Poetic prose into poetry: from Proust to Woodstock

I've been hanging around the Poetics section at dVerse-Poet's Pub, but today I thought I would join the group over at the section of the pub called Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft. This week it is hosted by Claudia, who introduces us to Zsa at zumpoems. Zsa gives us a Poetic Prose into Poetry Challenge that is really something! For the full explanation please click the Meeting the Bar link above......but here is the nutshell portion of the challenge:

• Pick a passage from a novel, essay or short story that qualifies as prose, but for you is particularly poetic.
• Then, as a first step, without changing a word or punctuation mark, reformat that so it appears to be poetry.
• Take your reformatted piece of prose and convert it into whatever meets your definition of poetry!

~~~

The passage I selected is from The Guermantes Way, by Marcel Proust.
            (Le Côté de Guermantes)
            [Vol. 3 of Remembrance of Things Past--
            (À la Recherche du temps perdu)]

At the age when a Name, offering us an image of the unknowable which
we have poured into its mould, while at the same moment it connotes
for us also an existing place, forces us accordingly to identify one
with the other to such a point that we set out to seek in a city for a
soul which it cannot embody but which we have no longer the power to
expel from the sound of its name, it is not only to towns and rivers
that names give an individuality, as do allegorical paintings, it is
not only the physical universe which they pattern with differences,
people with marvels, there is the social universe also; and so every
historic house, in town or country, has its lady or its fairy, as
every forest has its spirit, as there is a nymph for every stream. . .

And yet the fairy must perish if we come in contact with the real
person to whom her name corresponds, for that person the name then
begins to reflect, and she has in her nothing of the fairy; the fairy
may revive if we remove ourself from the person, but if we remain in
her presence the fairy definitely dies and with her the name, . . .

~~~

This is my reformatted version of the prose above into poetry:

At the age when a Name,
offering us an image of the unknowable
which we have poured into its mould,

            while at the same moment

it connotes for us also
an existing place,

forces us accordingly to identify one
            with the other
to such a point that we set out
                        to seek in a city for a soul
            which it cannot embody
but which we have no longer the power
            to expel
                        from the sound of its name,

it is not only to towns and rivers
that names give an individuality,
            as do allegorical paintings,

it is not only the physical universe
which they pattern with differences,
people with marvels,

            there is the social universe also;

and so every historic house,
in town or country,
has its lady or its fairy,
            as every forest has its spirit,
                        as there is a nymph for every stream. . .

And yet the fairy
            must perish
if we come in contact with the real person
to whom her name corresponds,
for that person the name then begins
            to reflect,
and she has in her nothing of the fairy;

the fairy
            may revive
if we remove ourself from the person,

but if we remain in her presence
the fairy definitely dies
and with her the name, . . .

~~~

Here is my poem. I think I should title it Forgive Me, Marcel ...... for the only thing I have in common with Proust is that, like him, I am a hopeless night owl who writes most frequently late at night and into the morning.

   
 
Woodstock

Nostalgie de la boue, a yearning
for the mud of the past;
the vast sweep of patchouli
Sexed sweetness, the stink of
Elimination and sweat;

The rasta patchwork of lovers
expecting days in the sun,
getting skunked by the rain;

And the fairy girl with a halo—

      Veronica! Veronica!

He whispered and screamed,
inhaled the sound of her name,
singing it into his soul
as he watched her from afar.

They all vanished into lore
after three days at the farm—

and the mud dried in the fields,
time crusting in the letters of
      a name
carved into a rock.

Peace to the fairy girl,
May the music never die.

MLydiaM ~ November 2011

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