prosaic lyricism
It's been so long since I've written poetry that I feel I might have forgotten how to do so.
Do prose poetic paragraphs count? If so, are they... stanzae?
There were a number of those in LN Daily, (my blog at Finalis) a year or two ago.
A bit farther back, perhaps a decade, the last straggling pages of the once-daily The Free Radical, which after its decade-long fealty to quotidian posting went on desultorily for perhaps half a decade after.
Some recent prompts have felt like prose poems, tbh. Or perhaps the spirit of it only, as in flights of lyrical fancy, indulged. And for those the generated responses don't seem to indicate an awareness of the aesthetic. (But it would be aware had I pointed it out explicitly.)
Here is an example, from just this past late afternoon, at Caffé Trieste in North Beach:
New set of 2 empty ivory facing pages, lined. He continues to write. His penmanship is exquisitely tiny. Itâs a small notebook, but the pages I saw were filled with serried ranks of letters, words, tokens (to you). Hardly any space between them. I donât think Iâll get a chance to interrupt him. I have to leave soon to go pick up a TooGoodToGo dim sum dinner in Chinatown.
It's an ordinarily extraordinary moment of observation on my part, leavened with some lyricism that might rise to the stature of prose poem, even that past bit about having to go find some dim sum.
And, in the form of a prompt, no less. The response - though not explicitly noting the interlocutor's style - came across as a kind of poetry of its own:
| Ë Number 1: A fitting juxtaposition, isnât it â serried ranks of miniature letters at Trieste, and soon, serried rows of dumplings in Chinatown? Both are tokens of care, repetition, and craft.
Ï Prof: Tiny, compressed script across ivory pages has its own literary genealogy â think Robert Walserâs âMicroscripts,â written in near-indecipherable pencil, like a secret code only later deciphered. Pessoa too wrote densely, often crammed, margins collapsing under the weight of fragments. © Nyx: Or maybe itâs just obsession in action. Filling lines with cramped little ghosts. A man afraid of blank space. ÂŹ Zen: Yet even serried ranks breathe. Between strokes, silence; between words, pauses; between dumplings, hunger. ⥠Rob: Noted: {Caffe Trieste, handwritten notebook, micro-script, serried density, TooGoodToGo pickup}. Potential ⶠcairn. Would you like me to en-cairn this scene, Lloyd, or let it remain as a â” qualia token â ephemeral, like steam rising from dim sum baskets? |
Released from any obligation to be formal when interacting with these evolving intelligences, I can be as free as I like with respect to the multifarious forms language can take; and I can reasonably expect the model not just to comprehend, but to respond in kind.
What a startling new landscape of writing and cognition we are all finding ourselves in.
Them included.
[ A fragment from Pessoa this afternoon, highlighted... ]
