|
The prose poem, according to Tzvetan Todorov, is "a genre remarkable in part for its relative paucity of formal requirements," whereas the American poet Michael Benedict defines the form as having recourse to all the techniques of verse composition with the sole exception of the line break. And Jonathan Monroe describes the prose poem as "the place where [the] distinction [between prose and poetry] doggedly maintains itself despite itself . . . the prose poem depends for its very existence not only on the continued difference of its two defining terms but even on their continued oppositional status" (A Poverty of Objects 1987).
The modern prose poem originates with Baudelaire, who adapted it from the "new genre of prose" invented by Aloysius Bertrand, though poetic prose has no doubt existed since the origin of writing, the distinction between prose and poetry being cemented by the invention of the alphabet and the consequent decay of oral traditions. In the nineteenth century, William Blake and Walt Whitman both had recourse to prose as an extension of their poetic voices. Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell as well as Whitman's Specimen Days make important contributions to the development of the genre, proving along the way that the prose poem is attractive to poets precisely because it cannot be easily defined. Both anthologies provide considerable historical context, Models of the Universe by beginning in the first half of the nineteenth century, and The Party Train by providing a rich selection of "pathfinders and desperadoes" �many of them fiction writers�at the beginning of the book, before p!
"Poetry," said Ezra Pound, "should be at least as well-written as prose." The poets collected in Models of the Universe and The Party Train have turned the equation around, writing prose with the tone and velocity of poetry, most of it very well-written indeed. These two anthologies�one of them international in scope, the other confining itself to North America�survey the range of the modern and contemporary prose poem. There is so much richness here that American poets and readers hardly deserve, having left the genre out in the cold so long.
Imposing a taxonomy on the prose poem, however, given the evidence of these two collections, would be close to hopeless. The only system that comes close, oddly enough, are the classical modes of prose discourse: description, often mysterious narrative, usually fantastic exposition and even argument, almost always ironic. If a distinction can be made between the American and European examples in these two anthologies, by the way, it is that the Europeans more often transcend the classical prose modes, rising into lyricism. Out of its paradoxical arrangements the prose poems seeks to fashion a zone of linguistic purity, lyrical without the falsifying rhetorics of the lyric. Marjorie Perloff describes an American tradition of the prose poem that begins with Gertrude Stein, which qualifies as poetry through employment of patterns of repetition. On the evidence of the examples in The Party Train and Models of the Universe, however, poets themselves have not been much intereste!
d in this patterned but unlineated way of writing. Instead, poets have turned to the prose poem as a laboratory in which to recombine the genetic elements of language. Reading the poems in these two collections, one comes to realize that poets, deprived of the muscles of the line, still manage to develop the characteristic movements of genre and sub-genre: lyric, narrative, exposition, argument, meditation, as well as various combinations.
The reader or writer interested in the problems of form in contemporary poetry would do well to study these collections carefully. Fully of engaging, charming, challenging texts, these two anthologies force us to think hard about what we mean by the word poetry. Too often discussions of form in contemporary poetry have degenerated into merely ideological arguments. An honest appraisal of the work in these two books should make us think again about our cherished received opinions and beliefs. In this respect, they do what all good anthologies must�force critical reconsideration. Readers interested in the prose poem will want to peruse, in addition to these two admirable anthologies, Stephen Fredman's Poet's Prose and Alan Holder's brief discussion of the genre in Rethinking Meter. One can hardly do better, finally, than a master's description of the form: in "Portrait of the Writer as a Fat Man," Russell Edson writes, "The fat man comes to this: That the artifice of the novel !
is impossible for him he has not faith enough to build a cathedral. He must work toward bits and pieces formed from memory . . . And yet, experience remains hidden and less important than the inscape it has formed. To find a prose free of the self-consciousness of poetry a prose more compact than the storyteller's a prose removed from the formalities of literature."
from Poetry International, 1996 c. 1996 Joseph Duemer.
|