A rarity in my childhood, snow seldom fell in Cornwall. When it did fell on the moors, white mischief not seen or heard. No snowballs or snowman, no sledging or skiing but so often an avalanche of expectations, that just melted away under the winter sun. Night time laid a white blanket before dawn, Wonder revealed by curtains, to 11years eyes. Confetti swirled drifting downwards, ghosting the landscape. A white sheet spread out in all directions.
Rumours of school closure spread by Chinese whispers, are made real by radio, verified by accents of authority. Flurries of jubilant snowball ambush the unwary, pelting their targets who exercise their right to reply. Larger balls of snow are rolled and compacted as the snowmen’s invasion commences. Footprints in the snow followed my cold feet, tramping towards a sloping field on a hill, my gloved hands, clutching a rectangular metal tea tray, a makeshift vehicle to skim down the steep meadow
Melted Memories
A rarity in my childhood, snow seldom fell in Cornwall.
When it did, fell on the moors, white mischief not seen or heard.
No snowballs or snowman,
No sledging or skiing
So often an avalanche of expectations,
That just melted away under the winter sun.
Night time laid a white blanket before dawn,
Wonder revealed by curtains, to 11years eyes.
Confetti swirled drifting downwards, ghosting the landscape.
A white sheet spread out in all directions.
Rumours of school closure spread by Chinese whispers,
Are made real by radio, verified by accents of authority.
Flurries of jubilant snowball ambush the unwary,
Pelting their targets who exercise their right to reply.
Larger balls of snow are rolled and compacted
As the snowmen’s invasion commences,
Footprints in the snow followed my cold feet
Tramping towards a sloping field on a hill,
My gloved hands, clutching a rectangular metal tea tray,
A makeshift vehicle to skim down the steep meadow.
I like the fact you have taken your piece of prose and used exactly the same words and you have resisted the temptation to tweak. Are poetry and prose the same? I'm not an academic and no nothing about the finer points but I know that some writing sounds like poetry.
'The 2 pieces above use the same words in the same order.' Indeed they do.
' I wanted to show that prose and poetry are not as different as people assume.' I agree, they, like many styles forms, overlap, and are similar, however . Others could not be more different if they tried! Compare a sonnet to the first piece of writing?.
But though I agree with you Jon, on many of your points, presenting two identical blocks of prose (Normal everyday writing such as in novels, letters etc) apart from their appearance on the page doesn't work and illustrates only that you can make a block of prose 'look' like poetry without being poetry.
'My message though is use…
An interesting exercise. I have no technical knowledge of this stuff. In my mind prose follows the normal rules of grammar while poetry strips out all but the core message. You've made me think here. which is great.
Also I love all the imagery and definitely got the snow-as-a-rarity message. Thank you
I like it/them. I suppose some would describe the first as similar to prose poetry, which I think means poetry laid out in non-poetic form, with punctuation varying from the norm.
I found it jarred slightly... 'no snowballs', followed closely by details of snowball fights!... but that apart I very much liked the language, imagery and descriptions (in both pieces) which seem identical. The first wasn't quite 'standard' prose with sentence structure; the latter less economic with words - more narrative poetry. But that's just my personal take.
You may have noticed the similarity betwween the prose and poetry above. I have particular reasons for doing that which I will explain but want to first leave this open to comments. So if you have any thoughts please leave them here