Always Young As Adults, Never Grow Old
Two strangers met in Heaven: a white tricenarian classy cat and a red vicenarian bird.
White: Where did you come from?
Red: I am a Victorian. I only died young because I was shot.
White: Really???!!! I am a Victorian too. I was born in 1840.
Red: I was born in 2003.
White: The late Victorian era is only until 1901. Were you a soldier, a factory worker or a prince?
Red: I was an instrumentalist. I lived in Victoria Court for twenty-two years and another five years in Victoria Street before I was shot while resting in the balcony.
White: Meowww...
Inner Paths
To take an inner journey, to learn to understand oneself,
To weigh the pros and cons to find momentum again.
To fall silent, and in the calm, let the heart reflect,
To shape one’s thoughts so they can begin to open.
The mind detaches and settles so it will not suffer,
Searching deep within silence to erase certain memories.
To reflect on our desires, to want to act, to act well,
To write so we may hold on to what we wish to know how to offer.
To build a future where something might change,
To imagine a gentler world, simpler to travel through.
To think of that elsewhere that would offer a clear escape,
To welcome those moments, traces that return again.
To lose oneself in thought to recover a little of who we are,
To meditate in silence when words become too heavy.
To keep watch at night, when shadows awaken memories,
To think of what hurts in order to learn to heal one’s wounds.
Joël Charvillat
William Butler Yeats in doubled stanzard quatrain 'The Cloths Of Heaven ' (with similar end lines recurrently appearing)writes with delightful lyrics a very personal plea
William Butler Yeats
respected as one of the greats
Awarded a Nobel prize
being tone deaf is a surprise
Song of the Broad-Axe 'A twelve stanza poem atypical of this most famous of US poets in both form & topic. Walt Whitman raised by Quakers in Brooklyn with typographical poetics devoted to the US commonwealth whose best poetry is in 'Leaves of Grass&Song of Myself'.
Walt Whitman junior,so sensual with poems&essays so influential (in the US at least)as a transcendental writer&realist.
To express through words,you
dance with poetry
You strike a chord and you sing
With a low, soft voice
a gentle humming sound that drifts into the clouds
You sing a love a song for your beloved
Sing,sing for your beloved
Just like a bird platmying melodies
The rhythm, the rhythm of the song
As a sweet,the beautiful melody
Wake up
You soothe your voice like a bird
That chirps
You play a beautiful melody
Starting a song all of a sudden
dancing to songs of joy and celebration
A short time filled with happiness
Humming always with pure joys
A song to put a body to sleep
As a sweet,beautiful melody
Wakes up
T S ELIOT wasteland
Eliot's
waste
land
so
empty
now of
flowers
to
while
away
the
hours
Missouri's Thomas Sterns Eliot
loved the English life quite a lot*
His style remained American
as a very poetical craftsman
a poet time has not forgot
Concepts in his 'Four Quartets'
in stone his reputation did set
EDWARD THOMAS
HAYMAKING a traditional delightful
12 END RHYME COUPLETS,of the labour filled days before mechanisation.
Nostalgia that remembers the good bits
of our yesterday's.
Edward Thomas a literary man
always wrote so his pens did scan
Sadly died in ww1
OMAR rubaiyat
tessellation"—or mosaic— of quatrains translation; rearranged, paraphrased,
into disconnected Persian
quatrains (rubai) 'a flowing, thematic narrative.
Edward Fitzgerald a gentle manner
translated Omar Khayyam
These quatrains known as rubaiyat
so novel hedonistic &stansaic
Omar Khayyam
a Persian poet man
Loved to pen quatrains
so he wrote them again.& again
McGough an English poet, a Lancashire lad &performance poet, grew to fame in the culture of the early sixties Beatles era with poems like this featured 'Mrs Moon ' atypical of his off beat contemporary recitatives that helped to popularise poetry to an audience used to 'pop' culture outpourings .
CHRISTINA R
Close to the Pre-Raphael sect
All proposals to wed,she did reject;
Her fame excels in retrospect-
A spinster,quiet,pious and chaste
Such talents were,not left to waste.
The talented Christina Rossetti
wrote carols and much poetry.
Married love elluded her,I'm afraid,
the poor lass dying as a spinster maid
Chaucer's elegiac poetry
The Book of the Duchess
The father of poetry in the early English language
in this original excerpt
try his tercet if you so wish
I have gret wonder, by this lighte,
How that I live, for day ne nighte
I may nat slepe wel nigh noght;
Geoffry Chaucer served as a page
first poet of ye olde English age
His Canterbury tales quite a feat
a work never did complete
Come join me in the religion of the well wishing fool
We meet once a month at the toe dipping pool
Where we reaffirm our mission to uphold the tradition
Of championing that reckless and rash, impetuous and crass
imperative of all human inanity. The keen assurety, whose
heights may only be scaled in proportion to the rarity
of their intellectual scarcity. We wholeheartedly cheer the pursuit
of the age old query of grasp and reach by those whose sole reward
seemingly is calamity. We stand here safe in our cloak of non participatory
scrupulosity and outrageously cheer the feckless audacity of those that advance the
sum total of human wisdom by dint of intellectual incapacity.
Lines are short, abrupt, and broken up staccato like
Poet Gertrude Stein
had a staccato style quite fine
She also became a Cubist
& with prose poetry for a while did persist
”One does find elegance, sovereignty of soul, the discernment of thought, and unimaginable beauty in the oddest of places ... A Lady of The Royal Court ? A Courtesan of a wealthy Nobleman? No. One has only to open one's eyes and mind to know the possessor of such charms would take to such places of status as a snake takes to water.”
My first encounter with ” La Dame en Noir ” ... Open air poetry reading ... A beach at Trouville, Normandy ... Summer 1875 ... She would later publish under le nom de plume ” Anon ” which became a rebellion in itself for all women, whose works of prose and poetry would be repeatedly rejected by publishers if authored by a woman. Her best known work ” Philistine ” was published in the Autumn of 1879. She also went on to publish much of her work authored under the single letter ” J ” ... When queried by a local columnist what it stood for. She answered with a straight face, ”
Why it comes after, I”
CRAZY EIGHT
No one knew
When she arrived
Or when she'd disappear
She would just drift in with the wind
Ginned up
Like she'd be hitting
All the ritzy joints in town
And never without her bête noire, "Kitty"
A crazy eight midnight black Mercury Coupe
They were inseparable
A couple of cats on the prowl
In the tall grass
She sure was some kinda dame
A real pearl
You could count yourself lucky
If you bumped into her
But you know the thing about luck ...
Introduction
The pleasure of reading prose on a poetry collection page begins with a productive uncertainty: a familiar-looking paragraph may unfold as narrative, confession, meditation, character study, argument, dream, or densely musical description. Without conspicuous lineation directing every pause, the sentence must carry unusual responsibility. Its clauses regulate breath, its punctuation controls hesitation, and its movement determines when an image arrives or an emotion changes pressure.
As you read the community poems, expect considerable variation in scale and intention. One writer may concentrate on a single remembered gesture, while another develops a scene, a comic voice, a letter-like address, or a sequence of reflections. Some pieces may favor direct storytelling; others may heighten repetition, figurative language, or sonic patterning. Not every submission will interpret the category in precisely the same way, and that variation gives readers an opportunity to consider where prose becomes especially charged, memorable, or lyrical.
An isolated example can display one successful approach, but a collection reveals the range of available decisions. Compare how several poets begin, how long they remain within one moment, and how they move between image and explanation. Notice which pieces make paragraph shape feel spacious, intimate, urgent, or claustrophobic. Reading beyond the first example also sharpens judgment: similarities reveal shared possibilities, while differences show how strongly voice, syntax, pacing, and selection can distinguish one writer from another.
Reading Guide
Approach each piece first as an experience rather than as a test of category. The prose surface can encourage fast, informational reading, but the most rewarding work often asks for slower attention. Sentences and paragraphs may be doing work that lineation performs elsewhere: organizing breath, delaying disclosure, accumulating detail, and creating turns. When comparing community poems, observe not only what each writer says but how the movement of thought has been shaped.
- The opening contract: Notice whether the first sentence offers a scene, voice, question, claim, or disturbance. What expectation does it establish, and does the rest of the piece deepen or productively overturn that expectation?
- Sentence pressure: Track where clauses lengthen, contract, interrupt one another, or arrive in fragments. Does the syntax enact calm reflection, breathless urgency, confusion, intimacy, or control more effectively than the subject alone could?
- Paragraph movement: Treat each paragraph break as a meaningful threshold. Does it signal a change in time, speaker, emotional temperature, or perspective? Compare whether other poets use paragraphs as scenes, stages of thought, or deliberate silences.
- Sound beneath the surface: Listen for recurring consonants, vowels, internal echoes, and repeated phrases. Do these patterns quietly unify the writing, or do they become so prominent that they compete with the natural authority of the voice?
- Image and explanation: Mark places where concrete detail gives way to interpretation. Does the writer trust an object, gesture, setting, or sensory impression to carry meaning, or explain an emotion before the image has gathered force?
- Narrative distance: Ask how close the voice stands to the event. Is the speaker reliving, observing, confessing, inventing, or reconsidering? How does that distance affect credibility and emotional intensity?
- The final resonance: Notice whether the ending resolves an action, returns to an image, changes the meaning of an earlier sentence, or deliberately leaves pressure unresolved. What remains active in the reader after the final punctuation?
Browse several poems with one of these elements in mind, then reread your favorites aloud. Comparison makes subtle differences in timing, tonal control, and sentence music easier to hear.
Writing Tips
Begin a prose draft by finding movement rather than merely finding a topic. A useful subject contains change: a memory becomes less certain, an ordinary object gathers emotional weight, a speaker revises a judgment, or a scene exposes something previously concealed. The form offers substantial freedom, but that freedom places greater pressure on selection and sentence design. A paragraph-shaped draft is not automatically finished simply because it occupies the page convincingly.
- Choose material that benefits from continuity: Consider experiences in which thought, observation, and action need to flow into one another. A sustained recollection, interior monologue, encounter, or unfolding description can gain force when the reader is carried forward without frequent visual interruption.
- Establish a center of gravity: Decide what image, question, conflict, or emotional contradiction holds the piece together. Freedom can encourage digression; a strong center allows associative movement without making the draft feel accidental.
- Build paragraphs as units of discovery: Give each paragraph a task beyond containing sentences. One might establish the physical world, another complicate the speaker's understanding, and another alter the emotional stakes. Break a paragraph when the mind or scene genuinely turns, not merely when the block looks long.
- Vary sentence architecture purposefully: Long sentences can accumulate impressions, imitate obsession, or postpone a difficult recognition. Short sentences can interrupt that flow with certainty, shock, or refusal. Repeatedly using the same length and structure often produces monotony rather than coherence.
- Compose for the ear without forcing ornament: Use internal echoes, consonant clusters, vowel patterns, and recurring key words to create texture. Obvious rhyme or heavily decorated phrasing can sound imposed if the speaker's situation does not support it. Read aloud to locate both music and strain.
- Let images perform intellectual work: Choose details that affect the speaker's understanding, not details included solely for prettiness. An image becomes structurally valuable when it returns altered, contradicts a claim, or makes an abstract emotion physically apprehensible.
- Protect the voice from over-explanation: Beginners often narrate an event and then tell the reader exactly what it means. Test whether a gesture, omission, tonal shift, or charged object can communicate part of that meaning more powerfully. Direct explanation is useful when it advances thought rather than repeats evidence.
- Earn the ending: Avoid attaching a generalized moral or dramatic declaration that the preceding language has not prepared. The final sentence may narrow, open outward, echo the beginning, or introduce a revealing contradiction, but it should change the pressure of what came before.
During revision, print or display the draft as a continuous reading experience and mark every place where attention weakens. Tighten redundant explanation, replace interchangeable images, and vary syntax where the rhythm becomes mechanical. Then read the piece aloud twice: once at a conversational pace and once slowly enough to hear every punctuation choice. The stronger version will preserve natural authority while making each pause, sound, paragraph shift, and final cadence feel intentional.
Interesting Facts
- A familiar page shape can conceal intricate timing. Readers may initially move through a paragraph as ordinary discourse, so a carefully delayed verb, interrupted clause, or sudden short sentence can produce an unusually strong surprise.
- Paragraph breaks can function as both silence and argument. The space between blocks may mark elapsed time, a withheld response, or a change in consciousness. Two writers can use the same visual separation to create either calm reflection or emotional rupture.
- Length changes psychological pressure. A single compact block may feel concentrated, secretive, or claustrophobic, while several paragraphs can permit narrative development and reconsideration. Neither effect follows automatically; sentence rhythm determines how the space is experienced.
- Repetition can seem less announced than it does in a refrain. Because recurring language is embedded within sentences, readers may absorb its pattern before consciously identifying it. That delayed recognition can make a repeated word feel obsessive, haunting, comic, or inevitable.
- The plainest sentence may carry the greatest weight. After a passage rich in imagery or syntactic expansion, an unadorned statement can restore emotional credibility and create contrast. Heightened language often becomes more effective when it has something restrained to press against.
- Side-by-side reading exposes hidden architecture. Browse the poems in this collection and compare how writers distribute scene, reflection, dialogue, description, and silence. The shared prose surface makes differences in voice and pacing especially visible.
Popular Themes
Subject matter changes how prose movement is felt. A reflective theme may welcome long, unfolding sentences, while danger or comedy may benefit from abrupt turns and tightly controlled timing. The subjects below are literary possibilities rather than a statistical popularity ranking; each becomes effective only when its language and structure support its emotional demands.
- Memory and family: Prose can follow the mind as it moves between present observation and remembered detail. Ordinary objects, repeated sayings, and domestic gestures can reveal affection, conflict, or uncertainty without requiring a complete family history.
- Love and intimacy: The closeness of a speaking voice can resemble confession, conversation, or an unsent letter. Sentence rhythm allows desire, hesitation, resentment, and tenderness to coexist before the speaker reaches a settled conclusion.
- Loss and mortality: Grief rarely proceeds in a neat emotional sequence. Paragraphs can hold recollection, denial, physical detail, and reflection together, while shifts in syntax register the mind's attempts to approach what remains difficult to name.
- Nature and place: Sustained description can move beyond scenery by showing how perception changes over time. Weather, animals, landscapes, or seasonal details become consequential when they influence memory, decision, mood, or the speaker's sense of scale.
- Everyday life: Meals, school rooms, work, music, sports, and routine journeys offer recognizable surfaces beneath which tension can develop. The challenge is to select details that transform familiarity rather than merely catalogue it.
- Humor and absurdity: Conventional sentence flow can establish a reasonable tone while events become increasingly strange. Understatement, delayed information, precise repetition, and a well-timed final sentence can sharpen comic effect.
- War and social witness: Prose can place observation beside reflection, allowing public events to be encountered through particular bodies, voices, places, and consequences. Specificity helps prevent large subjects from becoming abstract declarations.
As you read the community poems, compare writers who address similar subjects. One may rely on scene, another on meditation, another on an intimate speaking voice. Those differences show how form does not merely contain a theme; it determines how the reader enters, experiences, and remembers it.
Editorial Insights
The central artistic tension lies between a familiar textual surface and a heightened demand for attention. A prose-shaped piece may look conversational, narrative, or explanatory, yet memorable work makes every sentence carry more than information. The language must remain readable while generating pressure through rhythm, implication, image, and sequence. Too much ordinary exposition can flatten the experience; too much ornament can make the voice sound manufactured. The strongest writing finds a register in which clarity and intensity strengthen rather than cancel each other.
Structure feels necessary when it enacts the subject. A long, accumulating sentence may embody panic, appetite, wonder, or obsessive recollection; a clipped series may suggest shock, resistance, or emotional exhaustion. Paragraph divisions can register changes of time, consciousness, or authority. These choices matter because the reader cannot rely on prominent lineation to announce emphasis. If the piece is placed into one block merely as packaging, its shape contributes little. If syntax and paragraph movement reproduce the way the speaker perceives or avoids an experience, structure becomes inseparable from meaning.
Editors and attentive readers notice when craft elements cooperate. An image introduced early may return with altered significance. A casual voice may fracture when it reaches the fact it has been circling. Sound may quietly bind distant sentences, while punctuation controls how quickly the reader recognizes a change. Common weaknesses arise when the writer substitutes poetic-sounding adjectives for exact perception, forces rhyme into otherwise natural speech, repeats a mechanical sentence pattern, or explains every implication. Another frequent problem is insufficient development: the draft offers an anecdote or attractive image but does not let it alter the speaker's understanding.
Individuality remains visible through selection and syntax. Two poets can describe the same kitchen, farewell, storm, or childhood incident and create entirely different experiences by choosing different sensory evidence, narrative distance, tonal restraint, and order of disclosure. This is why comparing multiple community poems is so valuable. One example may make a particular strategy seem essential; several reveal that quality depends less on a single approved manner than on the precision with which each writer aligns voice, pacing, imagery, and emotional movement.
Read, Write & Share
Read beyond the first example and let several community poems challenge your sense of what prose can accomplish in a poetry setting. Compare how different writers shape sentences, manage paragraphs, reveal emotion, and bring an experience to rest. When a piece holds your attention, leave a thoughtful comment about a particular image, tonal turn, rhythmic choice, or ending.
Then try your own approach. Choose material that needs sustained movement, revise it for sound and pressure, and publish the finished work on PoetrySoup. Your interpretation can become part of the continuing conversation among readers and writers exploring the form.
Collection Statistics
This collection contains 12054 poems, providing many opportunities to compare how writers handle voice, sentence movement, imagery, narrative, and closure. Within a collection of this size, poets may follow familiar conventions, adapt them to suit particular subjects, or challenge expectations about how a prose piece should create poetic intensity. Reading across multiple entries offers a broader view than any single example can provide.
Sub Categories
Read wonderful prose poetry on the following sub-topics:
christmas, death, dog, family, food, friends, funny, kids, life, love, music, nature, school, sports, war
and more.
Definition | What is Prose in Poetry?
Looking for the formal definition, structure, and history of this poetry form? Visit the Poetry Dictionary entry below. Then return to explore how PoetrySoup members bring the form to life through their own poems.