A new form

Of poetry.

While sitting face down in the massage chair just now getting my back loosened so I can avert a raging headache, I went into that state of semi-consciousness where ideas float around, and one of them is a new form of prose-poetry that I need to think of a name for. It’ll be two lines, and in the way of a conversation, and it’ll be open-ended, as good poetry/writing is. The specific one I’d thought of is inter-textual, but I wonder if that needs to be part of the form. There won’t need to be attribution to speakers, and I can’t decide yet if inverted commas should be used to highlight the conversational aspect. But it’ll always be two lines—like a snippet of a conversation, like the most important part of a longer conversation.

This was the one that came to me and sparked this idea of a new genre:

“I’d like to live in the world of The Boy and the Heron.”

“Which one?”

I guess you do need to know the film to properly respond to the poem, but I guess even without having seen it, there can be a response too, though probably a different sort.

So it is kinda like a haiku/senryu, and the vibe of it reminds me specifically of Ezra Pound’s haiku, In a Station of a Metro.

And it’s poetic in that there is an internal rhythm and beat to it, but it could look like prose. Maybe I’ll name this form Response Poetry, because it’s one being responding to other in conversation, and possibly a response to another text being referenced. But Response Poetry sounds like some kind of first-aid or rescue method…and well it may be. Guess I’ll think a bit more about what to call this, and in a parallel world I’ll send out an open call to get people to write this new form and send it all in and we can all decide what to call this form together.