This week's symposium covered creative writing and how they were common distinguished between poetry and prose. The lecture explored the many facets of thematic devices and elements used within both poetry and prose in order to communicate something to the reader. Although both writing styles can be used to convey possibly the same idea, prose relies more on diction and tone of the author, while poetry relies on the rhythm and sound of the words themselves.
The prose section of the lecture sought to defy the normal expectations of an A-B-A-B rhyme structure within lined poetry. It sought to illustrate how poets such as Tracie Morgan, uses repetition and rhythm in order to create emphasis, rather than word meaning themselves. Poetry has begun to defy many expectations of conventional form, using the placement of words on the page and syllables in key places in order to subtly affect the reader.
Leading the prose lecture, Professor Cyrus Console-Soican attempted to illustrate the blurred and faltering line between prose and poetry. He emphasized that it was not the structure that dictated the constraints for either style, but rather the subject matter: fact or fiction. In order to show this distinction to us, Cyrus showed us a video of Lydia Davis reading her book of short stories, Can't and Won't. Her writing style illustrated a lyrical, almost musical quality to her words that bordered upon poetry (when read aloud), but still retained the subject matters of prose.
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