Alan Gould - Poetry or prose?

from an essay ‘I Skip, I Plod’ concerning the choice between writing in poetic or prose form.

   ...Until I have made my act of will — committed bottom to chair — I am not a writer, but a daydreamer. The will informs the daydream with an anxiety to get started, turning a passive reverie into an attention more urgently on the lookout for material. At the instant where a likely idea, image, scrap of verbal music occurs, the mind does a curious thing. It seizes upon the raw, unformed substance at the same time as it anticipates an end-result,  how the thing might look, the effect on an audience it might have.  We have seen this mechanism expressed when Michaelangelo tells us how his tortile, completed sculpture is already incipient in the uncut marble. Equally we have seen the cartoon of the person who, in looking at a cow, has a sirloin steak sizzling in his thought bubble. The mechanism forshadows rather than forsees, and bears little resemblance to what will be the actual finished poem or novel. The critical thing is that it has occurred and linked an outset to a provisional end. This instantaneous linkage  is of course one of humanity’s most common and ancient mental processes, by no means confined to artistic enterprises.
   Now, the intuition that opts for poetry or prose in this forshadowing does so, I believe, on the basis of this anticipated effect. Setting aside the particular emotional effects of a given poem or a given novel, the animus of a poem, its primordial  intent, is, I take it, to create a trance that isolates a reader wholly within the successive evocations that prolong the poem. The primordial interest of the novel, by contrast, is in creating a slightly variant trance, one that makes of the reader a link between the world within the novel and the veritable world the novel implies is larger than itself. ‘Only connect,’ E.M.Forster advises the novelist.
   So the trance of a poem orients the reader toward the immediacy of music;  this is now and now and now. The trance of the novel points the reader toward the continuity and scale of history; this is ‘and then, and then, and then.’
   Both these orientations attach to powerful, but distinct reservoirs of human attitudes and feelings with respect to our existence. To test the difference of these reservoirs only consider how novels can be successfully televised, poems cannot.  Dickens’ London, Balzac’s Paris, Trollope’s Barchester, Eliot’s Middlemarch, the Sydney of Christina Stead or Ruth Park are continuous with each other because the novels by these authors describe lives as they have been. No novel can, or in my opinion should, ever quite escape the opening sentence, ‘Once upon a time.’ But the London that comes in and out of focus in The Waste Land, or the Sydney of Slessor’s ‘Five Bells’ are enchanted spaces,  and enchanted time, self-contained, untransferrable. If they mirror anything, it is not so much the bustle as the trance itself...