Prose Poetry X

Was just thinking of a small argument to explain to an english scholar that attended a poetry talk about Elizabeth Bishop when he "corrected" me after I said "poetic prose" by saying "prose poetry".

I was thinking about it for a moment.

Not only in portuguese we say "poetic prose" for the texts that in english scholarship are called "prose poetry" (like Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Verlaine, just to use the most famous examples), but also, let's go back to Walter Benjamin or even more recently Giorgio Agamben and walk along their path: "how you say something means what you are saying".

Using two nouns juxtaposed, i.e.: "prose poetry", means one of two possibilities: a) prose that could be poetry, that was made prose, but could have one or more of the following: sound qualities of a poem, that is rhythm, displacing of accents and pauses, poetic lexicon, poetic syntax, or; b) poetry written as poetry, but had it's stanzas collapsed into paragraphs and is now, therefore, prose.

When you use "poetic prose", on the other hand, an adjective (a qualifier) placed side by side a noun, it means: prose that was intended to have traits of poetry, but never really intended to be poetry in the first place.

To me it is a whole different meaning!