Poem rec: Taking, and what's your idea of poetic?

[crowroad3]

Title: Taking
Poet: laughablelament
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Wincest
Tags/Warnings/Spoilers: incest kink
Prompt: "Taking some 'we' time." - Dean, 10.04 (Paper Moon)

Look at this sexy thing laughablelament posted at spnapo!  And by 'sexy' I don't mean the line breaks. (OK that too.)

We'd love some prompts or poems/poem-like things/lyrical drabbles/images/self-contained bits of fic/

Comments

[z_publicizes]

I started writing Higher Learning as poetry, couldn't get the lines to break organically, and so revised it into prose. I'm delighted that it still reads as poem-like to you, since I love structural hybrids.

As for what reads as poetry to me, subjectively? Well, huh. Kind of fumbling here. I suppose it's all in the prosody, a greater emphasis placed on rhythm--greater than what exactly I find harder to answer. I think most good prose has a sense of rhythm, but it's generally more diluted by other concerns.

With poetry, when I first look at the text on the page, the first thing I take in is the line groupings, how the lines break; I get a sense of the meter just from that first visual. A prose-poem doesn't make that same first impression; it's only as I'm reading it that I experience the rhythm and respond to it as poetry. I think that might be part of what I like about it--it sneaks up on you.

Here's an excerpt from Colum McCann's Transatlantic--"A strong wind arrives from the west in uneven gusts. They are twelve hours late already, but now is the time--the fog has lifted and the long range weather reports are good. No clouds. The sky above seems painted in. The initial wind velocity is strong, but will probably calm to about twenty knots. There will, later, be a good moon. They climb aboard to scattered cheers, secure their safety belts, check the instruments yet again. A quick salute from the starter. Contact! Alcock opens the throttle and brings both engines to full power. He signals for the wooden chocks to be pulled clear from the wheels. The mechanic leans down, ducks under the wings, armpits the chocks, steps back, throws them away. He raises both arms in the air. A cough of smoke from the engines. The propellers whirl. The Vimy is pointed into the gale. A slight angle to the wind. Uphill. Go now, go. The waft of warming oil. Speed and lift. The incredible roar. The trees loom in the distance. A drainage ditch challenges on the far side. They say nothing. No Great Scott. No Chin up, old sport. They inch forward, lumbering into the wind. Go, go." --Well, that's from a longer passage best experienced in full, but I think the idea is there. The emphasis on rhythm, how it creates immediacy and intimacy.

Rhythm works the same way with laughablelament's poem--but with line breaks that add the element of surprise and fit the subject matter to give it a coy, playful feel. Bite a hickey high//inside one thigh. There's a pause where we don't know where that hickey's going, and the suspense is part of the sexiness.

The rhythm of caranfindel's single-sentence fics is a suspended breath--you take a breath at the start and you don't let it out until the end stop. That creates a sense of visceral immediacy, grabbing the reader in a way that's not that dissimilar to what McCann and laughablelament are doing, with their lines like swift exhalations. It's the same goal--immerse the reader in the moment--reached by different technique.

[crowroad3]

"I started writing Higher Learning as poetry, couldn't get the lines to break organically, and so revised it into prose. I'm delighted that it still reads as poem-like to you, since I love structural hybrids.": I think I could hear/feel that in HL, the way it turns around an image, even in the way it breaks.

It probably won't surprise you that this happens to me too, in both directions. Sometimes a thing just will not come out as prose--and the boundary is always a fluid frontier. I think if structural hybrids (and other sorts of hybrids) didn't exist, most of my writing wouldn't exist, heh.

"I think most good prose has a sense of rhythm": yep. And I think I read very much like you, prose poem or lyric, whether "poetry" is suggested visually, in the breaks, or no.

McCann is stunning--I love exhalation and imperative, and I see it too, the way both "Taken" and Transatlantic" suspend us--yes, suspended breath; these three excellent examples of different technical paths to the same.
And yeah, this is one of those things poetry does (for me) considers the effects of breath and space; things excellent prose can do too...