A-hem

Maybe it's the season, but I find myself becoming allergic to the trope "this poem is just prose broken up into lines." It seems to crop up on an irregular basis all over the place. Behind it I often catch the faint whiff of satisfaction at having exposed an imposter, the Emperor's new clothes.  And it crops up in discussions of what is "legitimately" poetry and what is not as a kind of Quod Erat Demonstratum -- the opponent is supposed to deflate in shame. Smug, smug smug.

It does, of course, mean absolutely nothing. It's sophistry and nonsense. It's like emptying all the gas and oil from a car, and, when it won't start, saying "Ah-ha, I told you this isn't really a car." Or taking the wings off a plane, crashing it, and saying "You see? Man was not meant to fly."

But the most cogent dismantling of this hobgoblin is something I have already posted here a while ago. I urge you to print it out and have it put on an index card to hand out when the pernicious "It's not poetry, it's cut-up prose" poltergeist shows up:

The poet is charged with failing to do something that he never intended. What the poet intended was for the reader to see with his eyes, hear with his ears, the divisions of the lines where they were placed, not for the reader to guess, from the order of the words alone, i.e., a prose paragraph, where the lines of verse should end. For writing to be read as lines of verse, all that is necessary is for the poet to indicate that they should be read so. If you aren't willing to submit to the poet's judgment, you needn't look or listen. There is no need to explain your unwillingness by trying to show a relationship between divisions of writing into verse-lines and the kind of language the poet is using.

–Louis Simpson, The Poetic Line: A Symposium in A Field Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

And from the same book, this:

The line is a unit of rhythm. The poet is moved by impulses of rhythm which he expresses in lines of verse. Impulse determines where each line breaks, and the impulse of the poem as a whole determines the look of the poem on the page or its sound in the air.

–Sandra McPherson, The Poetic Line: A Symposium in A Field Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

Of course, there are kazillion ways for a poem to fail, but, really, there are much more important things to talk about, even in the world of poetry.