WHY AMERICAN COLONIES WERE LOST a lyrical local guide by US PoetrySoup poet is
Massey's outstanding sonnet poetry piece (second of the series) penned in the cross genre 'literary poetics ' follows in the footsteps of ground - breakingauthor Martin Gray,but extending it structurally ,beyond iambic trimeter ,thus bringing into play both rhyme&sonnet syllabics.
A 160 page poem with15 chapters ,each with a historic background intro) The poem has the dual bonus of being for loversof the combination of both poetry&history .
Yesterday, who knows where I was, lost in my thoughts.
Yesterday, a morning when you wake up in Moscow or Budapest.
Yesterday, a day when the light caresses other horizons.
Yesterday, a night when the darkness of a sky resembles yours.
Yesterday, I am already far away, my body carries my melancholy.
Yesterday is the memory of a living breath that left me.
Yesterday, I whirl in the four winds and drift away from tomorrow.
Yesterday, images build the memory of small moments.
Yesterday, awaited messages that warm our hearts.
Yesterday, sufferings that broke you and left you like an orphan.
Yesterday, a flight of swallows leaving an electric wire.
Yesterday, the warmth of your gaze lost in mine.
Yesterday, my words that play, trying to find yours again.
Yesterday, the beginning of an end, or at least a road fading away.
Yesterday, I wish you had never existed so I wouldn’t have to mourn you.
Yesterday, I beg you, stay today or become the day before yesterday.
Joel Charvillat .
a cummings apt free verse personification presented LOWER CASE style as two quatrains... atypical short&to the point
Edward Estlin Cummings so inventive
penned poetry so sensitive
He loved to write in lower case style
interspersed by CAPITALS once in a while
initialled as Edward Eselm
originality known throughout the poetic realm
In the vertical not horizontal
whose lower case was so unusual
e e cummings a poet, i be
this is how i found my u s p
in verse to be so 'original'
lower case & in the vertical
Sarumino -BASHO MONKEYS RAINCOAT is unique in Renku ,the ancient collaborative form(36 stanza linked verse poems)with examples from Basho(and his disciples...)namely Winters First shower/Summer moon/Katydid/and Plum young herbs, considered to the most typical of Basho's mature style conveying his attitude to life & compiled during his 1689 'Back Roads' pilgrimage ,the translator/editor adds both a cultural commentary for each stanza therein and an index of informative notes thereto
A haikuist was Matsuo Basho
his masterwork,Kasen *you know
He practiced this long poetic sequence
a 36 stanza poem recited in length
*www.jstor.org/stable/2718744
An atypical Carroll comic conversational satire style poesy in three voices in 40/40/28 tercet stanzas in the series of this genre to which he is identified & on which his reputation & epitaph rests
Lewis Carroll famed now for 'Alice'
a wonderland lass with no vice
Also in verse he did persist
Jabberwocky revealed him a linguist
Children's books of worldwide acclaim
Whimsical humour in nonsense rhyme
Of childhood days in summertime-
Its acrostic brought Liddel's fame,
The story ending with Alice's full name
Emerson ,a 'literary lion ' of his era 1803 -1882, (& of Unitarian sect) in this abab quatrain 'Sacrifice' alludes to Christ's redeeming free gift to confessing sinners ,(those true believers )who then accept
Ralph Waldo Emerson
a minister unitarian
When filled with consuming doubt
prosody poured forth..without
John Donne* (1572 – March 31, 1631 Jacobean poet, satirist, lawyer and preacher/cleric in the Church of England considered the founding figure of the so-called metaphysical poetry movement dwells in this 6/8/6/8 lined quatrain of stanzas on love the other topic on which his well deserved 'master' poet' reputation famously rests.His analytical mind draws out universal truths recognised by we favoured with true love experientially our lives
*English cleric one John Donne
oneday his poetics had just begun
A master of verse so erotic
so divine & metaphysique
WCW
'this is just to say' & 'dear Bill' reply ( see above links)
The now famous three quatrain 'matter of fact' classic free verse of an everyday event.
& reply a three stanza five-liner thought to be an early example of 'found poetry' from a 'real time ' domestic note
William Carlos Wiliams in his day
noted for his 'This is just to Say'
An example of short pointed prose
guess its how 'Red Wheebarrow' arose
GUTTURAL MUSE by SEAMUS HEANEY
A classic piece of observation from a hotel window ,in just three five liners .A view of universal everyday scenes from a 'detached 'poetic viewpoint with imaginative ,yet wistful digressions of the older observer 'poet'*
*Ulster poet Seamus Heaney
ever a favourite with me
In which nostalgic childhood shines through
to become a Nobel winner too
Lyrical in beauty,dug from
the depths of the past.
A storyteller, articulate in
elegaic stanza writing words
to last.Of farm life and childhood,
deep in Irish terra firma in
which he and his poetry stood.
A delightful imagist quality
of 'as is moments' once
frozen in memory,and now
released for our delight .His
triplet,quatrain and quintain form
brings a succinctness of thought
combined with the commonplace
A Tribute to Seamus Heaney 1939-2013
Marriage
The body still crossed by yesterday’s gentle fatigue,
and yet the mind light, moments drifting,
as if something had moved between us
and refused to fade.
Yesterday, a movement brought us together,
one of those rare moments
when glances answer each other,
when gestures take on a meaning larger than their form,
when one feels that time itself
paused to let us breathe.
Each one, in their own way,
carried a part of that light —
in a smile,
in a silence,
in a hand resting on another.
And this morning,
in the heaviness of bodies still charged with celebration,
a clarity remains,
like a discreet thread that still connects us
to what we shared.
And perhaps nothing is truly over,
for what we lived
continues to walk within us,
like a softness that seeks no name.
In the silence of the day that pushes us,
something remains,
a simple heartbeat,
a simple link,
and that is enough to illuminate our paths.
Joël Charvillat
To Elizbeth Barrett Browning
invalidity from riding did bring
Putting aside this tragic hurt
she elope to marry her Robert
Her Petrachan sonnet we see
an abba abba then cdecde
A sestet follows the octave
a love poesy we all crave
twin souls was her song
heart to heart,all the day long
Minimalistic Ezra Pound
also wrote poetry most profound
but in his 'Station Metro' verse
he pared&pared to make it terse
Idaho's Ezra Pound
with Canto did astound
He began as an imagist theorist
with the genre did not persist
Writer William Ernest Henley
a little known poet was he
'Invictus' * his claim to fame
inspiration** the name of the game(s)
A stoic due to illness & hospitalisation his poem *(s) & (life)became an inspirational name for the 'games' ,Mandela,RL Stevenson& Butterworth the composer..William's (born 1849 died 1903)Invictus' verse ,four abab quatrains, was written in 1875.
They watched as the tentacles of the atomic industry spread.
A mycelium growth along the coastline.
Ever nearing the land beloved of Nicholson, a uniqueness being devoured.
False hope and promise.
and like the swans on the flooded mine, buried their heads, feeding on the scraps.
As Bank Head and Kirksanton suffered they slobbered, selective blindness to the cruelty.
The weak of the clutch removed from the nest.
It was their job to protect, to highlight the injustice.
But ever on they went dredging the depths, ignoring those whose plates were being stripped clean to feed them.
Profitting on the misery of others.
Those who took their words as true, left helpless.
The community that the poet exalted, different, deceived, and forever divided.
Pioneers betrayed.
Windscale, Calder Hall built by them yet kept at distance to preserve our place.
The poets castle restored on the “Unnecessary suffering”
Norman turns.
The shame.
He washed his hands.
Of her and us.
And we were sluiced into the Irish Sea.
On a rough tide.
Whilst the gentleness of the Yorkshire Dales embraced him.
Again.
Clinging to each other and the flotsam of the incoming tide we were swept back to shore, blistered, weathered, but together.
A successful navigation to land, prevailing with fortune and fortitude.
Onshore our journeys continued but in differing directions, scarred by the experience, new land to explore.
New lives.
Ever changed we reunite to recount, reminisce, a newness added on each telling.
The scarring still exists the flesh tears, the salt burns, but every now and then the flag is hauled,
the sail thrown open to the wind and we sail, the waters stiller, navigable.
Harbours now, each open to protect from choppy oceans.
A safe mooring.
Introduction
The first pleasure of reading prose poetry comes from a productive uncertainty: a paragraph seems to invite ordinary reading, yet its language asks to be heard, tasted, and revisited. Sentences may carry narrative information while also behaving like musical phrases; familiar objects may enter an atmosphere of dream, argument, confession, or fable. That double demand makes comparison especially rewarding. One poet may build quiet pressure through restrained description, while another may crowd the paragraph with surreal leaps, comic reversals, or incantatory repetition.
As you browse the community poems, expect differences in scale and movement. Some pieces may concentrate on a single charged instant; others may unfold through anecdote, meditation, character, or a chain of associative images. Paragraphs can feel spacious or claustrophobic, conversational or ceremonial. Because verse-line cues do not direct every pause and emphasis, poets must find other ways to control attention: syntax, punctuation, sentence length, sound, repetition, and the placement of startling details all become especially consequential.
Reading beyond the first example reveals how many artistic problems this form can solve. Compare where writers accelerate, where they interrupt narrative logic, and where an apparently plain sentence suddenly acquires symbolic weight. Consider, too, how each poet earns the poem's final sentence. Across several examples, the form becomes less a visual category than a field of choices about intensity, continuity, and surprise. The collection invites readers to discover not one model to imitate, but many ways of making a paragraph retain mystery after its information has been understood.
Reading Guide
A prose poem can initially resemble a short scene, reflection, anecdote, or fragment of fiction, so the reader's first task is to notice when ordinary informational reading becomes insufficient. Read once for the situation, then again for pressure: recurring sounds, unusual syntax, image patterns, tonal instability, and moments when literal sense gives way to association. As you read the community poems, compare not only what each piece says but how its sentences manage the attention that line breaks might otherwise guide.
- Listen to sentence rhythm. Notice the alternation of long, accumulating sentences and short declarations. Rhythm can produce urgency, trance, hesitation, or sudden certainty inside a compact block. When comparing poems, ask: where does the sentence make me speed up, pause, or mentally reread?
- Track the image logic. Images may develop through physical observation, metaphor, dreamlike substitution, or abrupt collision. Their sequence often provides the poem's hidden architecture. Ask: does each image deepen the central pressure, or is surprise being pursued without emotional consequence?
- Observe paragraph pressure. A dense paragraph can trap the speaker within memory or obsession, while separated paragraphs may create intervals, shifts, or implied silence. Ask: how does the poem's visual mass affect my breathing and my expectation of what comes next?
- Follow the speaking voice. Prose poetry can borrow the manner of confession, instruction, report, prayer, advertisement, diary, or fable, then destabilize it. Ask: what kind of discourse does the voice seem to promise, and where does the poet complicate that promise?
- Mark repetitions and echoes. Repeated words, grammatical shapes, or consonant sounds can supply cohesion without an obvious verse pattern. Repetition may soothe, accuse, obsess, or turn comic. Ask: does the repeated element return unchanged, or does its meaning alter with each appearance?
- Study the turn and the ending. A strong prose poem may pivot through a change in scale, tone, tense, perception, or implied reality. Its last sentence can close an argument, reopen an image, or leave narrative energy suspended. Ask: has the ending been prepared by the poem's language without becoming predictable?
Read several pieces aloud as well as silently. Comparison will sharpen your sense of which poems merely deliver content in a paragraph and which transform the sentence itself into an instrument of tension, music, and discovery.
Writing Tips
Begin a prose poem by identifying a pressure that benefits from continuous sentences: a memory that refuses to separate into neat moments, an observation that keeps mutating, a voice that must sustain an urgent address, or a miniature narrative whose literal events conceal another argument. Do not choose the form merely to avoid arranging lines. Choose it because the paragraph's apparent normality can create useful friction with heightened, unstable, or emotionally concentrated language.
- Choose material with more than one current. A remembered room becomes more compelling when description also carries grief, desire, shame, or estrangement. Let the surface action and the emotional action move together without making them identical. The form thrives when a sentence can report one thing while implying another.
- Draft through sentences, not chopped-up verse. Give each sentence a reason to begin, gather energy, and end. Vary length and structure deliberately. A chain of similarly shaped sentences can create ritual, but accidental sameness produces monotony. Test whether syntax is generating momentum rather than merely containing images.
- Use continuity as pressure. Without frequent visual resets, detail can accumulate until the paragraph feels breathless, intimate, comic, or oppressive. Exploit that closeness, but provide internal bearings through punctuation, recurring motifs, tonal shifts, or strategic sentence endings so the reader is not simply lost.
- Control associative leaps. Surreal or unexpected transitions are strongest when some thread connects them: sound, color, emotional logic, symbolic resemblance, or the speaker's fixation. A beginner's common mistake is to treat randomness as mystery. Remove any startling image that does not change the poem's emotional or imaginative field.
- Develop a credible voice. Decide what verbal world the speaker inhabits. A bureaucratic voice, intimate confession, folktale manner, or cool report creates expectations that can be fulfilled or subverted. Keep diction coherent enough to establish authority, then let deviations signal genuine disturbance rather than casual inconsistency.
- Make sound work below the surface. Read for internal rhyme, consonance, vowel color, stress, and repeated phrases. These should intensify meaning without making every sentence sound ornamented. If alliteration calls attention only to itself, reduce it; if the paragraph feels flat, strengthen sound around emotionally decisive words.
- Resist over-explanation. Prose syntax can tempt writers to clarify motives, provide background, and summarize significance. Trust concrete details and patterned language to carry part of the meaning. After an evocative image, ask whether the next sentence enlarges its resonance or merely explains what the reader has already felt.
- Earn the final sentence. Avoid attaching a moral, abstract conclusion, or clever twist simply to announce completion. Return to an earlier object under altered emotional light, introduce a precise destabilizing fact, or let the voice reach a recognition it could not have stated at the beginning. Closure may be firm or open, but it should change the pressure of what precedes it.
During revision, print or display the draft as a whole and then read it aloud twice: once conversationally and once with heightened attention to rhythm. Mark every place your breath, interest, or comprehension falters. Tighten explanatory passages, replace decorative images with consequential ones, and vary pacing where the paragraph becomes mechanically even. Finally, test the reader's expectation by asking whether the piece would lose essential force if converted into ordinary exposition or arbitrarily broken into lines. If little changes, the language and structure need further pressure.
Interesting Facts
- A familiar visual shape can conceal radical movement. The paragraph may look orderly while its consciousness jumps among memory, fantasy, observation, and argument. This contrast lets a poet place imaginative instability inside an apparently controlled container.
- Punctuation can assume unusual expressive weight. A period may deliver a blow, while commas can prolong thought past comfort. Dashes, colons, and fragments can shape implied breath and silence when the page offers fewer visual cues for pausing.
- Length changes the form's emotional physics. A very brief piece may operate like a compressed revelation or verbal trap. A longer one can accumulate narrative credibility before shifting into dream, obsession, or symbolic transformation.
- Repetition can replace visible patterning. Recurring phrases, objects, or sentence structures create expectation and memory within the paragraph. Depending on context, the same technique can sound prayerful, comic, anxious, accusatory, or hypnotic.
- Plain diction can be as heightened as ornate diction. A restrained report may become disturbing through selection and juxtaposition, while lush language may create sensory excess. Intensity depends less on decoration than on the exact relationship among voice, image, and implication.
- Reading aloud reveals an otherwise hidden design. On the page, two prose poems may appear similarly shaped; in performance, one may move through clipped shocks and another through sweeping syntax. Browse the poems in this collection to hear how differently writers score the paragraph.
Popular Themes
Subject matter changes when it enters the sustained space of a prose poem. A domestic memory can acquire the momentum of confession; a landscape can unfold as an argument; an ordinary errand can drift into dream without a visible stanza announcing the transition. The themes below are literary possibilities rather than measured popularity rankings, and each benefits from the form's ability to keep narrative, image, and meditation in close contact.
- Memory and childhood. Continuous sentences can imitate recollection as it gathers details, revises itself, and crosses time unexpectedly. Gaps or contradictions in the speaker's account may become part of the emotional truth.
- Dreams and altered reality. The paragraph lends an air of factual confidence to impossible events. That calm presentation can make transformation feel intimate, comic, ominous, or strangely believable.
- Family and domestic life. Rooms, meals, inherited objects, and habitual phrases offer concrete anchors for complicated relationships. A poet can move from anecdote to implication without pausing to label every emotional turn.
- Love, absence, and grief. Accumulating syntax can embody longing or the refusal to let go, while a spare sentence may register absence more sharply than direct explanation. Recurrent objects can carry what the speaker cannot state.
- Nature and place. Detailed observation can gradually become psychological or symbolic without abandoning the physical scene. Weather, animals, streets, and landscapes may act as pressures on consciousness rather than decorative backgrounds.
- War, public life, and social unease. A poem can borrow the tones of report, announcement, testimony, or instruction, then expose what those modes suppress. Juxtaposing official language with sensory detail can reveal moral distance.
- Humor, absurdity, and satire. Straight-faced sentences can present outrageous premises as ordinary facts. The resulting tension supports deadpan comedy, while repetition and escalation allow a joke to become an unsettling critique.
As you read the community poems, compare pieces that address similar subjects. Notice whether one poet relies on narrative sequence, another on image clusters, and another on a distinctive speaking voice. Shared themes do not produce interchangeable poems; they reveal how syntax, tone, and imaginative logic transform familiar material.
Editorial Insights
The central artistic tension lies between the paragraph's promise of continuity and poetry's appetite for concentration, resonance, and surprise. A technically recognizable piece may occupy the expected visual space and include vivid language, yet remain inert if its sentences merely transfer information. A memorable prose poem makes continuity itself expressive. Its thought may rush because the speaker cannot stop, circle because an obsession cannot be resolved, or proceed calmly while the described world becomes increasingly impossible. The structure feels necessary when the reader senses that dividing the language differently would alter its emotional logic.
Editors and attentive readers listen for several systems working at once. The literal situation should remain engaging, but beneath it sound, image, syntax, and implication create additional movement. A recurring object may gather meanings each time it appears. A long sentence may delay a feared admission; a blunt sentence may puncture elaborate self-deception. The strongest pieces do not apply poetic effects evenly. They create contrast, allowing plain passages to establish credibility before a charged image or tonal break changes how the entire paragraph is understood.
Common weaknesses arise from mistaking surface freedom for artistic freedom. Random images can imitate imaginative range without developing an emotional argument. Uniformly ornate diction can make every detail compete at the same volume. A miniature story may explain its meaning so fully that no resonance remains, while an extremely compressed piece may offer atmosphere without enough development to reward rereading. Mechanical repetition, predictable escalation, and an ending that simply restates the theme can likewise flatten the experience. Revision should therefore ask not only whether each sentence is attractive, but whether it changes the pressure, pattern, or stakes of the whole.
Individuality remains visible through the poet's management of attention. One writer may favor deadpan absurdity, another sensuous accumulation, another documentary restraint, and another an intimate voice that continually corrects itself. None of these approaches is inherently superior; quality depends on the fit between manner and material. Comparing several community poems helps readers detect that fit. Side by side, pieces reveal how much can be accomplished through sentence rhythm, tonal control, selective detail, and the timing of a turn. The comparison also discourages a single-template view of the form: memorable work does not merely look like a prose poem, but discovers why this particular experience must move through these particular sentences.
Read, Write & Share
Read beyond the first example and allow several community poems to challenge your expectations of what a paragraph can do. Compare how different writers handle sentence rhythm, image sequences, narrative movement, voice, and closure. When a poem rewards your attention, leave a thoughtful comment that identifies the choice that affected you and explains why.
Then try composing your own piece. Let its subject determine the pace and pressure of its sentences, revise it aloud, and publish it on PoetrySoup when the paragraph feels shaped rather than merely filled. Your interpretation can become part of the continuing conversation among readers and poets in this collection.
Collection Statistics
This collection currently contains 8171 poems, offering a broad field for reading multiple interpretations side by side. Such a collection supports comparison among different subjects, voices, sentence rhythms, image patterns, and approaches to closure. As you browse, remember that individual poets may follow familiar conventions closely, adapt them to suit a particular subject, or challenge reader expectations while preserving the concentrated imaginative pressure that gives the work its poetic force.
Prose Poetry Categories
Read wonderful prose poetry 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 Poetry 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.
Related Poetry Forms
prose,