PROSE

I’m still processing my time at the Glen Workshop. As I sat down to begin writing this 'blog entry, I realized that I’m not feeling very poetic right now. Perhaps I experienced too much of a good thing last week... in class, I was surrounded by all manner of poets: newbies, preachers (believe it or not – a priest, a minister and a rabbi), teachers, even published authors.

Right now, prose speaks to me. Since I’m not feeling poetic, I guess I’m feeling prosaic. Before using that term, I thought it might be a good idea to look it up online to discover its real meaning. I was surprised to find that one definition of prosaic is:

“Lacking in imagination and spirit; dull.”

YIKES!!! That’s enough to scare me back into my smoking jacket while scrambling to light my pipe as I sit at my secretary desk and begin scribing with my quill pen. (I'm not serious (or is that Sirius?))

But seriously, this does remind me of the discussion we had in class last week about the difference between poetry and prose. As I stopped to think about this during class, I found myself writing these words:

"All poetry should be transformative, both for the poet and the reader."

But later that same day, as I was scanning a local newspaper, I found this ad for the Santa Fe Animal Shelter & Humane Society:

“A dog is prose; a cat is a poem.” – Jean Burden

Maybe it’s just the DOG days of summer that have taken over the creative part of my brain.