Discussion → Prose Poetry and Microfiction
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Microfiction often seems to meld with Prose Poetry, especially in the work of Lydia Davis. I'm curious how people think they are different and/or the same.
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PP/FF is the title of an anthology edited by Peter Conners and published by Starcherone. Double pianissimo/Double forte. Music again!
Lydia Davis is included in it, along with many others.From the foreword I was asked to write in 2005 to my prose poem chapbook: "When I wrote XAM: Paragraph Series in 1998, I was in those cities and locations cited in these passages. I see the pieces as related prose poems. A prose poem, as I have practiced it, is two pages or fewer in length and uses language, rather than temporal events, as the first given. Glimpses of action, person (not as in fiction, “character”), and scene may also appear in them. Prose poems are less calculating than fiction and less tightly crafted than a short story or short poem; they are less pre-meditated. Perhaps they are more rhythmic. My friend, Michael J. Kelly, admitted to finding the rhythms in XAM to be difficult to follow. It reminds me that rhythm is something also personal. The best rhythmic writing would be “beatest.” Yuan is my codeword for today." It still seems possible to see it that way for me.
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Prose poetry " uses language, rather than temporal events, as the first given. " That's really fascinating Ann. And yet, I think, when you do both equally, that's when the melding takes place of prose poetry and microfiction.
Group Description
ALL MICROFICTION ALL THE TIME.
Here's a place to post both published and unpublished Microfiction and a place to discuss and debate the special aesthetics of the genre.
Some sources claim word count under 100, others under 200, others under 400 and still others under 500. Your guess is as good as mine, but 500 is the absolute limit. The shorter the better. Poetry welcome.
Joseph Young in FRIGG, Spring 2009, wrote,
"To be its own genre, microfiction needs to do something that other forms won’t. It needs to use language, description, dialogue, character to tell a story that can’t be told any other way. It’s not just compression, and it’s not just leaving things out, background info on characters or such. Microfiction needs to carve out whole worlds in a space small enough to fit the eye. You look, just once, and there the whole story is, on the page...
"If fiction (e.g., narrative) is time, then microfiction is microtime. But let me caveat. A microfiction can describe the entire life of a character. It can illustrate birth, marriage, death, 80 years of experience. But the amount from that 80 years that actually occurs in microfiction, in microtime, is nearly nothing, a tenth of a second."
Me? I think of microfiction as the miniature galaxy inside the marble hung from the cat's collar in Men in Black.
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