Lucy Ives Considers the Ways & Means of Prosimetrum

At Literary Hub, Lucy Ives calls for more work that mixes genre: "In the classical West sometimes this [kind of synthesizing of genre] is called prosimetrum. Elsewhere, I have liked terms like 'miscellany,' 'saga,' 'postmodern novel.' There are, it turns out, not just many ways, but many reasons to write a work bringing together groups of sentences with groups of words that are measured out according to principles and patterns that are not merely grammatical."

Here are her three:

"REASON ONE: you recognize that much distinction is arbitrary." "REASON TWO: it is conceivable to you that the poet is as likely to be a character or other figment, as a genuine, living person." "REASON THREE: you are bored with a certain (sad) status quo."

Later:

Above I have supplied three reasons, and though I like them fairly well, they do not, in the end, as is probably to be expected, exhaust all my thinking and feeling about varying, combinatory writing styles. I may care most about a mixture of styles because it allows the paranoiac in me to comment on the conservative literary (not to mention educational) systems that I fear linger in our world, in spite of—and sometimes even paradoxically by way of—the iconoclasm of modernist heroes et al. Verse is not just, to my mind, a form with various technical appurtenances, since it has a long history and specific social functions (inputs, outputs); like prose, it seems to me at times a sort of system, with myriad institutional nodes. Though I am not so heroic myself as to believe that my contemporaries are in need of saving, I do often find that some perverse aspect of me would very much like to make things a little bit messier, throw a wrench in the engine, and otherwise, pick your frustratingly well-worn metaphor, cause to function less smoothly said system of literary production. Most of all, stubborn being that I am, I find myself drawn to various styles of silence, said silence being a possible ingredient in, or sign of, the still, at least to me, unaccountable distance between poetry and prose.

Anyway, could we remove a poem from its job as a poem?

Read all of "On the Many Ways and Reasons to Mix Poetry and Prose" at Literary Hub.