I think this exercise (among other intriguing things) pushes the prose toward poetry. The drastic limitation on vocabulary renders the words more and more "charged with meaning," as Pound might say. And poetry is a rather different mindset. This in turn raises the question of how poetry, prose-poems, and nano-fiction differ. I've gained …
I think this exercise (among other intriguing things) pushes the prose toward poetry. The drastic limitation on vocabulary renders the words more and more "charged with meaning," as Pound might say. And poetry is a rather different mindset. This in turn raises the question of how poetry, prose-poems, and nano-fiction differ. I've gained some interesting insights from converting poems into paragraphs, and vice versa. Perhaps as a result I'm also captivated by the power of the visual presentation, the line breaks, words in italics, indents, and many of these exercises resulted in short repetitive lines, at least reminiscent of poetry. The visual is, of course, not in the language or in the writing, but it IS in the reading, silently or out loud, the timing, the emphasis. Punctuation and paragraph breaks can provide vital assistance in reading a piece in the writer's voice, or they can ruin the flow and baffle the reader. I wonder sometimes if we should adopt a more adventurous approach to these "performative" aids in printed material.
Your comment reminded me of some of D.H. Lawrence's works, where he would often repeat a word or phrase within a sentence, or within a paragraph, or use a variation of a word or phrase a paragraph or two later. Him being a poet as well might have been a part of that. The 50-word/200-word constraint might lend itself to some poetic tropes, though Lawrence used those methods in full novels.
I think this exercise (among other intriguing things) pushes the prose toward poetry. The drastic limitation on vocabulary renders the words more and more "charged with meaning," as Pound might say. And poetry is a rather different mindset. This in turn raises the question of how poetry, prose-poems, and nano-fiction differ. I've gained some interesting insights from converting poems into paragraphs, and vice versa. Perhaps as a result I'm also captivated by the power of the visual presentation, the line breaks, words in italics, indents, and many of these exercises resulted in short repetitive lines, at least reminiscent of poetry. The visual is, of course, not in the language or in the writing, but it IS in the reading, silently or out loud, the timing, the emphasis. Punctuation and paragraph breaks can provide vital assistance in reading a piece in the writer's voice, or they can ruin the flow and baffle the reader. I wonder sometimes if we should adopt a more adventurous approach to these "performative" aids in printed material.
Your comment reminded me of some of D.H. Lawrence's works, where he would often repeat a word or phrase within a sentence, or within a paragraph, or use a variation of a word or phrase a paragraph or two later. Him being a poet as well might have been a part of that. The 50-word/200-word constraint might lend itself to some poetic tropes, though Lawrence used those methods in full novels.