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istara · 3718 days ago · link · · parent · post: Breaking the mold a bit, but I think the opening line of James Crumley's novel "The Last Good Kiss" is a poem in and of itself
I wouldn't really classify that as a poem either, not to detract from its artistic merit, but it's essentially prose. Not that I would go by any particular set of rules, as I think there's a lot of grey, but broadly I would agree with this in terms of what it says about structure (I disagree with it on expressiveness and language). I guess it's like reading out the lyrics of a song and calling it singing. It's not. You could have semi-singing forms, such as chants-verging-on-plainsong, but O'Hara's work isn't even that. I'll allow him the first five lines at a stretch but past that, when he gets to multi sentence paragraphs, that's 100% prose.