Prose Poetry

An Introduction

Paul Hetherington, Cassandra Atherton

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691212135
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

An engaging and authoritative introduction to an increasingly important and popular literary genre Prose Poetry is the first book of its kind—an engaging and authoritative introduction to the history, development, and features of English-language prose poetry, an increasingly important and popular literary form that is still too little understood and appreciated. Poets and scholars Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton introduce prose poetry's key characteristics, chart its evolution from the nineteenth century to the present, and discuss many historical and contemporary prose poems that both demonstrate their great diversity around the Anglophone world and show why they represent some of today's most inventive writing.A prose poem looks like prose but reads like poetry: it lacks the line breaks of other poetic forms but employs poetic techniques, such as internal rhyme, repetition, and compression. Prose Poetry explains how this form opens new spaces for writers to create riveting works that reshape the resources of prose while redefining the poetic. Discussing prose poetry' s precursors, including William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman, and prose poets such as Charles Simic, Russell Edson, Lydia Davis, and Claudia Rankine, the book pays equal attention to male and female prose poets, documenting women's essential but frequently unacknowledged contributions to the genre.Revealing how prose poetry tests boundaries and challenges conventions to open up new imaginative vistas, this is an essential book for all readers, students, teachers, and writers of prose poetry.

PART 1

BEGINNINGS

CHAPTER 1

Introducing the Prose Poem

PROSE POETRY’S “PROBLEM” OF DEFINITION

The prose poem in English is now established as an important literary form in many countries at a time when the composition and publication of poetry is thriving. While prose poetry is still written and published less often than lineated poetry, notable books of prose poems have been produced—including Mark Strand’s acclaimed volume, The Monument (1978);¹ Charles Simic’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The World Doesn’t End (1989); Luke Kennard’s The Solex Brothers (2005), winner of an Eric Gregory Award; Claudia Rankine’s multi-award-winning, hybrid work, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014); and Eve Joseph’s Quarrels (2018), winner of the Griffin Prize.

Such books demonstrate prose poetry’s capacity to articulate poetic ideas in ways that are conspicuously different from contemporary lineated lyric poetry*— now usually defined as short, sometimes musical forms of poetry that appear to address personal emotions and feelings, often using the first-person voice. However, while poetry generally continues to be recognized as a literary genre highly suited to expressing intense emotion, grappling with the ineffable and the intimate, and while lineated lyric poetry is widely admired for its rhythms and musicality, the main scholarship written about English-language prose poetry to date defines the form as problematic, paradoxical, ambiguous, unresolved, or contradictory. This is despite the fact that a prose poem rarely looks unapproachable, unfinished, or confused. In some instances, the prose poem has even been portrayed as little more than illusory or nonsensical, as in this quotation from poet George Barker:

Like the Loch Ness monster the prose poem is a creature of whose existence we have only very uncertain evidence. Sometimes it seems to appear, like a series of undulating coils, out of the dithyrambs of Walt Whitman; several French critics claim to have taken photographs of this extraordinary beast, and a great many American poets possess tape recordings of the rhapsodies it chants up from the depths of the liberated imagination.²

The common observation that the term “prose poetry” appears to contain a contradiction is not surprising given that poetry and prose are often understood to be fundamentally different kinds of writing. Prose poetry has also been described as “a poem written in prose instead of verse,” characterized as a form that “avails itself of the elements of prose . . . while foregrounding the devices of poetry,” defined in relation to flash fiction and microfiction, and compared to free verse.³ In the first issue of The Prose Poem: An International Journal, the editor and prose poet Peter Johnson states, “Just as black humor straddles the fine line between comedy and tragedy, so the prose poem plants one foot in prose, the other in poetry, both heels resting precariously on banana peels.”⁴

Johnson’s analogy is entertaining and instructive, but the prose poem looks robust rather than precarious and, despite critics’ vacillations, its literary currency is increasing to the extent that a number of new prose poetry anthologies and critical books about prose poetry have been published in recent years, or are in preparation. These include the Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (2020), edited by Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington; the anthologies The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry (2019), edited by Anne Caldwell and Oz Hardwick; A Cast-Iron Aeroplane that Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 Contemporary American Poets on Their Prose Poetry (2019), edited by Peter Johnson; and The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem: From Baudelaire to Anne Carson (2018), edited by Jeremy Noel-Tod. They also include the essay collections The Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem (forthcoming), edited by Mary Ann Caws and Michel Delville, and British Prose Poems: The Poems Without Lines (2018), edited by Jane Monson, also editor of the 2011 anthology This Line Is Not For Turning: An Anthology of Contemporary British Prose Poetry; and, in Australia, a number of small anthologies of prose poetry—including Tract: Prose Poems (2017), Cities: Ten Poets, Ten Cities (2017), Pulse: Prose Poems (2016), and Seam: Prose Poems (2015) (various editors)—linked to the International Prose Poetry Group started in 2014 by the International Poetry Studies Institute at the University of Canberra.⁵ In this book we will discuss a variety of contemporary prose poems, including some from recent anthologies, because it is instructive to examine diverse examples of the form and we are interested in the way prose poetry continues to develop at a rapid pace.⁶

Prose poetry is flourishing for a variety of reasons, one of them being the late twentieth- and twenty-first-century embrace of apparently hybrid or new literary forms. Apart from the prose poem, there are many other examples, including the lyric essay, novels that largely eschew narrative, fictocritical works, poetic memoir, and epistolary works written as poetry. There are also works that demonstrate a multivalent hybridity, such as graphic novels, which include prose poems. We explore the hybrid nature of some prose poems in more detail in later chapters but, generally speaking, the prose poem is one of a number of kinds of literature that appear to possess the characteristics, or use the techniques, of more than one established genre or form. Many of the significant scholars of prose poetry emphasize this point, including Robert Alexander, Michel Delville, Stephen Fredman, Jonathan Monroe, Steven Monte, Margueritte S. Murphy, and Nikki Santilli.⁷

As some of these critics have acknowledged, the apparently thorny issue about how to define the terms “poetry,” “prose,” and “prose poetry” may be due partly to the confusion in many people’s minds between poetry and verse. Santilli notes how in the twentieth century, Roman Jakobson “is able to shift discussion away from a verse/prose dialectic to a more liberal concept of ‘poetry’ that may inhabit verse and nonversified work alike.”⁸ Emmylou Grosser also comments on this distinction with respect to the Hebrew Bible, observing that “the ancient Hebrew poetic texts have been passed down to us in mostly unlineated form.”⁹ She states, “For those who view poetry as . . . identifiable by the concentration of certain poetic features (most of which can also be found in prose), prose and poetry in the Bible are best viewed as the opposing ends of a continuum . . . [while] prose and verse are best viewed as distinct categories.”¹⁰ Such comments provide, in analogical form, a summary of some key features of the contemporary debate about prose poetry.

Disagreement about how to understand the term “poetry” is not new. Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz discusses contention among the ancient Greeks about this matter, noting that Aristotle questioned whether there was an “expression in the Greek tongue to signify poetry proper.”¹¹ Contemporary debates about how to interpret the term “poetry” are sometimes even more vexed than those of the ancient world. Some people understand “poetry” to mean condensed, highly suggestive, and often imagistic writing composed of lines that do not run to the page’s right-hand margin or, if they speak of “verse,” they usually invoke the notion that verse is identifiable by such characteristics as meter and rhyme or other aspects of verse’s formal patterning of language. When people talk of “prose,” they frequently mean something like narrative prose fiction.

Such issues demonstrate how questions of literary genre and form remain slippery and continue to generate much discussion and debate. The early difficulty in categorizing Charles Simic’s volume The World Doesn’t End (1989) provides an example of such slipperiness in practice. The book’s success in winning the Pulitzer Prize for poetry helped to legitimate prose poetry as a form but, reportedly, Simic did not write his works with the prose poem form specifically in mind. It was his editor who negotiated with him in order to make the book more marketable:

I showed [my manuscript] to my editor, who, to my surprise, offered to publish it. Oddly, it was only then that the question of what to call these little pieces came up. “Don’t call them anything,” I told my editor. “You have to call them something,” she explained to me, “so that the bookstore knows under what heading to shelve the book.” After giving it some thought, and with some uneasiness on my part, we decided to call them prose poems.¹²

Despite such ambiguities, it is unsatisfactory to define a significant literary form such as the prose poem primarily in terms of writers’ or critics’ uncertainties. As a significant part of contemporary literature in English, prose poetry deserves a clear, positive characterization of its features and qualities just as, for example, the lineated lyric poem or the novel does. This is especially important because the idea of poetic prose more generally is well established and has a history nearly as old as literature itself. The prose poem may be, in comparison, a new form, but its antecedents are venerable, and the idea that poetry may be written in prose is not anywhere near as radical as some writers suggest.

The Poetry Foundation states that “[t]he definition of a genre changes over time, and a text often interacts with multiple genres,”¹³ which is certainly the case with prose poetry. The Foundation also contends, in the case of genres, and at the broadest level, that the primary candidates are poetry, drama, nonfiction, and fiction. This is a good, straightforward definition and, making use of it, one may understand prose poetry as a separate, identifiable, and distinctive literary form— part of the broad genre of poetry written in the mode of prose. Lewis Turco explores this point:

[In] the Western Judeo-Christian tradition there is ample precedent for writing any of the genres—song, narrative poetry, and dramatic poetry, in either of the modes—prose or verse; therefore, genres do not depend on the modes in which they are written. “Verse,” a mode, is not equivalent to “poetry,” a genre. To ask the question “What is the difference between prose and poetry?” is to compare anchors with bullets.¹⁴

Santilli similarly points out that prose is a mode with certain general characteristics: “[W]hile prose poetry is a genre or form, poetic prose describes a prose style. It is precisely this style that cannot be contained inside the severe perimeters of the prose poem. Prose enacts a continuum, a process that moves the reader and itself inexorably onward (not necessarily forward). Poetic prose facilitates this movement by characteristically florid verbosity. The style of the prose poem, on the other hand, is constrained by a relatively unnatural brevity.”¹⁵

Her discussion of poetic prose and its “florid verbosity” supports the importance of making a clear distinction between the prose poem (as a compressed and concise literary form) and the more general notion of poetic prose. While poetic prose often features an explicit use of elaborate literary figures and an expressively meandering way of moving—often across many pages—the prose poem is necessarily short, often less than one page. Prose poetry is a disciplined form that implicitly asserts and reveals some significant continuities between poetry and prose, making clear that poetry—as well as being written in verse or free verse—may be written in the mode of prose.

The opening of one of the well-known works from Simic’s volume The World Doesn’t End illustrates these distinctions nicely:

We were so poor I had to take the place of the
bait in the mousetrap. All alone in the cellar, I
could hear them pacing upstairs, tossing and turning
in their beds.¹⁶

We discuss this work at greater length in the chapters that follow, but it is useful to note at this juncture that it is written in the mode of prose while inhabiting the genre of poetry, and it takes the form of a prose poem. This is to say that despite conveying a brief narrative, its main meanings derive from the weird, open, and poetic suggestiveness of its imagery. Works such as this one do not constitute a genre in their own right and are best understood as a form of poetry.

PROSAIC POETRY AND POETIC PROSE

Before we discuss the features of prose poetry in more detail, it is worth remembering that the differences between lineated lyric poetry and poetic prose (other than in their use of lines and stanzas compared to sentences and paragraphs) have never been entirely clear-cut. This has especially been the case since the advent of so-called free verse in the nineteenth century, where many free verse poems tended to be prosaic in their rhythms, even as they exploited line breaks for poetic effect. The nineteenth-century American poet Walt Whitman, for instance, frequently constructed his poems as if they were an exotic species of prose:

Trippers and askers surround me,

People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation,

The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new,

My dinner, dress, associates, looks, works, co...