The Line Between Prose and Poetry

I am 58 years old and still doing what I started at 15 years of age, writing poetry. My few friends, after years of seeming me so obsessed with verse will sometimes get a yen to write some of their own verse. I encourage that activity and feel that mankind is just a little better when our membership does creative stuff, especially when we write, and perhaps even more so when we write verse. To do my small part in spreading awareness of poetry, and hopefully appreciation of poetry I send out a poem every day to my email list.

Recently, one of my few friends emailed me a question about these poems. He said, "They just seem like thoughts to me. They don't rhyme. I thought poetry had to rhyme. That is exactly the subject of a wonderful poem by Howard Nemerov.

Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry

by Howard Nemerov

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle

That while you watched turned to pieces of snow

Riding a gradient invisible

From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn't tell.

And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

From Sentences by Howard Nemerov, published by the University of Chicago Press . Copyright 1980 by Howard Nemerov. Reprinted with the permission of Margaret Nemerov. All rights reserved. www.amazon.com/Collected-Poems-Howard-Nemerov/dp/0226572595

You will notice that the title does not seem to fit with the text of the poem. The titled intent of the poem is to explain the difference between prose and poetry, but the content of the poem is about some birds that get covered with a dusting of snow as they feed on seeds and crumbs.

The birds apparently are intended to stand in, symbolically, for the written work. As they are covered their identity becomes obscuredL are they birds, or are they just part of the snow covered earth?

At first, the speaker in the poem does not know what he is looking at, but suddenly the sparrows take flight and there is no longer any question as to what the speaker was looking at, the speaker was looking at birds.

In a similar way, a writing my, at first, be difficult to identify. Are you looking at prose, or are you looking at poetry. If you look long enough, you may, eventually, be rewarded as the words take flight, and all questions are pushed away by the wind coming from their graceful flight. Poetry, if it is real, if it is not dead, will, for the patient reader, always reveal itself. Maybe it will rhyme and maybe it won't, but the power of poetry always can reveal itself, if the reader will only wait, watch, and read the signs carefully.

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The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Bollingen Prize. Howard Nemerov (B. Feb. 29, 1920 D. July 5, 1991) was US Poet Laureate twice, once from 1963 to 1964, and from 1988 to 1990.

Howard Nemerov is certainly a well known poet among people who read a lot of poetry, but for the man on the street, few would be able to identify him by name or picture. I, being a daily poetry reader, have great respect for Mr. Nemerov and I wanted to focus on one particular poem of his, because it attempts to address a very common question among people who have not read much poetry since high school.