Poetry - is it just prose on short lines?

It's my turn to blog over at Authors Electric - this time on the subject of poetry.  Does anyone know what it is?


http://www.authorselectric.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/poetry-is-it-just-prose-on-short-lines.html

This is one of the trickiest questions on the Eng Lit syllabus - What is Poetry?  As a published poet I should know, but ......

I’ve just done an interview on this for a former member of Authors Electric - Roz Morris, who hosts the ‘Undercover Soundtrack’ blog, runs a fiction course for the Guardian Masterclass series and produces a radio programme called ‘So You Want to be a Writer?’.  Her questions meant that I had to think quite hard about the craft of poetry which, we discovered in discussion, isn’t that much different from the craft of fiction.

Poetry is a bit more concerned with the rhythm and music of language than fiction usually is; the musicality of words and their percussion. This means that sometimes the syntax can get overlooked in the sheer exuberance of the lines. Poets are allowed to have a bit more fun with words than prose writers.  . . .
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