Here's a quote:
Although he has written this book of prose… James Galvin think of himself as a poet. To be known as a poet is important to him. It is a matter of temperament, he says. He doesn’t feel prose is up to the tasks to which he wants to put language on the page. “Poetry has a kind of snap to it,” he says. “Getting back to horse terminology, poetry steps out so smart.”
Prose, according to Galvin, is tethered to time and ordered by reason, whereas poetry, ruled by line breaks and shot through with gaps, runs to a beat. It is organized spatially, not temporally; it moves outside time—it is lyric. “If you sit down to write a prose work,” Galvin says, “before you even touch the pen to the paper you have already addressed the idea of the passage of time. And if you sit down to write something that’s in lines, you have already decided to resist that passage.” A line of poetry depends on space; its very purpose is to fill a set space with a particular pattern of beats. A sentence, however, disregards space; it sets out to name something and to say something about that thing: subject and predicate—there is your sentence, no matter how long or short, regardless of its syllable count. Sentences and paragraphs are defined as units of thought. Of thought, you see; not of music, not of space.
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*Italics added.
What do you think? I always think of the accentual/accentual syllabic line as a unit of breath, and necessarily a unit of music because it's based on rhythm. Isn't that timing, if not time? And what about the prose poem? The sheerly syllabic poem? The lyric moments in prose (whole swaths of Beloved and the end of "The Dead" as just two examples)? Aren't these governed more by music and timing than time? I don't think of prose as necessarily harnessed to the predicted predicate moment.
But maybe that's just me.
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