Poets who write prose ...

Poets who write prose ...

They used to say writing was either poetic or prosaic, prose being the rough-edged, uncouth cousin of elegant poetry. Today, more and more poets are writing prose, and the lines between prose and poetry have blurred.

You can gulp down prosaic writing in lumps of undigested words, but this kind of prose makes you want to savour it rather than skimming it. Poets like Helen Humphreys (Wild Dogs) are writing fiction, but even more poets have turned to travel writing and other forms of literary non- fiction.

The first piece I read which fit into this category was Touch the Dragon by Karen Connelly. She experienced Thailand as a seventeen year old on a one year exchange, and kept a journal. The travel memoir based on these first raw impresssions of a very young girl, her senses unblunted by experience, was not written till a few years later when she was a published poet. Read it. You won't be sorry. I have to go looking for a copy; I lent mine to a Thai student I was tutoring.

Dinner with Persephone by Patricia Storace is another account by a poet of a year spent abroad.. It begins with the line "I lived in Athens, at the intersection of a prostitute and a saint." I doubt if I will finish this book quickly; I expect I shall relish every word.

That means I won't get to read The Gargoyle's Left Ear by Susan McMaster very soon. A bookstore in Ottawa has it on order for me. McMaster read from her book on CBC the other day and I knew immediately that I must get hold of a copy. She too is a poet. She founded Branching Out, a feminist magazine all of us lefties read in the seventies. She was twenty-two, and it was a wonderful magazine, filled with thoughtful writing about politics and elegant prose and poetry written by intelligent Canadian women. The Gargoyle's Left Ear is a writer's memoir set in Ottawa.

This is the kind of book I cannot borrow from a friend or the library. I must have my own copy. I want to return to these books over and over again at will. I want to high;ight passages and scribble in their margins. They are the books that nourish me as I consume them and which become part of who I am.