Reading Response on Prose Poems

Help!  I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.  After having read Ted Kooser’s The Poetry Home Repair Manual the line between poetry and prose has blurred for me.  What is the difference between poetry and prose?  It appears that poetry can be written like prose and prose can be written like poetry.  I am so confused.

            Of course the poetry that I am talking about is not your regular ballad or sestina.  I am talking about the prose poem.  It doesn’t obviously have the shape and look of a regular poem.  Let’s take David Ray’s At the Train Station in Pamplona as an example.  It describes a scene between two lovers in which the girl leaves her lover and boards a train.  The “poem” contains delicious, specific details, such as a man “with his hands hopelessly in his pockets,” and a girl “toying with the green umbrella.”  I did enjoy this “poem” and could easily visualize the scene between the girl and the man because of the details that Ray includes.  However, this “poem” could easily have been a scene in a chapter of a story.  Perhaps it is something that our hero witnesses while waiting for his train in Pamplona.

            So, let’s say that I have a story that includes a car.  I can write “The yellow Rabbit was parked on the side of the road,” or I can write “There is my car standing lonely and proud.”  Is the second description poetry?

            In my struggle to understand, distinguish and define poetry and prose, I have resorted to an analogy.  Perhaps a poem is like a photograph or painting and prose is like a movie.  The movie can contain poetic images, but it is bigger, longer and more complex.  The photograph or painting is more limited, but can invite us to dig deeper into the moment of time it has captured or depicted.  Maybe, the movie/prose provides us the macro view and the photograph/poem invites us into the micro world.