future in this passage:
Quiet, naked children flower into generations of original, young men with old scars. You’ll find them where the rainbow over the sun sparkles sincerely for the earth across the evening sky. The originals fade away like the sun and the kids turn back to the same page over and over again trying to remember who said it.
The young children, whose innocence is represented by nakedness, flower into unique identities that must still carry the scars of the past. Despite this past, the children press on, following the rainbow of the American dream. Ultimately, these children will learn to embrace their past, scars and all, and try to reclaim their history by "turning back the pages" to remember the lessons of previous generations.
In another passage, Crespin debunks the myths of "superheroes" and their perceived perfection:
Memory still remains where the first superhero I ever knew won the paper crown but left it on a hilltop with a story written in its crumpled folds and walked a while with his hands in his linty pockets.
He describes the attention and praise of these cultural superheroes as a “paper crown” that cannot stand on its own, but this spotlight is not enough to sustain these heroes. Instead, they long to express themselves by using the attention to create a story, only to leave it behind for others to find. Ultimately, despite the fawning attention and attempts at creativity, the hero walks with his hands in his pockets, which are filled with the same kind of lint we all find on occasion. Crespin’s poetic imagery makes the metaphors effective, and the prosaic narrative holds the imagery together.
If you incorporate prose poetry into your writing diet, it can be both an end and a means. While you’ll certainly create some delightful poetry chock full of imagery when you let your mind off its leash, the free association of prose poetry can help generate new ideas about old characters, settings and stories, develop ideas you haven’t been able to write about, and reveal those perfect descriptions you want in your writing. So play around, you never know what you may find; new varieties of meanings can enrich all aspects of your writing.
