ABSTRACT
“Humans,” writes Gillie Bolton, “are narrative-making creatures; creating stories is our way of making sense of things.” The Aristotelian beginning-middle-end offers a comfortingly familiar structure in which the most complex and challenging aspects of human experience may be contained; and even in our postmodern age of distrust in grand narratives, it is a structure that is employed successfully in countless popular novels and other media. This chapter considers the ways in which prose poetry uses poetic techniques in order to set up and subvert readers’ expectations of unlineated text which they carry from prose narrative. It then goes on to suggest why this makes it such a vital literary form for the early twenty-first century, a time in which all narratives are suspect and in which, most of all, neat conclusions are not to be trusted.
