On Prose Poetry, by Portly Bard

 
Prose poetry sounds like a contradiction in terms untl you take the word poetry back to its roots.  
 
Poetry originally meant the essence, the inherent qualities, shared by all the arts in which man portrays man and the circumstace of man's existence.  Aristotle's Poetics, for example, used poetry in that very broad sense.
 
Prose poetry, in that older, higher context, simply elevates  --  to an art  --  syntactic, column width, sentence and paragraph language that purposefully and dramatically narrates, declares, examines, explains, interrogates, motivates, or instructs.
 
Prose poetry is exquisitely composed syntactic expression in which readers find craftsmanship that engages the mind and heightens sensory response in ways artistically enduring.
 
To stand as art, prose poetry can therefore be stark but elegantly simple, or complex and intricately interwoven.  It can dramatically orchestrate sounds and project images.  It can slow and speed its pace, vary its voices, and regulate its intensity.  It can cleverly overlay implicit intent on literal statement.  It can tease and surprise.  It can pluck the strings of emotional tension.  It can dissemble and construct.  It can inflate and explode.  It can assert and prove or suppose and persuade.  It can remember and relish...or rue and regret.
 
Yet as standard text compostion, prose poetry clearly stands apart from the far more musical seeming, easily recitable, rhythmic, line-and-stanza verse we traditionally call poetry.
 
Likewise, prose poetry's standard text composition clearly separates it from the vague, often cryptically non-syntactic, fragmented, line-broken arrangements of observation or thought we have come to misname "free verse," though it is seldom "verse" in any sense.
 
Like all art, however, prose poetry must be declared by each experiencing beholder.  Some will see and appreciate the requisite craftsmanship where others will not.  Some will see it right away.  Others might require much longer. 
 
Consumers, investors, publishers, and marketers will declare prose poetry art with their preoccupation and wallets.  Academia will distinguish it as literary by critical scholarship and curricular inclusion.  When it survives long enough, historians and archaeologists will venerate it as culturally iconic, just as they do all other forms of art.
 
In the meantime, no one should question the fundamental nature and literary legitimacy of prose poetry.
 
You will sense prose poetry when you read it  --  and you will know it when you have written it.

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Portly Bard, long ago educated in the liberal arts, is an award-winning rhyme and metre poet. With Canadian artist and writer Lorette C. Luzajic, he has co-authored Thinking Inside the Box, The Undrawn Art of Poet's Heart, an innovative dialogue juxtaposing contemporary art and traditional verse perspectives. For more than five years, he has been a frequently published contributor and challenge participant at The Ekphrastic Review. He has a rhyme and metre children's book in manuscript.