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From Academy to the Street, From Poetry To Prose



From academy to the street, from poetry to prose - Nicanor Parra –

‘My own antipoems use this blank verse. I’ve often been asked what an antipoem is and the most frequent response I’ve given, without realising  what I was saying is – “an antipoem is quite simple a dramatic utterance”, and a dramatic utterance, we would have to add, is a Shakespearean blank verse. Or rather, it is a hendecasyllable that lengthens and shortens, and that oscillates between the academy, the street and the fairground.

 I’ve always worked with these elements: I’ve even managed to combine verse with eleven syllables and one with one syllable, and verses with prose. I thought it was a great invention of mine, but the Elizabethans were already working with these methods – Shakespeare used them in King Lear, where a large percentage of the work is written in prose, without us fully knowing what is verse and what is prose.

This is very important: we could say that they are prosaic verses, or poetic verse’

 

-- from The Transfiguration of Literary Composition

 

Postscript – I found Nicanor talking about his ‘discovery’ relating to Cervantes in connection to Shakespeare – shift from 8 to 11 syllables -

‘For example, how Don Quixote begins. With an octosyllable, and it continues with a hendecasyllable. It begins with Sancho, with Sancho's language: en-un-lu-gar-de-la-Man-cha, / de-cu-yo-nom-bre-no-quie-roa-cor-dar-me’

 ["Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing"]

The octosyllable began in French literature, and then made its way into English (12-13th century) – in Chaucer for instance -

               ‘In spirit ones by a visioun’ (In spirit, once by a vision)

 The hendecasyllable is the term used when a line of iambic pentameter contains 11 syllables (usually they’re 10) – in Shakespeare and in Keats. It originates in Ancient Greek and Latin poetry -

‘And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries’ (Shakespeare)

‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’ (Keats)

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