Prose and Form and Reentry

HTML Giant has a collection of quotes on prose poetry, as well as prose versus poetry.

A couple of years ago I struggled with a desire to write a prose poem and no idea how to do it. It's good to know I'm not the only one:

‘My own formal literary education has not accorded much regard to what in English are referred to as ‘prose poems,’ and I am not at all sure what the genre is supposed to entail.’ (W.S. Merwin)

‘However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can’t be much to it.’ (James Schuyler)

And yet the form has its proponents:

‘There is a shorter distance from the unconscious to the Prose Poem than from the unconscious to most poems in verse.’ (Michael Benedikt)

‘A poetry freed from the definition of poetry, and a prose free of the necessities of fiction.’ (Russell Edson)

I did eventually write a few prose poems. Well, actually, after much research, I realized that I had already written some prose poems and not even known it, as I had expected the form to be a single paragraph block that I recognized from many prose poems I had read.

It's good to try new forms. This week I finished a cento, and I really enjoyed it. I was stymied in my writing because of just finishing my first semester of online study which coincided with my first semester in many years back in the classroom as a teacher, and poetry fell by the wayside (as did this blog). And so I hadn't been writing much and was having trouble getting back into it, and as usual, pursuing a form with its structures and its strictures was the right way for me to edge back in. A cento, with its collage form of other people's lines, was really low-risk but still creative and got me revved up.

Now I have an idea for a poem to write the usual way.

It's pouring rain here, and it's my older son's birthday morning. He's in the other room putting together a model ship he wanted for his birthday, happily at work. I just noticed my pajamas are inside out--slept all night in them that way. I feel like I'm coming out of a long period of automatic pilot and back into the world. And what a world it is.

Asking the Prose Pros

So I've been trying for months and months to write a prose poem. Why? Because I like reading prose poems, and because I wanted to write something that felt as modern as the prose poem (though yes, the form goes back as far as the Bible, but still its resurgence makes it feel modern). And because I wanted to do something I'd never done. And so, a prose poem.

But every time I wrote a few lines of what was meant to be a prose poem, I would see a place a linebreak would add a double meaning or increase tension or serve some other function particular to the linebreak, and I would end up lineating what I was working on.

I felt about prose poems like that famous quote about pornography: I can't exactly say what it is, but I know it when I see it. Well, it turns out I was wrong. Because in desperation at failing once again at writing a prose poem, I decided to gather some information about them in order to focus my thinking.

Searching around online, here are a few things I read about prose poems that I ALREADY knew, but which are stated interestingly enough to catch my attention:

As quoted on the Poets.org website, here is Peter Johnson's explanation of a prose poem (Johnson is editor of The Prose Poem: An International Journal), "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."

Here's what Robert Hass, in an interview with the Iowa Review, had to say: "I was working in these forms because they had a certain outwardness that verse didn’t have."

Anya Groner's review of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry: Contemporary Poets in Discussion and Practice edited by Gary L. McDowell and F. Daniel Rzicznek on Bookslut contained the following paragraph:

The power of the prose poem, many of the contributors suggest, comes from the tension inherent to concision. Tung-Hui Hu comments that “Nothing stops a lyric poem from going on indefinitely… But a prose poem has to stop; too long and it turns into a short story.” As Carol Guess points out, in prose poetry “what’s unsaid matter as much as what’s said.”  It’s precisely the constraints of size that, like a reduction in cooking, produce the prose poem’s zany power, the pull between urgency and irreverence (Keplinger) or “the impulse to make meaning and the impulse to focus on sound alone, on letters as musical notation” (Guess). Writers need not choose between narrative and lyric. The sentence is the drum, and the subject matter is limitless, as long as it fits in the box. It’s like Pandora’s box, but in reverse.

Yes, yes, yes, I could recognize a prose poem. The problem was I couldn't write one. And then I came across something I DIDN'T already know in this almost prosaic description by J. Zimmerman at http://www.baymoon.com/~ariadne/form/prosePoem.htm:

Prose is the ordinary language that people use in speaking or writing. It does not treat the line as a formal unit. It has no repetitive pattern of rhythm or meter.
In a prose poem:

• The writing is continuous and without line breaks.
• The piece may be of any length and may be divided into paragraphs. A single sentence or sentence fragment can be a prose poem, as can multiple paragraphs.
• The natural rhythm of thought can lead to rhythmical cadences in a prose poem.
• Internal rhyme and alliteration and repetition can be used. Some such trait of poetry must be present. Otherwise it is prose, not a prose poem.
• It lies between free verse and prose.
• Usually has compressed thought and intensity.

Wait a minute, what is the 2nd bullet point? A prose poem can be divided into paragraphs? It doesn't have to be a single Russell Edson-style block? But I've written four or five of those. Pieces that started out as poems but in which it became clear linebreaks added nothing, despite the poetic devices otherwise used. Short paragraphs of 2 or 3 lines each, which organically wrapped around at the end of the line to the next line, so that stanzas ended up looking more like.....really short paragraphs.

So I've written prose poems? I've actually published some, not knowing it?

It turns out that despite my previous confidence, I couldn't recognize prose poems, or not all prose poems, because I was stuck on the blocky single-paragraph form as an identifying feature. Which it isn't necessarily.

And even better, I didn't even know a prose poem when I'd  written one, not out of a concerted effort to do so, but because the poem took on the form that naturally suited it as it developed. Which is the best way for a form to turn up in a poem. For me anyway.

I'll never be a prose poem pro myself, but I'm glad I've got a few prose poems in my repertoire, however unwittingly they came to be there. And now I can stop trying so hard.