Adapting short texts for the market

When texts are short, the poetry and prose categories can merge. So why bother trying to categorize? Once people other than the author are involved, there are several reasons - e.g.

• Editors of anthologies and specialist magazines need to draw a line somewhere
• Writers submitting to certain magazines need to specify whether their submission is poetry or prose. What type of work does the author want the submission to be printed amongst? Magazines often demarcate, though Arts Council "New Writing" anthologies sometimes had a "Texts" section for unclassified works, and "The New Yorker" used to have "Casuals" and "Shouts and Murmers".
• Readers may benefit from knowing which reading strategies to initially adopt, and which expectations to develop.

Categories

The classifications are more fine-grained than just "Prose" and "Poetry". There are Haibun (combining prose and haiku), anecdotes, vignettes, contes, short-shorts, microfiction, Flash, ketai fiction, Twitter lit, prose poems, found poems, etc. The existence of line-breaks usually suffices as a marker of poetry, though some free verse, shorn of its line-breaks, might easily fit into these prose categories. Some forms are defined by word-count. For some others, definitions abound. Here are a few -

• Flash - The Bridport Prize's web site suggests that Flash "contains the classic story elements: protagonist, conflict, obstacles or complications and resolution. However unlike the case with a traditional short story, the word length often forces some of these elements to remain unwritten: hinted at or implied in the written storyline". They impose a 250-word limit.
• Prose poetry - In "This Line Is Not For Turning", a prose poetry anthology she edited, Jane Monson provides a description of the prose-poem "at its most disciplined" - "no more than a page, preferably half of one, focussed, dense, justified, with an intuitive grasp of a good story and narrative, a keen eye for unusual and surprising detail and images relative to that story, and a sharp ear for delivering elegant, witty, clear and subtly surreal pieces of conversation and brief occurrences, incidents or happenings". She goes on to write that her anthology "focuses and captures a particular style; which shares in tone, pithiness and brevity the best traits of 'flash fiction', 'micro fiction', 'sudden prose', and the 'short short story' rather than the strengths and weaknesses of 'free verse', 'blank verse' and 'poetic prose'"
• Prose poetry - In Summer 2012's "Poetry Review", Carrie Etter wrote "While some poets and critics insist that we must resist defining prose poetry for it to retain its subversive genre-blurring character, I find some basic distinctions crucial for its appreciation ... a prose poem develops without 'going' anywhere"

Magazines like Sudden Prose ("Prose Poetry and Short-Short Stories) and Double Room (seeks to "explore the intersection of poetry and fiction") seem to accept the overlap. The 2 denominations occupy similar terrains though they have different histories and look in different directions. Calling a piece a prose poem is still making a statement -

• "Prose Poetry is some of the funniest—and strangest—writing you’ll find anywhere. It lends itself to the comic, and the absurd. Maybe humor is easier to convey in a sentence than in a line break. … Flash Fiction is something else, as it’s about character (and change), and it’s therefore more difficult to pull off in such a short space" - Brett at Bark.
• "Flash fiction focuses on story (whether that be character or plot or place or time). Prose poetry focuses on image and/or emotion" - Chris (Bellingham Review)
• "In spite of the prose poem’s history of breaking rules and redefining itself ..." - Bruce Holland Rogers (flash fiction online).

Market trends

I think the current short-text literary arena is currently dominated by 3 overlapping terms

• Poetry - the dominant term; so much so that in the late 1900s a short text had to be made into a poem to have much of a chance of publication. In the age of relaxed free verse, inserting regular line-breaks often sufficed to create a "poem". A text labelled as such carries some of the weight traditionally associated with the term, and is most likely to be read beside other poetry. It needn't have plot or character, nor need it be written in sentences, though it frequently has all of these properties.
• Flash Fiction - a fairly recent and popular term for a cluster of genres that have been around for a long time. Derived from the short story, it's expected to have plot and character (though the proportions may vary), and is likely to be read beside other (perhaps much longer) fiction. Venues now exist for such work - in dedicated magazines, but also magazines in general are more likely to accept short texts nowadays. Specialist outlets impose word-count limits (from 250 to 1000 words).
• Prose poetry - Initially a rebellion against the rhyme/meter of Formalism, then later a challenge to the one remaining obvious feature of poetry - the line-break. Shorn of its rebel image, it retains its feel of being different - though examples appear in many collections and magazines, there are rarely more than 2 or 3 examples per publication. It's likely to appear beside other poetry. Sometimes the only prose-like feature it possesses is the layout, but more often it's in sentences, and can (or even should, according to some practitioners) have narrative impetus.

The popularity and increasing acceptance of Flash (and to a lesser extent of prose poetry) should mean that fewer texts have gratuitous line-breaks nowadays, but understandably, progress is slow. Re-classification of texts previously published as poetry would help change the climate. When creating his poetry anthology, Yeats used a fragment of Pater's prose. Even pieces as long as Carolyn Forché's "The Colonel" have appeared in both poetry and Flash anthologies. In Monson's prose poetry anthology, someone contributed part of their novel. I think the distinctions between micro-fiction and prose-poetry are rather in the eye of the beholder, and the prose-poetry/free-verse distinction can be merely the result of typing habits or previous adaptions for markets.

Adaptions

Given these fuzzy theoretic definitions and the fluidity of the market, it's tempting for writers to add/remove line-breaks, add/remove punchlines, or add/remove connections in order to make a text more appealing to particular outlets. For some styles (those using surrealism, perhaps) I don't think any artistic integrity is lost by doing this. Given the variation in word-count limits it's also worth having more than one version of stories. When texts are adapted, more genre decision might be necessary. When line-breaks are removed from poetry, one of two effects are likely -

• More narrative might be added (i.e. more prose features added)
• The text might appear rather flat, so to compensate the content may become more surreal/imagistic, less linear (i.e. more poetry features added).

When shortening prose, several things can happen. The result might be

• A sketch - same proportions as a story
• A slice (just the sounds, maybe, or a moment in time without back-story)
• A fable (a genre that allows omissions)
• Selected extracts - an interesting set-up followed quickly by a punchline rather than by character development.
• A prose form - a shopping list, an application form, a questionnaire, etc.
• More obscurity (on the grounds that readers can re-read)
• More intensity or extremes

I think that a piece in a form is often printed in poetry sections of magazines even if its content isn't poetic - "forms" and "short texts" both tend to be associated with poetry. So shortened prose can end up in a poetry venue.

Series

The distinction between short and long texts is challenged by series. In Time Lines: few lines and fewer George Szirtes looks at Twitter, pointing out that Jennifer Egan's novella, Black Box is told all in tweets. Similarly, microfictions can be strung into a sequence.

See also

• Short Fiction
• Managing story length
• Flash
• Poetry or prose?
• Prose poems
• a list of Flash outlets

Prose poems

What are Prose Poems? Purple prose? Vignettes? Free verse without line-breaks? Flash Fiction? Whatever, they're staging a mini-comeback lately. Layout serves several purposes in poetry. Sometimes it merely echoes the sonic organisation (as in sonnets); sometimes (as in shape poems) the appearance has a meaning for the eye but not the ear; sometimes words are in a 2-dimensional arrangement (the white space speaks); and sometimes the text is a script for performance, the line-breaks showing where to breathe. Line-breaks are sometimes added as "speed bumps" in the hope that by slowing down reading the text will be taken more seriously, but readers can - and should - call the text's bluff if they think they're being hoaxed. With prose-poetry the appearance isn't significant, and punctuation guides the reader's breathing and rhythm.

Although dozens of French writers experimented with them in the 1700s, it was not until Baudelaire's work appeared in 1855 that prose poems gained wide recognition. Rimbaud's book of prose poetry "Illuminations", published in 1886, is one of the best examples. In the Decadent and Symbolist atmosphere of the nineteenth century fin de siècle when all things French were of interest in sophisticated circles, some English writers took up this new French form. Oscar Wilde's own "Poems in Prose" was published in 1894.

Baudelaire predicted that it would be the dominant poetic form of the 20th century. Later, Robert Bly thought that as we complete our graduation from an aristocratic to a democratic society, the sentence will surely replace the line as poetry's primary unit. "We are all secretly longing for prose", he claimed. However, in the UK/US the form faded away. Some critics claim this was because it became associated with decadence and homosexuality. Others have suggested that free verse was so free that it made prose poetry unnecessary. Ron Silliman feels that instead of being a genre with open borders (to vispo, conceptual poetry, etc), the US prose-poem in the mid-1900s was typified by "little prose vignettes with a vaguely surreal air". Then in the 1970s Scalapino, Ashbery, Creeley, et al "challenged the borders first with fiction & then with the journal or diary".

Since the Pulitzer Prize was awarded to Simic's 1989 book of prose poems, "The World Doesn't End", the number of prose poem collections published has increased again. For most of its history, the prose poem has been associated primarily with experimentalists but now it's making its way into the mainstream. It's not unusual nowadays to see a prose poem in collections. Sometimes mainstream poets write a whole book of prose poems. Here's an extract from a recent review

"High Water Mark: Prose Poems" reads like the work of a conversational free-verse poet who has decided that line breaks are a needless vestigial reflex. His funny, tender little allegories are how Carl Dennis or Billy Collins might write if the Return keys fell off their laptops

What did the reviewer mean by "vestigial reflex"? The lines of a sonnet are roughly the same length because they have roughly the same number of syllables. Stanzas of terza rima have the same number of lines because that's the form. So we've become used to seeing poetry delivered in boxes of text. But why should free verse try to copy the appearance of verse when there's no underlying formal reason?

Once a reaction to Hallmark-style love/dove doggerel, line-breaks have now become an unchallenged convention - easy to use and overuse. Woe betide you if you put an unnecessary adverb in, but you can litter a poem with junk line-breaks and people won't care. No wonder that poets scatter so many around - there's nothing to lose, and a chance that readers will sense extra meaning and
suspense.

There are signs that people are bothering about line-breaks again. A recent judge's report that I read demoted a poem because of its gratuitous line-breaks. And there's renewed interest in formal verse. People used to complain that doggerel wasn't "poetic", that the only reason to call it poetry was that it rhymed. Nowadays there's too much free verse that's only poetry because it has line-breaks. Be brave. Take off your line-breaks. If what's left isn't poetic, there's a fair chance that it wasn't poetic in the first place.

Note however, that many people still view prose poems with suspicion. For example, in "The Origins of Free verse" (published 1996), H.T. Kirby-Smith says "If lack of ability safely disguises itself for a time in bad free verse, the ultimate refuge of bankrupt talent is the prose poem". He also thinks "It is unlikely that a well-established canon of prose poetry will ever be established [because] ... the common reader has not yet found it to be a memorable genre".

Outlets

Some outlets are resistant to prose poems so poets tend to disguise their prose poetry. Often one sees free verse where the line-breaks seem designed to be as unobtrusive as possible, breaking only at punctuation. This is the start of David Hart's poem which came 2nd in the UK's 2002 National Poetry Competition

Then in the twentieth century they invented transparent adhesive tape,
the first record played on Radio 1 was Flowers In The Rain by the Move,
and whereas ink had previously been in pots, now it was in cartridges.

This is as close to a prose format as "free verse" can be. Recently "New Writing" anthologies published by the British Council have a section entitled "Texts" alongside "Poems" and "Stories" - a good idea. The Prose Poem: An International Journal is a specialist magazine, as is Paragraph. Several magazines accept online submission of Flash - see Submission Guidelines

Articles

• Chronicle: Poetry: The Language People Speak
• What's a Prose Poem?
• Narrotics: New Narrative and the Prose Poem
• The Language People Speak, January 9, 2005, NY Times, By Eric McHenry
• Hidden Form: The Prose Poem in English Poetry by David Caddy
• "Writing the Prose Poem" (Writing in Education 58, Autumn 2012) by Robert Van Dias
• Two Cultures of the Prose Poem, John Taylor (Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. XLIV, no. 2, Spring 2005)

Books

• "The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre" by Michel Delville
• "Models of the Universe: An Anthology of the Prose Poem" by Stuart Friebert
• "Great American Prose Poems : From Poe to the Present" by David Lehman
• "The Party Train: A Collection of North American Prose Poetry" by Robert Alexander
• "A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery" by Marguerite Murphy. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997.
• "Poet's Prose" by Stephen Fredman, Cambridge University Press, 1991
• "The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry" by Gary L. McDowell and F. Daniel Rzicznek, Rose Metal Press, 2010

Examples

Many are online. Here's one about "Mona Lisa" by Pater

She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.

This was written as part of an essay. William Yeats included it in a poetry anthology, adding line-breaks!