Apr

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Prose And Cons.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

April 1, 2008 |

Kicking off the 12th annual National Poetry Month…

Several years ago a college friend of mine entered a poetry contest and won. He called one of our professors to tell him the news. The professor was excited and said, “That’s wonderful. I’ll put a note about it in the department newsletter.”

At that point my friend added, “By the way, it was a prose poem.”

The professor was silent for a moment then said, “I’ll leave that part out.”

Before I go any further, let me quote The Teachers And Writers Handbook Of Poetic Forms: “As its name suggests, the prose poem is a cross between prose and poetry. It looks like prose but it reads like poetry without rhyme or a set rhythm.” I realize prose poems probably no longer need defending. In fact things may have gone too far the other way. Prose poems may have become too accepted. My friend felt frustrated; he spent a lot of time talking to other poets and professors, trying to defend the prose poem as a legitimate form. If free verse can dispense with rhyme and regular metrics, why not take it one step further and throw out line breaks as well? Almost thirty years ago some critics were outraged when Charles Simic’s The World Doesn’t End won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Their response was, essentially, how can this be poetry? There’s a certain irony in the fact that Simic is currently serving as the Poet Laureate of the United States.

rebelangels.jpgOf course there are poets and critics who take the definition of poetry one step further. Formalism, which has its own magazines and even collections like Rebel Angels: 25 Poets Of The New Formalism, edited by Mark Jarman and David Mason, but Formalism is easy. Write a sonnet, a villanelle, or even blank verse and presto! You’re a Formalist.

The prose poem is harder because it’s not so easily defined. What separates the prose poem from the short story or the fable? Robert Frost, when asked, “What is poetry?” answered, “Poetry is what poets write.” Is it that simple? Is a prose poem a piece of prose written by a poet? Is a prose poem only a prose poem if it’s called one? Peter Johnson, who edited five volumes of The Prose Poem: An International Journal, in his introduction to The Best Of The Prose Poem clearly struggled with the issue, saying, “For every definitive statement I make on the genre, I recognize the prescriptive flaw in that statement, so that when pontificating on the prose poem, I feel like one of the Three Stooges, alternately slapping myself in the face with each hand”. He then turns to critics and prose poem writers, starting with Russel Edson, but also E.M. Cioran, Schlegel, Simic, and others. (You can read the entire introduction here.)

He also mentions Michael Benedikt’s first anthology of the prose poem, The Prose Poem: An International Anthology, published in 1976. Sadly out of print, this anthology was plundered by Stuart Friebert and David Young for their excellent 1995 anthology Models Of The Universe, which also added newer prose poems by Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Carolyn Forche.

The problem for the prose poem is that, because it’s essentially formless, it has to exist in a context. Outside of a poetry collection or poetry magazine a prose poem isn’t necessarily a prose poem anymore. I’m not trying to be pejorative by comparing the prose poem to a urinal, but when Duchamp signed a urinal and stuck it in a museum he took a utilitarian object and turned it into a piece of art. For most of us a urinal isn’t art, even more than ninety years after Duchamp pulled his stunt. What mattered was the context. The problem for writers of prose poems is that the prose poem itself is an act of rebellion, but for there to be rebellion there must be something to rebel against. When Baudelaire wrote Le Spleen de Paris, his collection of prose poems, he was rebelling against the prevailing aesthetic of the day. If prose poems are accepted, if they’re part of the establishment, they’ll get lost; they’ll cease to be. Writers of prose poems, asked to define their work, might end up saying, “There’s no such thing.”

Here’s a great prose poem by Peter Johnson:

Just Listen

I sit by the window and watch a great mythological bird go down in flames. In fact, it’s a kite the neighborhood troublemaker has set on fire. Twenty-one and still living at home, deciding when to cut through a screen and chop us into little pieces. “He wouldn’t hurt a fly,” his mother would say, as they packed our parts into black antiseptic body bags. I explain this possibility to the garbage men. I’m trying to make friends with them, unable to understand why they leave our empty cans in the middle of the driveway, then laugh as they walk away. One says, “Another name for moving air is wind, and shade is just a very large shadow”—perhaps a nice way to make me feel less eclipsed. It’s not working, it’s not working. I’m scared for children yet to be abducted, scared for the pregnant woman raped at knife point on the New Jersey Turnpike, scared for what violence does to one’s life, how it squats inside the hollow heart like a dead cricket. My son and his friends found a dead cricket, coffined it in a plastic Easter egg and buried it in the backyard. It was a kind of time capsule, they explained—a surprise for some future boy archeologist, someone much happier than us, who will live during a time when trees don’t look so depressed, and birds and dogs don’t chatter and growl like the chorus in an undiscovered Greek tragedy.

from Eduardo And “I”


Comments

1 Comment so far

  1. Book ‘Em: Train Of Thought. :: Just Write on April 7, 2008 1:00 am

    [...] prose poem is as much about style as it is form. As I’ve said previously, a prose poem may be more defined by context than any formal structure. I used to think of the opening section as yet another defense of the [...]

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