In the face of the great variety of prose poems and a conspicuous lack of consensus about what prose poetry is, various scholars and prose poets have suggested that it is best if the form remains mysterious and that we understand prose poetry primarily through reading individual works. For instance, Kevin Brophy writes:

It is an understandable impulse in a postmodern period to maintain the sometimes-enigmatic frisson associated with the idea of an unquantifiable literary form. Part of the appeal of prose poetry is that it may represent different things to different prose poets and may even manifest in ways that they do not expect. Thus, the form often brings with it a sense of surprise and an associated sense that every prose poem carries the possibility of newness. When we wrote the book Prose Poetry: An Introduction (2020), we were aware of these issues. Prose poetry has long been called a subversive form, and even “hypersubversive,”⁴ largely because it fails to conform with conventional expectations of either traditional verse or contemporary free verse. It also does not conform to the expectations associated with conventional, discursive prose – whether fiction or narrative nonfiction.

In this context, we wrote that “the main scholarship written about English-language prose poetry to date defines the form as problematic, paradoxical, ambiguous, unresolved, or contradictory.”⁵ We also quoted the fine prose poet and editor, Peter Johnson’s wonderfully tantalising remark, “Just as black humour 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”⁶ – a comment he made at a time when prose poems were hard to place in journals and magazines and when there was a powerful sense that the prose poem had been “othered” by mainstream literary culture. Given this, is it possible to say what constitutes a prose poem and, in any case, what should one make of its protean tendencies?

In addressing these questions, we will focus on some of the features of prose poetry we have defined in our scholarship on the form: its fragmentary nature and use of metonymy; its use of sentences rather than poetic lines; its prose-poetic cadences; its relationship to the quotidian; its appearance on the page; and its incorporation into hybrid literary forms. We examine these features primarily through the discussion and explication of particular prose poems, taking the position that, overall, prose poetry belongs to the genre of poetry but is written in the mode of prose.⁷ Importantly, we begin with the premise that prose poetry is a literary form with identifiable characteristics, however various actual prose poems may be.

The development of prose poetry was one outcome of this preoccupation with literary insufficiency. Whether one takes Charles Baudelaire’s preface to the first book of modern prose poetry, Le Spleen de Paris [Paris Spleen] (1869) at face value – and a few critics have questioned Baudelaire’s sincerity – his attitude in this preface is reasonably congruent with some of Novalis’s key ideas. He writes, “I will not hold [the reader] to the unbroken thread of some superfluous plot … Chop it into many fragments and you will see how each is able to exist apart.”⁹ This idea of prose poetry being composed of fragments is of profound importance in understanding how ideas of the small and the large, and of what is contained and what is liberated, may intersect in this literary form. As fragments acknowledge their insufficiency, so they simultaneously claim a kind of self-sufficiency, suggesting that their limitations are part of their point. Fragmentation implies that although there is a whole, and although it may be partly knowable, once one steps back from society’s grand and encompassing narratives – of the Biblical story, for example, or aspects of European Enlightenment narratives – fragmentation becomes a recognition of knowledge’s limitations.

Prose poems as literary fragments thus have the capacity to suggest a clear-sighted understanding of the power of appreciating the brokenness and partiality – in both senses – of human ways of seeing. Prose poems resonate especially powerfully in the liminal space that exists between the limitations of what they say and know, and the larger world and knowledge at which they gesture. Their own gestures are deliberately circumscribed and poetically suggestive in order to reach outwards and, in this reaching outwards, they resist closure. Instead, they open a dialogue with larger and not-completely knowable worlds, sometimes unfathomable states of being and the ineffable. By never trying to tell the full story, they acknowledge that no single narrative is able to be all-encompassing.

If prose poems as fragments gesture towards and invoke larger ideas and meanings, they may be understood as inherently metonymic. Certainly, any analysis of their parts indicates that they regularly employ metonymic gestures – where truncated and limited statements stand in for, or gesture at, larger statements and broader ideas beyond their own forms of representation. Furthermore, because prose-poems-as-fragments acknowledge what one may call their broken-offness, many of the most interesting of them resist the full impetus of narrative even when they employ narrative devices. Prose poems try to point to something about their language or their subject that sits outside of the narrative gestures they make (and frequently outside of the work itself), understanding that narrative gestures alone can rarely do the work of connecting the outside “whole” to the prose poem’s relatively brief, fragmentary utterance. The prose poem’s language needs to employ metaphorical, metonymic, analogical, and ambiguous figures in order to open conduits between its utterance and what is does not, or cannot, explicitly say.

Thus, prose poems exemplify the art of what we will call the suggestive-implicit – saying just enough to indicate that there is more – somewhere – that might be said but cannot currently be stated. However, in its use of prose, the prose poem’s flow of sentences and its box shape initially tend to disguise this suggestive-implicitness; indeed, at a first glance, many prose poems appear to be complete and explicit. This means that many prose poems transform powerfully under the reader’s gaze as they are revealed to be fragmentary and open.

Metonymically, these works stand in for the nuclear sublime’s appeal to the beauty and terror of extinction, while simultaneously acknowledging the ultimate failure of any attempt to convey the end of all forms of life. In this way, the accumulation of prose poems and photographs in Irradiated Cities is a stark admission that while each is a part of something much larger, perhaps even infinite in its implications, it must be pieced together from fragments to be effective – an acknowledgement that, in such a context, nothing we know or can name or grasp is truly whole. Furthermore, Nagai highlights the power of fragments to stand in for much more than singular moments in a traumatic past. As Nicholas Wong argues, the juxtapositions in the text haunt and beg us “to confront both the cities and ourselves in pieces.”¹⁰

Nagai’s striking use of colons between phrases and clauses in Irradiated Cities both separates and unites fragments. The colons signal conclusions that never conclude and may even be read as QEDs that prove nothing. However, this repetitive use of the colon constantly expands the reader’s sense of these prose poems because, as John Bradley identifies, “everything is connected to everything else.”¹¹ For example, in “The Living Calls to the Dead,” Nagai uses the initial aftermath of the atomic bombing to build a picture of abject suffering and catastrophe. Broken parts of sentences are used to convey a sense of the ruptured, postatomic world. Nagai’s fragments are simultaneously joined and separated, stacking up on one another like debris and an uncontainable, immeasurable list of suffering: