Prose, poetry, and experimental writing are not simply genres or writing, but feel like entirely different mediums and constructs. While you may go about writing a space opera differently from a harlequin romance, just as you use different aspects of poetry depending on if you’re writing lyrical poetry or spoken word, they all hold the same traditions and aspects as their medium. At the most basic level, with prose, you have characters, setting, plot, and conflict; with poetry you have imagery, figures of speech, and prosody; and with experimental writing you need an editor’s eye. In talking to other writers and in my own experience, you can’t often work on prose and poetry projects at the same time because you go about them in entirely different ways. That doesn’t mean there’s a thick brick wall separating these different mediums of writing, in fact those walls are as hazy and as easy to pass through as spider webs in a dark hallway. Sometimes prose can have rhythm, sometimes poems tell a story in large blocks of text rather than stanzas, and sometimes you wouldn’t even know by looking at something that it was experimental. Over the next few paragraphs, I’m going to break down my personal experiences working with each medium, talking about the battles and joys of each. Knowing what kind of mindset you use while operating within different writing mediums allows you to best consider how you can discuss the elements of nature within each.
Prose was my first love. I’ve been telling stories well before I ever knew what a metaphor was. We speak to each other in prose, not verse. Prose covers things as vast and wide as a scientific paper on exoplanets to a diary entry written by a 12 year old railing against her parents. Prose is the backbone of communication, our most recognized way of passing knowledge from person to person through the written word, just like a tree would be unrecognizable if there were no trunk or branches. While I’ll admit to blurring the line between the two mediums frequently, I feel prose either has a more character- or narrative-driven focus as well as (usually) being more structured by conventional syntax and grammar than poetry and experimental writing.
Whether I’m writing an academic essay, diary entry (rare), or manuscript, I find myself more likely to be thinking in a sequential order, if not a chronological one. Maybe that’s filling out general character sheets, organizing plot outlines, or on a paragraph by paragraph basis, but often I find I have to do a lot more thinking before I start writing prose proper. What I mean by that is, before I’ve even started putting pencil to paper, I’m worldbuilding, I’m researching something to make that worldbuilding more realistic. In the least, I have to construct my thoughts more fully and in a way that could make sense to someone else if given the skeleton of my story. Even if I don’t have the plot perfectly planned out point by point, I need to know the direction I’m heading when I start writing prose, while when I’m writing poetry, I don’t need that preamble and the way forward is more intuitive. My initial idea for a poem is often more abstract than my first brainstorm for a prose project. A prose piece starts with a topic, a character, or a plot while most of my poems start with an emotion, an image, or vague concept. The “thinking” part of writing is the beginning of prose, and at the end of poetry. This is probably why I defeat myself before I even start writing an actual story because the undertaking of doing so is so much vast. I’m thinking about potential plot-holes, the basic personality of each character, or the socio-political ramifications of representing certain characters in certain ways before I even get to the story starting “once upon a time.” Typically, prose stories are much longer than individual poems, meaning the enterprise from beginning to end takes a greater amount of time, meaning that with poetry, not only do I fulfill my desire to get to the “fun” part of writing quicker, but it feels more like getting an adrenaline rush from running a sprint rather than the runner’s high you get from running a marathon.
With all that being said, prose feels like I’m thinking more externally while in poetry I’m thinking more internally. Especially if you’re writing a novel or screenplay with a cast of characters, it helps if you have more external life experience. One time, my little sister Brooke commented that all my characters “talk smart,” as in they take after the way I talk (her words not mine). I don’t tend to think of myself as a particularly well-spoken person, before or after university, but the inordinate amount of books I’ve digested most certainly has widened my vocabulary to an above average level. If I’m writing a character who is younger than me, who did not have the benefit of a university education, or grew up in a different time or place than me, it would make no sense for them to talk as I talk.
This made my short foray into screenwriting interesting, because the professor for the course, Kathryn Mockler, stressed a screenplay includes only image and dialogue, and things need to be left to a director or actor to play with. This felt similar to how she viewed poetry (I took my introductory poetry course with her as well). Mockler also wanted to stick to a 3-act structure, probably for the best because most of us in the class were first-time screen writers. The strict format and structure of a screenplay hyper-focused me on creating a basic skeleton of a narrative and made me use words, lines, and dialogue as sparingly as possible, as every line needed to move the plot forward. That’s a tall order for a person known for her off-tangents and wordiness. I found myself later applying this economy of words to my story (prose) writing, which has left it feeling a little without flourish in my opinion, but again, you’re your own worst critic.
I’ve only recently discovered memoirs as something I can enjoy reading. It started with Ester S. Keyser’s Paddling My Own Canoe and was cemented with Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, Robyn Davidson’s Tracks, Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, and Thomas Osbourne’s The Reluctant Pioneer (I’m sure you’ll notice a common theme). Before then, I was a strict fiction reader (and writer). I had the philosophy that if I could walk outside and have a chance of experiencing something similar, what was the point of reading about it? Reading had been my form of escapism as a child, but, I’ve learned that art isn’t just about enjoying the experience and escaping realities. In reading this blog you are looking at the bulk of my experience in memoir writing. I did take a university course on creative nonfiction, but if my final grade was any indication, I was mediocre at best. I couldn’t escape the feeling that memoir and personal essays are like someone peeking into your diary. At the time of that creative nonfiction course, writing a memoir tasted of being a little narcissist and self-indulgent by putting yourself on display, believing your voice and experience to be something unique and worth sharing. I didn’t believe my life was been particularly unique, enriching, or entertaining for others to hear and I still don’t. I’m not a pioneer in my field, or a pioneer in a literal sense, and my life is not filled with the kind of drama that keeps you eating popcorn. Of course, did everyone who wrote the memoirs I enjoyed above believe their lives something wildly unique, or were they just following the flow of life?
In working on this blog, I’m taking on a wholly new genre for myself compared to the teenager who exclusively wrote fantasy “novels” and cringe-y love poetry. When I came to university, I pretty much left prose behind to work on essays and discovered poetry and experimental writing. The impact of this has changed the way I write prose drastically. Imagery may be the language of poetry, and character and story may be the language of prose, but learning to use imagery to invoke symbolism, learning to not hold the audience’s hand and spoon-feed them meaning, learning how even individual sounds in words matter, and learning how to apply and alter all that has only improved my prose as I find myself wanting to dip my toes into writing it again.
If a tree would be unrecognizable without it’s trunk and branches and it sways only a little in the wind, rooted strong into the earth to represent prose, then poetry is the leaves that are rustled by even the slightest breeze, and flow to the cycle of seasons. Leaves give a tree colour, and how most people are able to recognize a tree species, but the potential of a young tree is not apparent by simply looking at the curves and ribs of a leaf, analyzing its veins. While logic and structure dominates my mind in writing prose, in poetry I’m more guided by intuition, feeling, and aesthetic. Counterintuitively, while poetry does not often match the way we speak, the heavier focus on rhythm and figurative language between words moves my pencil more quickly across the page. Perhaps that’s because the beginning of a poem is closer to a Timbit of an idea rather than the complete circle of a donut: a singular image, a strong feeling needing to be confessed, without the complexity of worrying about character and plot (generally speaking). If the character or plot does not form a straight line that meshes together into a logical whole, it can feel like the prose falls apart like one domino falling into another. In the throes of writing a poem, logic is thrown out the window and it’s like my hand is creating verse, not my mind.
Just as we frequently separate trees into coniferous and deciduous, I feel like there is a huge rift in the two types of poetry I tend to write: lyrical “page” poetry and spoken word. Despite both being in the poetry family and using rhythm and figures of speech, the communities built up around the two genres couldn’t be more different. My local poetry scene has many different events one can attend, but the main two I attended before I became a recluse was London Open Mic Poetry (now under different management and name) and the London Poetry Slam. To be under 40 years old made you stick out at London Open Mic Poetry just as much as performing at the London Poetry Slam at 24 years old made me the old lady. London Open Mic Poetry was more laid back, ponderous, held at a Greek restaurant on Adelaide while LPS was held at a music hall with minimal food and a bar. I’m sure the emphasis on performance and competition is what conflated the difference between the two events. If you were a regular at LOMP, it wasn’t strange to hear one person share the same poems every month, and going over the time limit, though frowned upon, was given more leeway. If you’re a regular at LPS, you better be bringing new poems every month to keep it fresh and rise up the ranks if you want to go to the national competition. Many poets at LOMP had little, if any stage presence while with LPS, even if you have the best written poem that every existed, if you can’t perform you’ll be given a lackluster score. The rules and politics are much more rigid at LPS compared to LOMP. While artists in general tend to be more left-leaning, LPS poems tended to be more topical and politically polarizing. There always felt like there was an animosity between LPS and LOMP which only became apparent if, like me, you hopped between the two scenes. Despite the different demographics and purposes of the events, both scenes were equally supportive of their friends, tried to pull more people into the poetry fold, and spread a love of writing. I never felt perfectly at home in either scene, feeling “too academic” for the poetry slam and “too performative” for the open mic, but I think both scenes could learn so much from each other. Learning to engage an audience through performance will leave your art in the memory of those who listen, and learning the foundations of poetry can only help those who seek to break those rules more informed. My love of linguistics endures me to poetry, as it always had me look at language at a level beyond what prose allows. Word choice is always important, whether you’re writing poetry or prose, but with words not only being used to communicate in poetry, but used for sound and movement, more weight is placed on each word. A wrong word in prose may stick out or make no sense in the context of a sentence, but a wrong word in a poem could throw off the entire rhythm of the verse. In poetry, I pull words down to the phonetic level, looking at how they look on the page and sound together.
Though poetry doesn’t have the rules prose has, it certainly has its own, even if it’s not grammatically restrictive in the traditional sense prose is. A period may not be necessary at the end of a line, but it will mean something different whether you put it there or not. The form of a poem, the length of individual lines, where you choose to break those lines can affect meaning or how a person reads it. We may connect and relate to character and stories more easily through prose because of how they tend to be displayed more explicitly, and the passionate following many long running series such as Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and A Song of Ice and Fire support are a testament to that. However, though poetry doesn’t often have the length and time to get readers to connect to characters, some of the most powerful, visceral reactions I’ve had to the written word have been to poetry collections such as the stellar Words for Elephant Man by Kenneth Sherman because of that focus on imagery and the musical addition of rhythm. Poetry and prose are often defined by what they aren’t and are frequently pitted against each other, and though they each have different rules and conventions, it’s up to an individual writer to decide which are worth keeping and which aren’t.
If prose is the trees and branches, and poetry is the leaves, then experimental writing is the soil feeding the tree, keeping it in place. The type of soil determines what kind of tree will grow there. Deciduous trees grow more in the eastern part of Canada, where soil is more nutrient rich and has more access to water while coniferous trees stand in more arid areas, in poorer soil. This is really interesting to see in Algonquin Park, as it is in a transitional region between southern and northern Canada, where deciduous meets boreal. The point of this off-tangent nature lesson shows how you can have similar tools, a seed, dirt, sunshine, rain, etc., and have vastly different outcomes. Experimental writing is the logical extreme of that, testing the boundaries of language, topic, content, and authorship itself.
I mentioned in both the prose and poetry sections that there are established conventions to them. Experimental writing is all about breaking those conventions. Most of my experience with experimental writing is in found poetry (taking works not originally written by yourself and altering and recontextualizing them into something new) and transcription poetry (where one copies down words of others as close to what they’re saying as possible), but there are other ways to twist around words as well. Visual poetry is about breaking down the conventions of how words appear on a page, and sound poetry focuses more on what sound communicates not attached to words (think of it as pretentious beatboxing), just to name a few.
I don’t think you actually write experimental writing in a traditional sense, you edit it into existence. In one of my early attempts at found poetry, I took lines from pop songs about empowerment (Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful,” Katy Perry’s “Firework,” etc.) against not-so-subtle misogynistic songs (think Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” or The Beastie Boys’ “Girls”). They began on opposite sides of the page, but slowly started moving closer together as the line between these apparently very different perspectives merged together. For another, I collected a year’s worth of “Word of the Day” words from Dictionary.com. “Word of the Day” words already are obscure words people are unlikely to know, and then I placed them in alliterative sentences, making them even harder to understand and say. Then, I asked a bunch of people to record themselves reading them aloud. While most people helping me were English majors like me, I also had someone who spoke English as a second language, polyglots, and people who did not have the education I did in English. The point was to show how people, even native English speakers, process the English language on the spot. In one experimental poem that focused in on Algonquin Park, I took a bunch of stories about camping and placed them on the page so that each story could be read, but jumbled them to show how memory may mix these stories altogether in someone’s head. While all these pieces are on different topics and use different methods, they all share the common theme of the “how” of the writing becoming more important than normal. I still have the PDF for my experimental writing course’s textbook (Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, edited by Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith if you’re interested) on my computer because it was fascinating to see how other writers managed to bend and twist the boundaries of literary convention.
Despite its very nature of existing on the margins of the literary world, I believe in making experimental writing more accessible to people. I didn’t learn about it until I was university, but I could imagine having a lot of fun with it if I’d known about it as a teenager. Giving a teenager a piece of media and telling them to make it their own could be a really powerful moment for them. Or imagine taking to the dregs of literature, Mien Kampf or the Malleus Maleficarium for example, books full of hatred and bile, and transforming it into something silly or worthwhile. Experimental writing has so much potential to really question not only writing on a ground level, but society as well. Experimental writing doesn’t exactly explain or tell you what it is critiquing so when you find out the method of a work’s creation it is that much more interesting and powerful.
Another interesting aspect to writing experiments is that, just like scientific ones, they don’t always follow your hypothesis or confirm what you set out to do with it. Also unlike prose or poetry, sometimes the point of experimental writing is to be illegible. If you’re not given the method to how or why an experimental piece was created, it can seem like pointless words (or non-words) on a page that lack meaning. In that way it is like avant-grade paintings, in which it is the procedure, not the results, that is the art. However, some of my favourite experimental poems are the ones where it becomes obvious what was done to create the poem or if you don’t notice it’s experimental at all because it flows together so nicely you’d think it’s just like any other story or poem. Sometimes an experimental writing piece exists only to have been created in the first place and not for the consumption or enjoyment of others and that can be something to revel in just as much as bringing a smile to someone’s face with a touching story or wowing someone with your sense of rhythm and extensive vocabulary in a poem.
My personal experience with writing across different genres and mediums is obviously not a universal one, but just like you couldn’t have a full tree without its trunk and branches, without leaves, or without the soil to plant it in, trying out different ways of writing can only enrich your primary form of writing. To bring one of these three mediums into nature writing is to tackle nature writing in very different ways. In writing prose, nature feels like something I have to actively research, include, and add into a piece like I would an additional character. It can’t simply be an image or setting. In writing poetry, a single image through observation could carry an entire poem and could be interpreted by readers in as many ways as there are readers. In experimental writing, by taking what is already established, whether that be some primary text or the rules and traditions of nature and language, and breaking them down so we can really think about how we define nature and language itself. I began writing as a way to only tell stories, but by learning how to write poetry and experimental writing, I’ve learned so many other ways I can enrich that storytelling experience.