1 files changed, 2 insertions, 2 deletions

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             <p>This is because poetry has more than one dimension, due to its linear nature—those line breaks are intentional, and the poem can’t just fit into any-sized book or web page. If prose is a liquid, filling any container it’s placed in with a constant volume, poetry is more like a crystallized form of prose, or to put it another way, poetry has between <a href="http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/psychology/cogsci/chaos/workshop/Fractals.html">one and two dimensions</a>. I wouldn’t say that poetry has fully two dimensions, except for some of the more conceptually visual stuff that I’d call a word-picture anyway, because from line to line that unidimensionality of prose remains. Poetry has a higher dimensionality than prose, though, because it’s crystallized there on the page; this fractal-dimensionality of poetry has interesting side effects on the genre itself.</p>
             <p>For one thing, poetry isn’t as bound by time as prose is. It can, as Marianne Boruch writes, resist “narrative sequence,” or “the forward press of <em>time</em> itself,” due to its repetitions and diversions, which are in turn made possible or more apparent by its line breaks. It’s able to meditate on a subject, or expand on it lyrically, exploring the emotions connected with the images in the poem, or the connections between images. Through repitition of sounds, the poem builds meaning through resonance and rhyming, something that’s harder to do in prose. Take, for example, the first lines of “<a href="http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html">The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock</a>:”</p>
             <blockquote>
-            <p><span class="line">LET us go then, you and I,</span><span class="line">When the evening is spread out against the sky</span><span class="line">Like a patient etherized upon a table;</span><span class="line">Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,</span><span class="line">The muttering retreats</span><span class="line">Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels</span><span class="line">And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:</span><span class="line">Streets that follow like a tedious argument</span><span class="line">Of insidious intent</span><span class="line">To lead you to an overwhelming question….</span><span class="line">Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”</span><span class="line">Let us go and make our visit.</span></p>
+            <p><span class="line">Let us go then, you and I,</span><span class="line">When the evening is spread out against the sky</span><span class="line">Like a patient etherized upon a table;</span><span class="line">Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,</span><span class="line">The muttering retreats</span><span class="line">Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels</span><span class="line">And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:</span><span class="line">Streets that follow like a tedious argument</span><span class="line">Of insidious intent</span><span class="line">To lead you to an overwhelming question….</span><span class="line">Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”</span><span class="line">Let us go and make our visit.</span></p>
             </blockquote>
             <p>And here it is again, without line breaks:</p>
             <blockquote>
-            <p>LET us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table; let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, the muttering retreats of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels and sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: streets that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent to lead you to an overwhelming question…. Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit.</p>
+            <p>Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table; let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, the muttering retreats of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels and sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: streets that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent to lead you to an overwhelming question…. Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit.</p>
             </blockquote>
             <p>The end-rhymes that do so much for the sound of the poem are gone, and so part of the meaning of the poem—its obsessive self-consciousness, its paranoia—are gone as well. Additionally, line breaks act as punctuation in the entirety of this <a href="statements-frag.html">fragment</a>; without them, the meaning becomes obscured in the long first sentence of the poem.</p>
             <p>Perhaps due to this dwelling on scene, or on all aspects of a single scene at one time, poetry tends to be heavy on images, or lyrical. I think this is what’s generally meant when someone describes a dance as “poetic,” or a story or anything else: I think they really mean “lyrical,” or maybe “beautiful.” The images form sort of a narrative as the reader moves through them, as Cesare Pavese says, that’s nevertheless <a href="http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2011/03/07/translation-adaptation-and-transformation-the-poet-as-translator-an-essay-by-richard-jackson/">different than a traditional narrative</a>: this “image narrative” jumps from image to image not by a logical progression but by the resonances between the images that run underneath them, on almost a subliminal plane. Almost without noticing, the reader of a poem is taken on an emotional journey that’s not necessarily connected to the images of the poem, themselves.</p>