Such a striking formulation (and summation!) of Piya here....

And I'm struck by your focusing on her declaration that she has found a home.  Later on in The Ecological Thought,Timothy Morton writes,

I'm delighted to see you using Joanna Macy's translation of Rilke....I have excerpts from her book, World as Lover, World as Self: Courage for Global Justice and Ecological Renewal, on board as our final reading of the semester, and am curious to see how you all will take her up her orientation, which combines environmental activism, Buddhist scholarship, general systems theory, and deep ecology.

Maybe, rather than a distinct poetry/prose dichotomy in the structure of words—chapter vs. verse, narrative vs. exposé—we need to blur those lines and look more closely at "poet" as the word. I think if we disassociate "poet" from poetry as solely a genre category, we can open up some different conversations beyond the poetry/prose binary. Maybe a poet, like Nirmal, doesn't have to solely write in the genre poetry. If anything, Nirmal shows us that a poet, or one who "lives through poetry", does not have to fit into a poetry/prose dichotomy.

I like the way you shift Marian and Caleb's question from what is more "raw" (btw, do y'all know the famous book, The Raw and the Cooked, by Claude Lévi-Strauss, which is a famous anthropologist's infamous description of what culture is doing: "cooking" what is "raw," "making it 'done'"?).

this is a VERY layered description of poetry as the "(translated) untranslated voice." so my reaction is very layered, too....

I guess I’ll start with the barometer statement. It’s hard to place myself on that scale because even now as we’re talking about the slippery nature of language, there are, as you mention, many ways that we can envision what “poetry” looks like and what “prose” looks like. Some prose is intensely poetic, and some traditional verse is little more than exposition. That said, if this were class, I would have to take a stance, so I’m going to stand fairly far on the disagreeing side of the barometer.

you ARE supposed to use "I" when writing an English paper about a book!
(@ least til next week, when we will use the ecological thought to
challenge the centrality of "I" in English sentence structures ;)

Caleb and I talked together about poetry vs. prose, translations, and Rilke's role in the novel. To start off, here is what our barometer statement would have been - I'm curious to see what people would say to it:

Poetry conveys a more raw experience than prose.

For me, I had two main take aways from the Hungry Tide, one was the importance of considering how people and nature live together and the second was not judging someone's character by what's on the surface.