Everyday Canvas

Do poetry's techniques belong in stories and novels?

Prompt: “Always be a poet, even in prose’” Charles Baudelaire
Are you getting Baudelaire’s drift? Does your prose turn poetic always, at times, or rarely?

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Prose poems I consider poetry, so I am not going to address them here, for poetry is poetry. As to the other types of prose that turn into poetry, I guess I could call some pieces of prose a poem, mine or belonging to others, from time to me.

For example, in my unedited, unrevised 2015 NaNo novel, the following excerpt focuses on leaves: “My greatest adoration and astonishment lies in the greens of the earth that billow and sway at will, on plains and hills, to vocal winds, rising storms, confident rains that leave tiny drops on leaves and grass. Then from all that greenery burst multicolored beauties, flowers like dreams, not knowing death yet, but daring to live between the storms and the sun.”

The above excerpt might qualify for a poem, but I think I was only experimenting with lyricism with this entire novel, and if I wanted to do anything at all with this work, I might edit a lot of it out, because I think, ‘the story’s the thing’ and stylistic anything may run the risk of looking like a blotch of blood on the plot. How about my accidental assonance and dissonance on the last part of the last sentence!

As for the quote in the prompt, Baudelaire is one of my favorite poets, but he wasn’t the only one to think in poetry. Flaubert was among those authors who first made fictional prose inflexibly style-conscious. Vladimir Nabokov said, “Gogol called his Dead Souls a prose poem; Flaubert’s novel [Madame Bovary] is also a poem but one that is composed better, with a closer, finer texture.”

I think this is because the romantic writer was stronger than the realist one in Flaubert’s psyche. After him, for a long time, everyone became a stylist one way or the other, into our time. By the way, Nabokov also takes after Flaubert.

In today’s novels and stories, I come across beautiful passages of poetry. These are just fine if they have some relevance to the rest of the novel or to a story’s elements. On the other hand, turning a piece of prose into poetry, especially when too strong a plot exists, inserts some painterly brushing and masking to the text, thus threatening the work to become irrelevant.