![]() ![]() ![]() It’s a bit like answering the question, “What’s a dog?” with the answer, “Not a cat.” The cover to Tania Hershman’s second collection hedges its bets and simply says it contains, “ Fictions by Tania Hershman.” ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ is a work of fiction but it’s also an epic poem so where does that leave us? If you assume for a moment that poetry doesn’t have to rhyme (which it hasn’t done since the sixteenth century, let’s be honest) then what’s the difference between prose and poetry? Well, up until the nineteenth century poetry was the stuff with the ragged right margin and then some Frenchman decided line breaks weren’t particularly important and the prose poem was born. I’m not sure I trust a definition like that. ![]() ![]() Where does prose end and poetry begin? A couple of hundred years ago that wasn’t such a difficult question to answer: poetry was the stuff that rhymed everything that wasn’t poetry was prose. I like short stories’ implicit awareness that life has no neat endings, that it is comprised of many very small moments, all in their own way powerful and important, and that life is messy, it’s unclear, it’s about reading between the lines. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |