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Prose and Poetry (Qualities that are characteristic of poetry:…
Prose and Poetry
Qualities that are characteristic of poetry:
Flexibility of text
Vocabulary
Purpose and function
Rhythm
Line segmentation
Plot and characters
Length
Rules
Length
We can not define poems and stories purely based on length.
Many jokes or humorous stories are told in a very concise manner, and some works which are relatively long are still seen more as poems than stories.
Haikes highlights the linguistic compression of poetry. Traditional Japanese haiku strictly consist of 17 syllables, which is usually fewer than ten words.
In general, signed texts are shorter than written ones so, while poems to tend to be short, length alone can not distinguish between poetry and prose.
Poems are usually shorter than stories.
Line segmentation
Line breaks have the power to turn a perfectly mundane expression into a poem, at least on a very superficial level.
There are many different kinds of poetry:
Concrete poetry
Prose poetry
Free verse
Performance poetry
In poetry, part of the poet's artistry is to decide when to break the lines and poetry can use unusual line breaks and punctuation to maintain rhythmic structure and sound patterns (rhyme, alliteration) or to emphasize certain words. Poets may even change the word order to do this.
In novels and other forms of prose, line breaks happen arbitrarily according to the typesetting, not as a result of any artistic intention.
Sign language poetry only emerged in certain countries in the 1970s or 1980s (and not all deaf communities create it, even today)
There are prove stories which are told in the most eloquent and thoughtful language, and there are poems whose content is as important as the language they use.
Passages in Shakespeare, for example, are sometimes presented on the page as prose, sometimes as verse.
Paul Valery said that prose is like walking or running, while poetry is like dancing.
We walk or run together somewhere- there is a clear purpose of reaching the destination and so long as that purpose is fulfilled, we rarely pay much attention to how we walk or run.
In prose, the language is used to communicate the content of the work, and as long as the message is successfully conveyed, how the language is used does not hugely matter.
Purpose and function
Poetry, does not necessarily seek immediate success in delivering a message.
Some poets even claim that they do not really mind whether the audiene get the maning of their poems or not.
Two function of poetic language:
foregrounding
defamiliarisation
Stories aim to deliver a coherent narrative that describes a sequence of events.
Successful communication is the primary purpose of prose storytelling.
Flexibility of text
Poetry usually has a fixed text, whereas prose stories can be adapted according to audiences or situations, making them more performative, free and flexible.
Poetry is almost always pre-structured to generate a text prior to the performance.
The time for composition can be very short, and we often create a story as we tell it.
Vocabulary
Stories in sign language are likely to have a higher frequency of established signs (those accepted widely among the community) to ensure that every one understands. In contrast, poetry uses more productive, create, or even new ways of signing.
Poetry relies much less on manual signs, but instead makes full use of non-manual elements (anything that is not produced by hands) facial expressions, gaze, body movement, space, speed, rhythm, and so on.
Rhythm
Rhythm and signing speed are important in any good performance of sign language literature, regardless of whather it is a poem or a prose story, but their functions may be slightly different.
While stories may use different rhythms and signing speeds to highlight actions or emotions (reflecting what is happening in the story), poetry manipulates than in a more deliberate and aesthetic manner for foreground the language itself rather than the content.
Plot and characters
Plot: a sequence in which a story unfolds.
In stories, a series of events are gathered in meaningful way (in chronological order, or in cause and effect rlationship).
Rules
Prose tends to be much more free and spontaneous, and the composition is less rule-driven.
Poems often follow specific rules such as strict rhyming schemes, metric structures or mandatory choice of particular kinds of words.