SOURCE: “Timing and Spacing the As If: Poetic Prose and Prosaic Poetry,” in Parnassus, Vol. 20, Nos. 1–2, 1995, pp. 11–31.

In the following excerpt, Feld discusses distinctions between prose and poetry, and offers a favorable assessment of Williams's Selected Poems, drawing attention to the use and effect of Williams's long line.

Where it starts as well as ends, Roman Jakobson told us, is with the etymologies. Prose: oratio prosa < prorsa < proversa (speech turned straightforward) and Poetry: versus (return). He'd have us keep in mind, too, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ early insistence, historically difficult to argue with, that the spine of so many master poems from the Bible onward is parallelism, doubling, interior resurrection. Prose, on the other hand, isn't asked to curl itself back; instead it stops dead in time, something which the genre of the story requires in no vague manner, either. “The death of another lends an appetite for novels...