Pretty Prose Or Poetry?
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Kim Barney
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My sister is a prize-winning poet.
She has won more awards for her poetry
than I could win in the rest of my life
if I lived to be a hundred years old,
and I don't WANT to live to be
a hundred years old.
If I make it to ninety,
I want to be shot
by a jealous husband.
I will be totally innocent,
of course, but just let him
shoot me anyway.
Anyway, my sister once
had a critic say this about
one of her poems:
"This is not poetry;
it's just pretty prose."
That brings up a huge question
in my mind. Who is to say
what is poetry and what is not?
There are people who have posted
thousands of "poems" on Poem Hunter,
but many of them, to me, are not poems
at all. (They are not "pretty prose" either) .
Anyone can write anything
and say it is poetry. They just say
that it is "free verse".
I like Wes Vogler's definition of
free verse. He says that free verse is
"prose on a poetry site".
Wes says that he is of the old school,
and that if it doesn't rhyme,
it isn't poetry.
Yet Billy Collins has been Poet Laureate
of the United States twice, and he hardly
ever uses anything except free verse.
Back to my sister and her critic. I can't see
how "pretty prose" could NOT be poetry!
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