Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Writing Prose

“For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle.... A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in their endeavor to make sure that the fires of this planet burn peaceably.” 

― John Cheever

Allegory of Rhetoric by Artemisia Lomi Gentileschi  (@1650)

“A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.” ― Gustave Flaubert

“The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.” ― Milan Kundera

 "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." ―Zora Neale Hurston

 "Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life." ―Barbara Kingsolver

"God of Literature Pointing the Dipper."

Poets United ~ Writing Prose

Poets United has a new prompt on the first Sunday of every month, "Telling Tales with Magaly Guerrero: a Pantry of Prose."  So let's write a poem about the tales we can tell in prose and how it is to write them.

Your challenge is to do one or more of these in a new poem: 

1. describe prose vs. poetry
2. use the prose element of dialogue fitting the character who speaks it (within your poem)
3. praise prose to the utmost 
4. show us a prose writer at work

Literature saving the past from destruction by Time, 
in the form of an old angel with a scythe. Etching by L. du Guernier.

 

They shut me up in Prose – (445)

BY EMILY DICKINSON

They shut me up in Prose –

As when a little Girl

They put me in the Closet –

Because they liked me “still”   –

Still! Could themself have peeped –

And seen my Brain – go round –

They might as wise have lodged a Bird

For Treason – in the Pound –

Himself has but to will

And easy as a Star

Look down upon Captivity –

And laugh – No more have I –

 📖

Poem by Aleksandr Kushner

📖

Ordinary Miracle - by Barbara Kingsolver

I have mourned lost days
When I accomplished nothing of importance.
But not lately.
Lately under the lunar tide
Of a woman's ocean, I work
My own sea-change:
Turning grains of sand to human eyes.
I daydream after breakfast
While the spirit of egg and toast
Knits together a length of bone
As fine as a wheatstalk.
Later, as I postpone weeding the garden
I will make two hands
That may tend a hundred gardens.

I need ten full moons exactly
For keeping the animal promise.
I offer myself up: unsaintly, but
Transmuted anyway
By the most ordinary miracle.
I am nothing in this world beyond the things one woman does.
But here are eyes that once were pearls.
And here is a second chance where there was none.

 

📖

Please share your new poem using Mr. Linky below and visit others in the spirit of the community—

 (Next week Sumana’s Midweek Motif will be ~

 Almond Blossoms, by Vincent Van Gogh)