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100 Differences Between Poetry and Prose
by Tom Leonard
100 Differences Between Poetry and Prose - Tom Leonard
100 Differences Between Poetry and Prose
poetry stops before the end of the margin
you can talk about prose without mentioning school
you don’t read poetry to get from Glasgow to Saltcoats without noticing
John Menzies doesn’t stock poetry
whoever heard of war & peace having the line as a unit of semantic yield
you can call a poem what you want and say its poetic licence
poetry is the subliminal history of linguistic shape
ahem
poetry has four wheels, two wings and a pair of false teeth
poetry is the heart and the brain divided by the lungs
poetry is the world’s oldest cock and fanny story
you don’t get prose in anapaestic dimeters
nobody publishes their first slim volume of prose
aristotle never wrote The Proses
if you dribble past five defenders, it isn’t called sheer prose
poets are the unacknowledged thingwaybobs
poetry is quintessentially contrapuntal
the square root of poetry is an ever-evolving quark
whenever Vergil looked in the mirror, he beheld an epic Latin poet
poetry is all the juicy bits in the juiciest order
poetry is jellied religion
pascal: if your labourers complain too much, try taking them to a poetry reading
prose goes scchhpludd
prose goes scchhpludd scchhpludd clomp clomp clomp
are you sitting comfortably
then I’ll end
from outside the narrative: Poems 1965-2009 (Etruscan Books/Wordpower Press, 2011), © Tom Leonard 2011, used by permission of the author.