/lit/ - Literature

>>18063456
>I think it’s just prose with line breaks...

>>18063467
>why?

I think i was wrong in saying this isn’t poetry. ‘What is poetry’ is subjective, so we’re all entitled to our own opinions...but even under my own definition I believe I was wrong.

Poetry (my definition):
>Writing under some structural constraint (Meter, rhyme, syllables (haiku), alliteration, etc) which materially influences the resulting piece of work
>Length constraints (flash fiction) probably doesn’t qualify, but 6-word stories certainly would. There’s plenty of gray in there.

Not Poetry
>Unconstrained (free) prose structure

Looks like poetry, but isn’t:
>a piece that follows structure entirely but abandons meaning (picking rhyming words at random)
>A piece written in normal prose, but altered later to look different (spacing, pagination, line breaks)...a chapter of harry potter in the shape of an owl
>An authorial idiosyncrasy that doesn’t materially affect the text itself (unique spelling/capitalization/punctuation/spacing)
(i thought, incorrectly, that your piece fell i to this category)

Doesn’t look like poetry, but is:
>a piece influenced by a structural constraint (meter/rhyme, etc), but without breaks to indicate lines/stanzas.
>works even if the reader doesn’t understand/notice the rules (number of letters follow digits in pi, first word from each sentence chosen at random, never use VWXYZ) as long as it forces the author to choose words thoughtfully to both say something and to satisfy poetic structure.

As you say, the line breaks were an intentional device you added in order to alter how you write (not just an affectation added after the fact)

Sorry for being so autistic about what is/isn’t poetry (and double autistic for writing this garbage explaining myself).

Tl;dr
I was being intellectually lazy and ungenerous, and assumed you were being lazy too. Great work anon.