Verse versus Prose

I was sharing with a kindred spirit sometime ago, that I lost interest in writing verse a while back.

It all started when she showed me a piece she was working on and my response to it was so cerebral that some of the musicality of it escaped me and unfortunately so did some of what she intended to communicate. I indicated that it was because I don't usually 'hear' poetry when I read it. She wondered how then do I write? I admitted that's why I stopped writing verse. I didn't like to read out loud. I didn't want to hear my words expressed out loud. Her passion for the impulse to read her work and share was so foreign to me that I was a little embarrassed. It's why I stopped writing verse. I am so self-conscious when it comes to performing that I refuse to do it. She suggested that her writing is not personal so she does not have time to be self-conscious.

That's not what it is for me. Even my poems which are not personal, I never liked performing them. I would really prefer to read in a monotone, devoid of any kind of inflection and poetry just does not work that way. Prose doesn't either, but the performance demand is considerably less, and it is easier for the author to be distanced from the content. Poetry is just too intimate.

That's the struggle I have yet to overcome and that's why being the writer I really want to be is still elusive. I don't want you to see me, I want you to see the craft. As long as there is anything that resembles me too much I avoid it. So when it came to Verse versus Prose, it was a KO from prose.

I wouldn't say that I eschew verse completely but right now there are characters in my head and there is only one medium for them. (sounds a bit suggestive, but no I just find with each passing day the charcters become more vivid and I learn more about them really quite arbitrarily)

I call it prosetry, but that's for an entirely different post....