Poetry and Prose: What Changes?

Prose usually lets the sentence set the pace. In poetry, the line can interrupt that pace. A word at the end of a line hangs in the air for a moment before the next line changes it. Poems also use pattern, silence, and sound in ways prose can use but does not usually foreground.

The border is porous: a prose poem can have no line breaks and still make us read for rhythm and image. The useful question is what the writer asks us to notice.

See the lines at work in a poem →