Craft: Five Things People Misunderstand about Prose Poems

O.E.D., Edson, Herbert, Shumaker, Hass, "Purple Death"

Students in my classes often get fussy about genres, categories, or identifying if a text is a poem, or something else. Genre really means sort or kind. Genres change over time, recombine, and are socially inferred. Genre distinctions are really just tools by which we can talk about texts; there is nothing meaningful about them in and of themselves.

Aris…