Was it a poem?

It was my creative writing class today, and after discussing the purpose in writing, (the reason we write, and the internal purpose of what we have written) we moved onto sharing what we had done since our last meeting. I had asked the group to write something in a different genre from what they usually write; one member had written a ‘Mills and Boon’ type story, another had written a description of something she had seen while driving home, a reflective piece.

The latter of these two was a rather tragic description of a dead fox which had been run over on a motorway. It started as descriptive, and then considered how the accident might have happened, wondering why such creatures as foxes and badgers haven’t learned after a hundred years that vehicles kill but don’t chase… and if animals could subdue their fight or flight instinct and learn a new-wait-till-it’s-gone understanding of the metallic monsters, then maybe fewer would be killed.

This sounds a rather sad and horrid subject, a dead fox squished on the road… but what she wrote was beautiful. She had written a prose piece, but to us listening to it, it sounded like a poem. I remarked on this and mentioned that with a few adjustments it indeed could properly be a poem, a complete poem.

This got me thinking about the difference between poetry and prose… We had been read a prose piece, but our ears heard it as poetry. Somehow it was the rhythm of the writing, the cadences, the pattern, the metre of the language, and even internal rhymes which the writer had not appreciated until I read parts of it back to her. She had been worried about the structure of what she had written; it had fallen into two parts and she wasn’t sure they connected as she would have liked. However, as a poem, it was a perfectly natural break, description then reflection.

It was a stunning piece… I hope she writes more!

Have a look at this poem by Tom Leonard:

http://www.tomleonard.co.uk/online-poetry-and-prose/100-differences-between-poetry-and-prose.html