Writing Genres
Fiction is usually thought of as prose, while poetry is given a separate classification. Essays are a form of prose usually differing from fiction in that the essay is considered a real document and not a tale. The distinction among these three forms is not always that clear, and often the genres are deliberately blurred. For that matter, critics often find elements of one type or writing echoed in another. A writer such as Thomas Wolfe, for instance, is often cited for the poetic nature of his prose. Steinbeck wrote what are called the intercalary chapters in The Grapes of Wrath in the form of essays on topics related to the larger fictional portion of the novel. Some poetry reads more like prose than what is thought of as poetry until the reader analyzes the interior tensions of the words selected and how they fit into the whole. In much modern fiction, the three elements may be used in various ways in the same work in order to achieve some purpose or to illustrate some concept more fully. How these three can be fit together can be seen with reference to the poetry of She Tries Her Tongue: Her Silence Softly Breaks by M. Nourbese Philip and the more prose work Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson.
Nourbese Philip in her collection of poetry She Tries Her Tongue: Her Silence Softly Breaks clearly writes poetry and not prose, but she shapes a narrative within the book by linking the poems thematically so that the whole carries the underlying form of the personal essay as well, doing so with a political purpose as one black woman poet suggest certain truths and realities surrounding the experience of the black woman in Western society today. I will show how Winterson, facing the unavoidable necessity of falling back on the cliched language of love, uses such language against itself. As Finney writes,Her subject is less love than the problems associated with describing it in narrative or textual form. As Finney notes, the narrator in this book "enters into an extended series of prose poems meditating on various parts of Louise's cancer-ridden body" (Finney para. Delville also cites a definition of the prose poem as follows:A composition able to have any or all the features of the lyric, except that it is put on the page--though not conceived of--as prose. 2) The author takes a certain poetic license in not identifying the main character more completely, and she does so in order to make a political and literary point about the degree to which gender is often irrelevant in addressing human emotions and ties between people. However, as one critic points out, this view denies what Winterson herself is a trying to do by not identifying the gender of the protagonist. In the genre which we call prose there is verse of every conceivable rhythm, some of it admirable. Its length, generally, is from half a page (one or two paragraphs) to three or four pages, i. The narrator tests love and decides to choose a loveless life with Jacqueline because it is safe: "I became an apostle of ordinariness.
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Acceptance Essays
