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!