Thread by @RobGMacfarlane

A short🧵on prose-poetry:
This is a page from proofs of JA Baker's The Peregrine (1967), marked up by Baker himself.
It's an extraordinary self-analysis.
He marks & counts stressed (\) & unstressed (u) syllables: 57.8% stressed!
He tallies metaphors, similes & verbs: 15.7% verbs!

Studying the data Baker provides helps us understand what lies under the bonnet, as it were, of the 'magnesium-flare intensity' of his famously dynamic prose.
On this page, the count is 20 metaphors vs 2 similes; metaphor's explosive energy-release vs simile's hinged joints.

This overwhelming preponderance of metaphor vs simile is consistent throughout (20 metaphors to 1 simile below), as is the very high verb count. There are 50 verbs in the page below describing the peregrine's 'soaring stoop', as Baker calls it in the margins.

By the time he wrote The Hill of Summer, his second and last book, he'd refined his analysis of his prose's poetry and its prosody, including a system of marginal ticks for what seem to be moments of extreme intensity or kinesis.
NB here too: 'M(etaphors) 31, S(imiles) 1.

I’ve never taken LSD: thanks to Baker, I don’t need to. He gives us landscape on acid: super-saturations of colour, wheeling phantasmagoria, dimensions blown out and falling away, nature as hypernature.
theguardian.com/books/2017/apr…

Werner Herzog, in his memoir Every Man For Himself and God Against All, tells us he carries a copy of The Peregrine around with him. It's also one of four set texts at his Rogue Film School (along with, inter alia, The Warren Report); to Herzog, this is prose as cinema.

I'm presently adapting The Peregrine into an opera with the musician-director Ben Frost/Ether Machines & astonishing singer-performer @KeeleyForsyth.
Premiere next June; announcement coming soon.
Finding ways to let Baker's language & vision take flight into music is...thrilling.