100 Differences Between Poetry and Prose


poetry stops before the end of the margin

you can talk about prose without mentioning school

you don’t read poetry to get from Glasgow to Saltcoats without noticing


John Menzies doesn’t stock poetry

whoever heard of war & peace having the line as a unit of semantic yield

you can call a poem what you want and say its poetic licence


poetry is the subliminal history of linguistic shape


poetry has four wheels, two wings and a pair of false teeth


poetry is the heart and the brain divided by the lungs

poetry is the world’s oldest cock and fanny story


you don’t get prose in anapaestic dimeters

nobody publishes their first slim volume of prose

aristotle never wrote The Proses


if you dribble past five defenders, it isn’t called sheer prose

poets are the unacknowledged thingwaybobs


poetry is quintessentially contrapuntal

the square root of poetry is an ever-evolving quark

whenever Vergil looked in the mirror, he beheld an epic Latin poet


poetry is all the juicy bits in the juiciest order

poetry is jellied religion

pascal: if your labourers complain too much, try taking them to a poetry reading


prose goes scchhpludd

prose goes scchhpludd scchhpludd clomp clomp clomp

are you sitting comfortably


then I’ll end


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