Apr

7

Book ‘Em: Train Of Thought.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

April 7, 2008 |

There are a lot of excellent prose poem anthologies, but one of my favorites is The Party Train: A Collection Of North American Prose Poetry. Although the prose poem has its origins with Baudelaire and Aloysius Bertrand, The Party Train demonstrates just how well writers in English have been able to use, adapt, transform, bend, fold, spindle, and mutilate the form for their own purposes. After three separate introductions by editors C.W. Truesdale, Robert Alexander, and Mark Vinz, the book opens with Pathfinders and Desperadoes, early writers of the prose poem. It includes some of the usual suspects–Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams–but also includes some unusual ones: Hawthorne, Thoreau, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Sherwood Anderson. Wait a minute. Are they even poets? Well, possibly a 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 prose poem; like the anthologies The Prose Poem and Models Of The Universe, I thought, including big names was a way of saying, “Look, prose poems are real! Hawthorne wrote them!” Having read this anthology through and then dipped into it several more times, though, I think the editors were just having a little fun pushing the limits of genre.

While the opening section is organized chronologically, the main body of more modern writers is organized alphabetically, which is a nice, egalitarian way to structure an anthology. It also means that editors Mark Vinz and C.W. Truesdale, who have prose poems of their own included, are right next to each other, although fellow editor Robert Alexander, who’s also included, comes much earlier in the table of contents. Also included are some pretty heavy hitters: Carolyn Forchè, Donald Hall, W.S. Merwin, and Maxine Chernoff are included along with less well-known but equally good writers. The anthology’s title is taken from a very funny prose poem by poet and dance critic Jack Anderson…but you’ll have to find the book if you want to read it.


Comments

1 Comment so far

  1. free funny poems on April 8, 2008 2:06 pm

    Very interesting article, learned new things..nice..

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