fringe poetry, but not prose 241Presence versus ProgressionTo conclude this section, I will examine both texts with extensive refer-
ence to Gerrit Krol’s essay Free Verse (Het vrije vers, 1982), an engaging
piece on distinctions between poetry and prose. On the issue of visual
layout, indulging in some excusable generalizations, Krol says:^19
A distinguishing characteristic of poetry is that not all of its lines are of
the same length. In prose, most or all lines are of the same length. And
there is another clear difference: the length of the work itself. Poems are
usually shorter than stories. We can even observe that the average poem
is shorter than one page, and the average story is longer... A poem may
be viewed at a glance.This is nothing new, but Krol’s quasi-naive observation on the poem’s
viewability at a glance takes on added importance as we read on:
We generalize the following proposition: a work of art is a unity. By this,
we mean that what we imagine the work of art to be... is a unity: it may
be recorded in one memory, in one emotion. This holds for poems and
stories alike. But the difference is that this sensation of unity, if evoked by
a poem, has a direct representation in another unity: that of the page...
Of a poem, the unity is directly visible in the one page, while of a story,
the unity is in-directly visible: in a sequence.«Salute» and «File 0» can each be recorded in one memory or emo-
tion, and their (imagined) unity as works of art isn’t contingent upon
internal sequence in time or in logic, but neither can be viewed at a
glance. Both texts exceed the size of Krol’s average poem by so much
that the concept of the page becomes irrelevant. Still, while neither is
contained in a single page, both possess the unity of a poem, according
to Krol:
[A poem], for all its truth, can lay no claim to logic and is not neces-
sarily consistent. It is a unity nonetheless. We could call something like
that ‘coherent.’ Things cohere, and that is why they are true: a and b are
true, not because one is a consequence of the other, but because they are
similar: a ≈ b [not a → b]. Poetry is the place where the world meets it-
self in comparisons, images situated in different layers, constituting each
other’s meaning and, moreover, exchangeable.As observed at several points in this study, poetic coherence need not
achieve anything like complete “coverage” of the text. Accordingly,
(^19) The following quotations come from Krol 1982: 10-14.