Personism (4. 25.18)

I asked the Wednesdays@One group to write "personist poems," or rather, poems in the Frank O'Hara style of "personism."  This project turned out to be more complicated than I imagined, given the straightforwardness and surface qualities of many of O'Hara's poems.

I began with this summary of the style, culled from various sources:

From Personism: A Manifesto[1]

“I’m not saying that I don’t have practically the most lofty ideas of anyone writing today, but what difference does that make?  They’re just ideas.  The only good thing about it [writing the so-called open or ‘naked’ poetry] is that when I get lofty enough I’ve stopped thinking and that’s when refreshment arrives.[2]

But how can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them.  Improves them for what?  For death?  Why hurry them along?  Too many poets act like middle-aged potatoes with drippings (tears).  I don’t give a damn whether they eat or not.  Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete).  Nobody should experience anything they don’t need to, if they don’t need poetry bully for them. . . [regarding technical matters] if you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you.  There’s nothing metaphysical about it. . . .

Abstraction in poetry, which Allen [Ginsberg] recently commented on in It Is, is intriguing.  I think it appears mostly in the minute particulars where decision is necessary.  Abstraction (in poetry, not in painting) involves personal removal by the poet.  For instance, the decision involved in the choice between ‘the nostalgia of the infinite’ and ‘the nostalgia for the infinite’ defines an attitude towards degree of abstraction.[3]  The nostalgia of the infinite representing the greater degree of abstraction, removal, and negative capability (as in Keats and Mallarmé).  Personism, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody knows about, interests me a great deal, being so totally opposed to this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry.  Personism is to Wallace Stevens what la poésie pure was to Béranger.  Personism has nothing to do with philosophy, it’s all art.[4]  It does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it!  But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet’s feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person.  That’s part of Personism.  It was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones [Amiri Baraka] on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (no Roi, by the way, a blond).[5]  I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person.  While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and Personism was born.  It’s a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents.  It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified.  The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages.  In all modesty, I confess that it may be the death of literature as we know it.  While I have certain regrets, I am still glad I got there before Alain Robbe-Grillet did.[6]  Poetry being quicker and surer than prose, it is only just that poetry finish literature off. . .

What can we expect of Personism? . . . Everything, but we won’t get it.  It is too new, too vital a movement to promise anything.  But it, like Africa, is on the way.  The recent propagandists for technique on the one hand, and for content on the other, had better watch out.”

─ September 3, 1959

This famous manifesto I supported with an analysis of an O'Hara poem and discussion of the style from Stephen Burt.  First, the poem:

Embarrassing Bill

              —      Frank O’Hara (1960-62)

Bill is sounding so funny there in the bathtub like a walrus

he is very talkative and smelling like a new rug in a store window

how pleasant it is to think of Bill in there, half-submerged, listening

and when he comes to the door to get some more cologne he is just like a pane of glass

in a modernistic church, sort of elevated and lofty and substantial

well, if that isn’t your idea of god, what is?

in these times one is very lucky to get a bath at all, much less

have someone cheerful come over and help themselves to one in your tub

I like to have all the rooms full and I just hope that Bill will get bigger

and bigger and bigger and pretty soon I’ll have to get a whole house

or I could always find a pedestal with central heating perhaps

in case he wants to write his poems standing up

                                                                             now, Bill, use your own towel

Then, the discussion:

“Every poem is or could be a ‘Personal Poem’ (an O’Hara title), with an ‘I’ and a ‘you,’ and a hope, not that Heaven will favor the poet, but that ‘one person out of the 8,000,000 is / thinking of me’ . . . The Personist poem . . . makes the reader a nearly intimate equal. (It’s tempting to see Personism, the style, as a reaction to Confessionalism, except that O’Hara invented his own style first.) . . . “Plenty of poets have learned from O’Hara, and they’re not shy about saying so: how to emulate the exhilarating life of happy crowds, how to make poems that sound like New York, how to make words acknowledge the accomplishments of abstract visual art, how to ‘let our guard down’ (yes, those are scare quotes), and how to emulate the energetic representational practice of post-abstract painters such as Larry Rivers.”

 —Stephen Burt, writing in www.poets.org in 2005

But everybody had problems grasping the idea of personism (acknowledged: I have always struggled with it, despite my admiration for the style and gesture of an O'Hara poem).  Reviewing everybody's contribution to this project, I tried to work out my own lack of understanding . . .

Personism Re-cap

Good morning all.  In my humble opinion, yesterday’s conversation about so-called Personism was less fruitful than other Wednesdays@One topics.  At least it left me a bit unsatisfied, and so I spent the day yesterday thinking about why.  Obviously, nobody read a “personist” effort without caveats and I think this is because none of us feels all that comfortable with our understanding of “Personism.”  I think we all have two questions about it and both those questions are rhetorical: 1) What is it? And 2) Who cares?

My own contribution, “Hiroshi: A Personism,” is highly self-conscious in a hackneyed, mimicky sort of way.  It’s trying too hard to be a personist poem.  In the end, it gives up and turns serious, dips below the surface to some more sober, deeper meaning (even if just implied) that of course is implicated in the overall failure: I mean, what else are you going to make of such criminally bad lines as “Beyond reason.  Like clay, like clay . . .”?   And so I think that’s one thing about so-called Personism that might be leaving all of us feeling a bit underwhelmed or even embarrassed when we encounter it.  It is selfie poetry, meaning, insincere.  In Personist poetry, neither the writer nor the person addressed is all that relevant; they are merely occasions for creating the Lucky Pierre of the poem itself.  If you are familiar with Action Painting—a style prevalent when O’Hara wrote his “Manifesto”—then you might have an idea about Personism and its focus.

Janet’s poem, “What’s in a name?” is not personist by any means.  This does not mean it’s a bad poem.  In fact, I think it was the best of the lot yesterday qua poem.  Had she written that for our allusion project . . .  well, let’s just say that it exhibits all the subtlety of good allusion poetry: a shared cultural knowledge that the writer can expect from her reader (Although Janet certainly didn’t get the understanding from us yesterday, that’s on us, not her poem!  And she even capitalized OSWALD THREE times!!!)  That bit about the rifle and rolled-up newspaper is brilliant.  But in the end, it’s too meaningful, with too much depth for the rococo of a personist poem, and it’s addressed to somebody she obviously doesn’t know at all, another “not-a-personism” characteristic.

Margaret’s “For reasons not worth mentioning” is, in my opinion, too sly to be “personist,” beginning with that title.  Which is not to say it’s not a poem and not a good poem, because it is a poem, and a good one.  I’ll admit right here and now that I stay clear of dog poems, for reasons which I think Margaret’s poem makes clear: the sentimental.  (A sin that Mary Oliver commits with abandon, and has built a successful career of).  But Margaret’s poem doesn’t come off as sentimental at all and herein lies the slyness, I think.  The paragraph above the separate closing line (the tail?) is so understated in its concern and worry and sorrow that I long to take on the pain and struggle of Rupert myself, so as to relieve him of it.  It’s a case of “if I could take your place . . .”  The image entailed by the one-and-a-half lines, “as his nails scraped the too-steep metal ramp,” is beyond mere sentiment and, for me at least, gets to the grim resolve to lessen someone’s or something’s burden that all people who feel any kind of responsibility and compassion must feel.  Margaret’s is one of those poems—not a personist thing, mind you—that we readers can learn from.  I think I agree with Janet, though; for this to be rendered more in the personist style, the poem would have to incorporate parts of the actual telephone conversation that its title implies.  Chat about the weather or what’s for dinner or the damn laundry or a missed movie or whatever, stuff that’s perfectly un-apropos to the subject of Rupert’s public bath. 

Bennet’s “Meeting a Roving Troubadour” is a sweet poem without being treacly, a sensitively captured moment in time that is all the more sensitive for its apparent serendipity (I mean, he was just there to have coffee . . .).  By now I think we know what Bennett is capable of in the heart department.  Those lines, “And sang to me / Because he had to” just knock me out!  These are, after giving it some thought last night, maybe another instance of what Personism accomplishes, what the “personist style” engages: bravery, courage, honesty to express the face-value of what’s right there before your eyes.  By this I don’t mean the guy with the guitar playing for Bennett, nor do I mean the fact of Bennett allowing himself to be played to.  No, the lucky Pierre of this poem is the courage Bennett summoned while drafting the poem to make that statement in the first place, right there in the poem: “And sang to me / Because he had to.”  Think about the nerve, the bravery required to say such a passionate thing in a poem!  And stating it so forthrightly, without dripping sentiment, almost as a fact of life, makes the lines all the more striking.  The other great lines?  “But I don’t have to be him,” and, now that I’ve had an evening to consider its ambiguity, the closing line “words / Waiting to become flesh” rings biblical and human and artful all at the same time.  I said yesterday that I didn’t think Frank O’Hara would have written the last line.  Let me amend that notion: I don’t think Frank O’Hara could conceive such passion or complexity in a poem.  It wasn’t his style.

I agree with the general assessment of Eric’s poem, “Reminders”: the “older version” is the better.  Janet observed that there is more power in the stanza approach, and I agree with that and for the same reasons—it creates a rhythm and a kind of “return” from thought to thought that leads you through an intensely personal recall.  This intense personal recall, as I think Eric acknowledged yesterday, is not Personism per se, probably because it is so intense; there’s nothing rococo about it.  O’Hara and his crowd probably would reject the notion of poetry as personal therapy (a.k.a. 20^th Century Western catharsis, viz. Modernist angst vs. neo-Romantic individualism vs. American rococo; see below): where Eric finds meaning in every object left behind (meaning and calculation, design and message), the so-called personist poets would see, or try to see, only the object.  That’s hard to do, which I think is one conclusion we all came to yesterday.  I know that I did.  The poem contains at least some “personist” gestures; for example, the stepping-back-from-the-text gesture of “Now that’s a little bitter-- / and a little better.”  The personist thing about those lines, I think, is the role they play in the poem: the writer simply incorporates a portion of his internal editor right into the poem itself, á la Action Painting style.

Why should this particular subject feel so unrewarding to talk about?  It may be because we (I, anyway) are programmed to think about poetry as a) some sort of depth charge of meaning that explodes only under the surface, b) a shamanistic or oracular utterance whose meaning is never self-evident, c) a serious and sober use of language or engagement with experience.  I suppose I could go on, but you get the idea: the style of poetry associated with writers like Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, James Laughlin and, probably most like O’Hara, James Schuyler (see his book A Few Days), we think of as “mere” surface, ever self-evident, and frivolous.  We think of it—or at least I think of it, way down deep (that’s a joke)—as American rococo.

Now there’s a thought: the rococo in America.  We (i.e., everybody attending Wednesdays@One) come to American poetry via Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, Pound, Lowell, Sexton, Plath, Berryman—my shelves sag under them!—all Big Thinkers, Alcoholics, Recluses, and/or Suicides.  That’s the foundation of the American poetic voice.  World War II comes and goes and leaves America a changed nation politically, economically, diplomatically and, more meaningful to us, culturally.  New foundation called for.  The American poetry community’s response, as we discussed yesterday, can be traced through two movements.  One is the more or less neo-Neoclassicism of “American rococo” where the entire subject of discussion, poetically speaking, is a snipped lock of hair (see Pope’s The Rape of the Lock) or a shoe flying off the foot of a girl on a swing (see Watteau’s painting, The Swing).  Consider this style a rejection of the bombs and genocides and annihilation of the WWII-and-after environment.  Personism would then be a branch of that rejection. 

And the other is the more or less neo-Romanticism of American poetry throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the earth-movement poetry, the Iron John movement poetry, the poetry of an individual’s deeply personal engagement with and responsibility for experience, especially through the medium of Nature.  I mentioned Donald Hall’s famous anthology, Contemporary American Poetry, published in 1962, as the opening of the gate onto this very American world.  Margaret mentioned Hayden Carruth’s omnibus anthology, The Voice That Is Great Within Us, which is a continuation, I think, of that neo-American Romantic style.  But as far as Personism is concerned, the thrust (no pun intended here) is into that notion of everything is all right, even the bad stuff is all right, and the glory is in the surface, and in fact, there is only the surface.  Everything else is illusion and silly navel-gazing. 

So the questions remain, for me anyway.  Is “Personism” a legitimate thing in poetry?  Yes, I think so.  Is it a style?  Absolutely!  A movement (requiring a manifesto)?  Nope.  A literary form?  Nope.  Is sentiment allowed in it?  All too often!  Can anybody really write it?  No, not just anybody.

---

[1] In The New Naked Poetry: Recent American Poetry in Open Forms, eds. Stephen Berg and Robert Mezey. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1976.

[2] Think of “lofty” in these sense as being “beat” or “ecstatic” or otherwise engaged with the poem and its subject instead of with convention, literary fashion, academic rule, etc.

[3] A poem is a record of minute choices made by its maker.

[4] A poem is a made thing that is essentially about itself, meaning, self-referential.

[5] Likely a reference to Joe LeSeuer, O’Hara’s longtime confidant, roommate and sometime lover; also a memoirist of the two men’s lives together.  Died in 2001.  Also might be a reference to Vincent Warren, another of O’Hara’s lovers at the time around which he coined the term.

[6] French avant-garde writer.

Welcome to the Six Month Roadhouse (4.18.18)

We’ve come as far as this roadhouse. Time to stop for gas and maybe some lunch. In fact, let’s tarry in the book room, pour ourselves something warm and bracing, throw another log on the fire, and have a natter about where we’ve been, what we’ve seen and experienced so far. Let’s plan the next segment (we can ditch the itinerary for something completely different or we can reaffirm it), turn in, and get an early start in the morning.

Six months ago, when this seminar began, the original members of Wednesdays@One agreed on a set of goals:

To appreciate the elasticity of language

• To work with words as things (sounds, muscle-movements, rhythms) that can be shaped in different ways
• To be, simply, makers of poems rather than “poets” or even “writers”
• To experiment (with ideas, words and sentences, thoughts and feelings)

At the “six-month roadhouse” let’s stop for a while to ponder these goals anew.*

• Have we kept them in mind at all?
• Assuming that we have, at least part of the time,
• Have we accomplished any of these goals?
• If so, in what ways & what has been our individual and collective experience?
• Are we better today at writing poems than we were six months ago?
• Are we better readers?
• Do we talk with more confidence, more authoritatively, about poems and poetry?
• Has our conception of “good,” “bad,” “successful” changed in any way?
• If we were asked “What is a poem? What is poetry?” today, would our ensuing conversation be different now than six months ago?
• Where do we go from here?

The challenge: ponder anew the goals, and then think about some or all of the questions ahead of next week’s session. Then let’s devote that session to exploring where we’ve been, what we’ve gotten from the itinerary so far, and where we’d all like to go over the next six months.

In the meantime, just to give you something to kick-start your thinking, I attach two poems . . .

Waiting for Icarus

—Muriel Rukeyser (1973)

He said he would be back and we’d drink wine together

He said that everything would be better than before

He said that we were on the edge of a new relation

He said he would never again cringe before his father

He said that he was going to invent full-time

He said he loved me that going into me

He said was going into the world and the sky

He said all the buckles were very firm

He said the wax was the best wax

He said Wait for me here on the beach

He said Just don’t cry

I remember the gulls and the waves

I remember the islands going dark on the sea

I remember the girls laughing

I remember they said he only wanted to get away from me

I remember mother saying: Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot

I remember she told me those who try out inventions are worse

I remember she added: Women who love such are the worst of all

I have been waiting all day, or perhaps longer.

I would have liked to try those wings myself.

It would have been better than this.

----

I Want to Be Stark [Like]

—Leah Umansky (The New York Times Magazine, April 8, 2018)

A man is only worth what people say he is,

and those Starks are good stock. They’ll knee-deep it.

They famish the craving they are fathered by.

Manning the forestry of life, they are steadfast and sturdy.

When pungent or cruel, they sauce the ache.

Light folds them in two.

What I want to say is, I would meet you upon this.

Let me, too, carry the token of the world.

Tell me the secret of what comes next,

and then take me

river     river     river

* A good idea since we’ve picked up a couple of hitchhikers along the way!

The Sonnet (4.10.18)

Who among us assumes at least the following about the “sonnet”?

• 14 lines
• Iambic pentameter, though tetrameter is acceptable
• A rhyme scheme, most likely abab cdcd efef gg

In other words, we assume the sonnet is a form set by more or less rigidly subscribed-to technical rules governing number of lines, line length & rhythm, and rhyme.  The purists among us might go so far as to insist that a sonnet line is restricted to ten syllables.

Some of us may go a little farther and assume the following as “natural” to the sonnet:

• Topics: life, love, death, human frailty, impermanence, the inexorable march of time
• Sweep of thought: from ignorance or confusion to understanding, from question to insight, from proposition to conclusion
• Tone: ironic (especially the self-deprecating kind of irony)

It might help to understand that the word “sonnet,” which the Italians used as early as the 12^th Century, means literally “little song” & comes from the Latin root sonus, meaning sound.  I would have liked those old poets!  Poetry begins in and as sound!  As Curt and Margaret rightly observed, both Dante and Petrarch practiced sonnets, though in Dante’s case we should probably handcuff the word in this way: “sonnet.”  I am not familiar with his Canzoniere (songs) but in La Vita Nuova (LVN), as Curt noted, he writes “sonnets” to Beatrice.  But he treats his poems first as “songs” rather than “sonnets” as we understand them traditionally. Sometimes he calls them “sonnets,” but sometimes “ballads” and even “roundelays.”  What’s more, in LVN there are “double sonnets,” which are “sonnets” with shorter lines interwoven, often as internal commentary (Dante is famous for this) and resulting in poems with as many as 20 lines.  Which is to say, “sonnet” for Dante meant “song” or, literally, “little song,” but not necessarily 14 lines of iambic pentameter rhyming abba/abba-cde/cde.  For him “sonnet” was a rhetorical form in which you could posit a theme or an argument or opinion etc. and then at the “turn” (called a “volta”) deliver a solution/conclusion/resolution.  Rhyme was of course part of the formula.  It was Petrarch who popularized or codified the form that we know today as “sonnet.”  

From Petrarch forward until at least the moderns, maybe later, the “sonnet” grew increasingly calcified in terms of its formal elements: 14 lines of iambic pentameter rendered in exactly 10 syllables; an abba/abba-cde/cde rhyme scheme (with some room for wiggle into an English form: abab-cdcd-efef-gg) and covering themes more or less “suitable” to the form (love, death, etc.).  Needless to say, sonnets written to this formula in 1940 looked an awful lot like sonnets written in 1540, and sounded about as fresh as a 400 year old poem, too.  You can still encounter them today among writers of sonnets who a) subscribe to the formula out of some traditionalist fellow-feeling, b) keep copies of Swinburne and Longfellow on the shelf and nothing more current, and/or c) submit poems to journals like The American Aesthetic, which regularly runs sonnet contests (and insists on 14 lines, iambic pentameter, 10 syllables per line, and at least abab-cdcd-efef-gg rhyme; and the rhymes must be exact {also called perfect}, not near, slant, off, or even “visual” {rough/cough}).

For the most part, though, today the rules are much more relaxed.  Sonnets usually retain the 14-line requirement, and sometimes the 5-foot or 5-beat metrical line, though strict iambic meter is no longer de rigeur.  In the modern “tradition,” it has been for many years enough just to gesture toward the sonnet form, in the way a modernist painting “echoes” earlier periods (and architecture, too).  The Denise Levertov poem below is an example.  So are several other poems that follow, including those that don’t actually contain 14 lines, but “move” like a sonnet (e.g., statement of problem in first paragraph, resolution in second).  

Here are some poems that approach or diverge from, more or less, the classical form we have come to know in English lit as “sonnet”:

Sunday Afternoon

—Denise Levertov (1961)

After the First Communion

and the banquet of mangoes and

bridal cake, the young daughters

of the coffee merchant lay down

for a long siesta, and their white dresses

lay beside them in quietness

and the white veils floated

In their dreams as the flies buzzed.

But as the afternoon

burned to a close they rose

and ran about the neighbourhood

among the halfbuilt villas

alive, alive, kicking a basketball, wearing

other new dresses, of bloodred velvet.

Sonnet[1]

—Billy Collins (2001)

All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now,

and after this one just a dozen

to launch a little ship on love’s storm-tossed seas,

then only ten more left like rows of beans.

How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan

and insist the iambic bongos must be played

and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines,

one for every station of the cross.

But hang on here while we make the turn

into the final six where all will be resolved,

where longing and heartache will find an end,

where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen,

take off those crazy medieval tights,

blow out the lights, and come at last to bed.

Sonnet #73

—William Shakespeare (15__?)

That time of year thou may’st in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see’st the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west,

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see’st the glowing of a fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the deathbed whereon it doth expire,

Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.

This thou perceive’st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ’ere long.

On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday

—Frank O’Hara (1964)

Quick! a last poem before I go

off my rocker. Oh Rachmaninoff!

Onset, Massachusets. Is it the fig-newton

playing the horn? Thundering windows

of hell, will your tubes ever break

into powder? Oh my palace of oranges,

junk shop, staples, umber, basalt;

I’m a child again when I was really

miserable, a grope pizzicato. My pocket

of rhinestone, yoyo, carpenter’s pencil,

amethyst, hypo, campaign button,

is the room full of smoke? Shit

on the soup, let it burn. So it’s back.

You’ll never be mentally sober.

Surviving

—Ruth Stone (2002)

I speak to you who are still loath to answer,

out of the flagella of my cells. I hear distant flutterings,

bird whistles and the sky’s wet slough

dissolving into fragments, shadows that were.

You who are always sinking into must,

stripping back, the gaud of skeletons,

cum of molecules, kiss of gas;

the exact never to be repeated form gone slack.

Now it is spring. Again it is that time you hung yourself.

Which self among you silenced all the rest?

Your psyche splintered selves, one for each year;

myself, who was, went with you into dust.

Now I am the simple who rose up and lived;

each day a blank, each night a catacomb.

The Spelling

—Simon Armitage (2006)

I left a spelling at my father’s house

written in small coins on his front step.

It said which star I was heading for next,

which channel to watch, which button to press.

I should have waited, given that spelling

a voice, but I was handsome and late.

While I was gone he replied with pebbles

and leaves at my gate. But a storm got up

from the west, sluicing all meaning and shape.

I keep his broken spelling in a tin,

tip it out onto the cellar floor, hoping

a letter or even a word might form.

And I am all grief, staring through black space

to meet his eyes, trying to read his face.

Notes from a Lover Who Hanged

—James Gainesborough of the City (n.d.)

It was Judgement Day, and naked I stood

God: Here you are, hero, so wicked smart

And here are your works, salacious and tart

You are judged, you know, by your bad and good

And what you couldn’t help and what you could

And who you hurt with head and heart

Now look for your head cause these poems are a part

Why I might knock you down with the Holy Rood.

Me: You spit on clouds and lightning hits the land

Father, I’ve never been any but Your own son

But if my songs more clunked than clanged

And I’m knocked to the Pit by Your Holy Hand

Call my life just Notes from a Lover Who Hanged.

Henry Moore in Arcadia

—Y.T. (1997)

“Weeks in the workroom watching the blackbirds eat,

Days in the haymaker’s field as the sun flies out of the sky.”

Yes, some things must be eaten, the rest you paint over.

Everything as if balances out in formulations of as if

just to convince our bellies not to acknowledge the difference.

Orange teeth are painted from the inside out and so

the prospect of the field of limes and of the national bank.

The blackbirds show how every conquest is Norman,

even the painterly, completed by stroke or fell-swoop.

Eats the mildest air of summer, the seeds of the mulberry,

rinses with a ’73, but walks resolutely into the vineyard

grumbling because not one soul has visited in three months

of written documentation. Grumbles and does not work or works

only of shade and light.  Nothing with any stamina, anyway.

---

[1] This one is rightly called a meta-sonnet. 

The Prose Poem (4.4.18)

“Prose” “Poem”: maybe this is the right way to characterize the form!  According to contributors to Wikipedia, the prose poem has been with us in one form or another since the 17^th Century, when it was practiced as “haibun” in Japan.  Haibun is a form of poetry that mingles prose elements with poetic.  A haibun develops a lyrical/narrative theme in a short-to-medium length paragraph to which a traditional hai-ku is appended at the end.  Bashō practiced the form. 

The prose poem was practiced throughout Europe in the 19^th Century, particularly by the French so-called Surrealists (Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé) who looked for ways to rebel against French traditional forms, particularly the Alexandrine line (six metrical feet, strictly) and to open up the poetic experience to stream of consciousness, the unconscious, the unorthodox.  Some Americans living in Europe practiced it: Gertrude Stein; while other American expatriates rejected it, vehemently: T.S. Eliot.

The form didn’t really grab writers’ and readers’ attention in the United States until the 1950s.  Ginsberg, Ashbery, Bly, and others picked it up again as a vehicle for rebelling against the “norms” of lyrical and narrative poetry of the day.  Today, prose poetry is recognized as a sub-genre of either poetry or prose, a kind of hybrid form with one foot in both camps.

All of the above is cribbed from the “prose poem” entry in Wikipedia.  It tells us only so much.  Thinking about, discussing, trying to write prose poems will be a good way to explore the form, and, for that matter, the “poem-ness” of a poem, so maybe we can begin with some questions . . .

• How does a poem differ from a piece of prose—lines/lineation?  rhyme?  meter?  Will a prose writing scan?
• What features do poems and prose share?  Narrative?  “Paragraph” structure?  Plot and character?  Dialogue?  Description?  Denouement?
• Do poems and prose “naturally” address different kinds of topics?
• What about tone—do poems and prose writing establish distinct voices, tones?
• Where does fiction fit into this scheme?  Where does it not?

Poetry as we know it traditionally, can be direct, ironic, allusive, and cryptic; it can deal in the surreal, the symbolic, the sublime and the profane.  It can be compressed and lyrical to the point of obscureness.  Because of its lineated form, often enough, poetry has the ability to turn sharply from one expression or thought to another, without warning.  It can aggregate and it can juxtapose.  It can employ non sequitur or logical progression. 

Prose poetry, throughout much of its history—in the West, anyway—has been associated mostly with only one literary figure: the surreal.  It’s hard to find a prose poem today that doesn’t in some way violate the norms or boundaries of “common sense” on its way to some higher reality.  Here are a few examples:

 The Everyday Enchantment of Music

—Mark Strand

A rough sound was polished until it became a smoother sound, which was polished until it became music. Then the music was polished until it became the memory of a night in Venice when tears of the sea fell from the Bridge of Sighs, which in turn was polished until it ceased to be and in its place stood the empty home of a heart in trouble. Then suddenly there was sun and the music came back and traffic was moving and off in the distance, at the edge of the city, a long line of clouds appeared, and there was thunder, which, however menacing,  would become music, and the memory of what happened after Venice would begin, and what happened after the home of the troubled heart broke in two would also begin.

The Field of Rooms and Halls

—Richard Siken

1.

A man found a door and hung it on the wall.

I think he thought in rectangles, each day’s bright panel pushed one against the next, a calendar of light. He would paint them, all these days, and hang them out of order: an unreliable hotel where no one ever knew which rooms were his, which rooms he had actually been inside of. There were gaps, of course, and sometimes overlaps: days too small to fill their slots, days too large for the day to hold them. And days, no matter what their size, that leaked into the next. A leaky day is a dangerous thing. January and her thirty-two rooms.

Sadness

—Michael Prihoda, in Unbroken Journal, March 2015

You couldn’t handle the way I talked about sadness. As if my parents had said anything else while baby-talking me in the cradle. But I couldn’t handle you, so I guess it’s fair. If anything is anymore.

Please Describe How You Became a Writer

—Naomi Shihab Nye, in Double Room Journal, W/S 2005 at www.doubleroomjournal.com

Possibly I began writing as a refuge from our insulting first grade textbook. Come, Jane, come. Look, Dick, look. Were there ever duller people in the world? You had to tell them to look at things? Why weren’t they looking to begin with?

Maar I

—Trina Burke, in Double Room Journal, Summer 2009

He begins to flourish aggressively and his competitors drop away. More honored in the breach, he is given the center aisle, is preferred seat. The others line up along the wall. This game may require a bold gesture, like hailing a cab. Gleam of watch with diamonds in place of numbers. They cultivate alliances, initiate ampersands: Ninety-five million angles to take in this bazaar. Objet d’art. Self-mutilator. Double-breasted postwar contemporary. A Dora Maar au Chat. When the fight is over, he passes out Cohibas, shakes hands. Imminent Moët. The glory hounds know when to applaud. Whose purchase, whose hammer? He leans over to his neighbor, fingering the laser-engraved buttons of his jacket: Just lay back and try not to create a fevered atmosphere.

Still, it’s easy to find prose poems that partake of exactly the structures (including lineation), figures, and moods that so-called poetry exercises.  In fact, the above ought to tell you that the prose poem isn’t restricted to treating of the surreal.  It can deal in the selfie-type confessional narrative, the political (class-conscious) attack, the literary/art cultural allusion, the joke.  All with more or less success and appeal, depending on your point of view.

Reading prose poetry is one way to gain an understanding of it.  So I recommend a couple of easy (and rewarding) places to start:

• www.unbrokenjournal.com/
• www.doubleroomjournal.com (by far the better resource for contemporary prose poetry)
• Mark Strand, Almost Invisible, Alfred A. Knopf, 2012
• Micro Fiction: An Anthology of Really Short Stories, Jerome Stern, ed. W.W. Norton, 1996
  

And here is a short bibliography, borrowed from Wikipedia, on writing about prose poetry, in case you’re interested . . .

Robert Alexander, C.W. Truesdale, and Mark Vinz. "The Party Train: A Collection of North American Prose Poetry." New Rivers Press, 1996.
Michel Delville, "The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre." Gainesville, FL: University of Florida, 1998
Stephen Fredman, "Poet’s Prose: The Crisis in American Verse." 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Ray Gonzalez, "No Boundaries: Prose Poems by 24 American Poets." Tupelo Press, 2003.
David Lehman, "Great American prose poems: from Poe to the present." Simon & Schuster, 2003
Jonathan Monroe, "A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre." Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987.
Margueritte S. Murphy, "A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem from Wilde to Ashbery." Amherst, Mass.: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.
Zygmunt Szweykowski, Twórczość Bolesława Prusa (The Art of Bolesław Prus), 2nd ed., Warsaw, Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1972.

And now, how about a project?  Shall we try to write a prose poem?  “Well, by all means, Mr. Clark!  Let’s do or die!”  Okay, then, one prose poem each for next week!