“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.”
―
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| 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.” ―
“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.” ―
"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
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:
Please share your new poem
using Mr. Linky below and visit others in the spirit of the community—
Your challenge is to do one or more of these in a new poem:
- describe prose vs. poetry
- use the prose element of dialogue fitting the character who speaks it (within your poem)
- praise prose to the utmost
- show us a prose writer at work
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| 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)
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 –
📖
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| Poem by Aleksandr Kushner |
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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.
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.
📖
(Next week Sumana’s Midweek Motif
will be ~
Almond Blossoms, by Vincent Van Gogh)
