By now it should be clear where I am headed: formula—IKEA, the franchise, the uniform—tends toward prose. The inimitable—a collection of antique furniture, the H & H Deli, Mrs. McGruder’s front porch—the spontaneous or whimsical, the heterogeneous or the unorthodox, tends to be poetic. I say “tends” because I have no confidence I can create verbal equations with mathematical precision. In general terms, prose in its purest form is smooth as a steel ball-bearing. It allows nothing to take root (other than the crop meant to be grown), it has nothing to catch on, to snag your clothes (or your imagination) as you slide down its unblemished surface. It is legal language with as little room as possible for misinterpretation. You don’t want the ambiguity in which poetry delights; you don’t want double meanings, puns, elasticity. You want to know the precise conditions under which you’ll inherit that fortune from Uncle Jack. You want to know exactly where to place the jack under the car.
Numerous novelists, essayists, short story writers, authors of creative non-fiction will be quick to object that they don’t write textureless sentences. They, too, use puns and double entendres and end sentences, paragraphs, stories ambiguously. Why shouldn’t they? They’re not writing legal contracts or instruction manuals. Again, I’m only staking out a pole, an extremity, and there’s room for every variety of prose and poetry within this spectrum.
At its pole prose has a practical purpose. Even in a novel, particularly a commercial one, prose is often there mainly to move a story along. We don’t want the unique in pure prose. We want the easily reproducible, the predictable, the commonplace, the accessible. This is why we go to franchises. As my brother put it when I urged him during a cross-country trip to stop at Grandma So-And-So’s Country Kitchen for breakfast, “I’d rather stop at McDonald’s. At least I know what I’m getting.”
Particularly for those who abhor labels or categories of any sort, let me try to illustrate what I mean by practical. Let’s take a pitcher from the Attic region of Greece fired in the kiln around 400 BC. Our hypothetical pitcher may have a stunning painting of Hermes in black against a burnt orange background, but the painting is utterly unnecessary to the holding and dispensing of water; the lovely Hermes likeness is not practical. The pitcher, however, is. Poke a hole in the bottom—a big one—and even though the pitcher can no longer be used to pour or store water, it’s still a work of art. Similarly, if we throw some paint remover on the pitcher and smear the figure of Hermes beyond recognition, we still have a pitcher that can be used, but it may no longer be a work of art—certainly it’s been drastically devalued as a work of art. When Valery, a consummate poet as well as a master of prose, pointed out that prose is to poetry as walking is to dancing, he was making the same point. Walking, especially in Valery’s day, gets you from one part of Paris to another. Dancing is something else altogether, a mood transformed into movement. It might be what you do when you have spare time and energy enough to give something back to the cosmos or feel like adding a flourish to your travel through the day.