Poetry as prose

Richard Ford

When Nancy Pearl asks novelist Richard Ford if he reads poetry differently than he reads prose, Ford gives a surprising answer. "No, I try to read is as prose," he says in The Writer's Library.

Most of us read poetry in a certain sing-songy way that we learned long ago. Ford says, "I try not to read poems the way I was taught in high school. I try not to pay attention to the meter. I just try to read it conversationally."

The way in which poetry is written, of course, suggests an entirely different way of reading. Consider if one of Robert Frost's most famous poems, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," had been written as prose:

Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; he will not see me stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer to stop without a farmhouse near between the woods and frozen lake the darkest evening of the year. He give his harness bells a shake to ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound's the sweep of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.

The rhyming scheme and the repeated last line still suggest poetry, yet when written as prose the text invites a different kind of reading. Does this help or hinder? In either case the same questions are raised: Why does the narrator stop by the woods? What might he be thinking about? Why does it matter whether the owner of the woods is around or not? What makes the woods so inviting when there are those promises to keep? What might those promises be? And so on.

In a different kind of poem, say something by E.E. Cummings, reading it as prose might lead to a very different result.

In another interview in the same book, novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen views short stories as something of a midway point between novels and poems. "But short stories are something that to me are perfect because they have sort of the grace and insight of a poem and the narrative of a novel but, you know, much shorter, so you can have your fix in twenty or thirty minutes with a great short story."

One can imagine how a writer as talented as Richard Ford or Viet Thanh Nguyen might turn Frost's poem into a short story or even a novel. The poem is the condensed version. The novel would be an expanded version, filled with many characters and many details about those promises and the owner of the woods. A short story would be a nice compromise between the two