From Poetry to Prose and Back

I have this poem that I've been thinking about for inclusion in my manuscript. It's been published in a journal, I like its imagery a lot, but I've always felt that it didn't have the power behind that it had the potential to convey.

So last week I pruned it and pruned it, clearing out any words that could be abandoned  (something I really should have done before its prior publication--oops!). It was better, but still didn't have the effect that I knew the images in the poem could have.

So then I noticed that, unlike most of the poems I write, the line breaks didn't particularly contribute to the poem's impact. So I had a bright idea: I'll make it prose, a prose poem. I'll get rid of these line breaks that seem to be so superfluous anyway. And I liked it. I felt it was a big improvement. I put it away to have a look at it later with fresh eyes.

And when I did return to it, guess what? I didn't think it had the power I was looking for. I read through it, saw that it was better than the lineated version, but still not right. I put it away again.

Then by chance I happened to be reading Jeffrey Skinner's The 6.5 Practices of Moderately Successful Poets, and I stumbled across this (on pg. 103):

"If you've done this work and the rhythm remains elusive it may mean that what you're struggling with wants to be prose--a prose poem, or "creative nonfiction" perhaps; or something between poetry and prose. Do you instantly see places where you want to cut, or write more? Often this is the case--the prose version suggests fresh paths of revision. Go ahead and do those revisions."

Yes, yes! I thought. I've done this--recognized that this poem doesn't want to be a poem, but wants to be prose. I've revised where prose suggested revisions necessary, and yet.....

Skinner's advice continues (still on pg. 103):

"Does the whole now feel more comfortable with the sound of the sentence than rhythm of the line? If so, maybe you've got yourself a prose poem. But if these operations don't lead to a new, more confident understanding of what the pome wants to be, put it away, and move. You can always come back to it later."

So I thought about that. There was still some rhythm in the prose poem, some sentences crying out to be the end of paragraphs, which I didn't want to do because I wanted a block prose poem, not one broken into paragraphs. Or wait.....maybe those were the ends of lines calling out to be recognized and so truncated? Maybe this wanted to be a poem after all, but one with much longer lines, so that the few lines that were aching to break themselves could do it with (yes) power and effect.

So I relineated the poem into long long lines (for me), included a few stanza breaks that hadn't been there in the first place (where I saw paragraphs forming in the prose version), and Shazam! ladies and gentlemen, we have the poem we were trying to find all along.

A long and circuitous route to getting here, but here we are now: a finished poem.