At the same time, the question persisted as to whether prose poetry was a subject to be mentioned in polite society at all. Oscar Wilde had made the term notorious in 1895 when, in court, he described a letter he had written to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, as a ‘prose sonnet’ (an association that later prose poems, such as Dulce María Loynaz’s ‘Love Letter to King Tutankhamun’ (here), have continued). Its reputation was not improved a generation later, when, in 1915, Aleister Crowley, the so-called ‘wickedest man in the world’, published translations from Paris Spleen in Vanity Fair magazine. In the same year, one of the best-known prose poems in English, T. S. Eliot’s ‘Hysteria’ (here), made its first appearance in an anthology edited by Ezra Pound. But even Eliot had his doubts about the form as a critic, calling it ‘an aberration which is only justified by absolute success’. Inside his personal copy of Stuart Merrill’s Pastels in Prose (1890), a popular anthology of French prose poetry, he kept a clipping of a newspaper parody called ‘The Latest Form of Literary Hysterics’. The title of his poem about a man made (hysterically) anxious by a laughing woman can, therefore, be read as an ironic comment on its own ‘bad form’ (‘I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might be collected’). Later, Eliot privately dismissed ‘Hysteria’ as ‘a kind of note for a poem, but not […] a poem’.12
In casting doubt on the sanity of the prose poet, Eliot may have had in mind the infamous example of Gertrude Stein. Once much mocked for her emphatically repetitive, under-punctuated style, Stein now deserves to be recognized as the most original prose poet in the English language. With the vividly abstract domesticity of Tender Buttons (1914), she invented a verbal Cubism in which household objects and foodstuffs are evoked in enigmatically glancing ways (‘a way of naming things that would … mean names without naming them’), just as the Cubist still-life broke up the solid contents of café tables into overlapping planes.13 The aftershock of Tender Buttons was not widely felt until the second half of the twentieth century, when Stein’s sideways manner can be heard everywhere in the experimental canon of American prose poetry, from the wry obliquity of John Ashbery – represented here by the poems ‘For John Clare’ (here) and ‘Homeless Heart’ (here) – to the kaleidoscopic autobiography of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life (here) and Clark Coolidge’s erotically textual ‘Letters’, from The Book of During (here). In such writing, Rosmarie Waldrop (here) remarks, ‘the cuts, discontinuities, ruptures, cracks, fissures, holes, hitches, snags, leaps, shifts of reference, and emptiness’ that we associate with modernist free verse (such as Eliot’s The Waste Land) occur, instead, ‘inside the sentence’.14
The freedom of the prose poem to follow the unmetrical pathways of thought can also take it in the opposite direction, towards a plainer style, imitative of speech. In this mode, the prose poem employs the formulas and rhythms of story-telling, with all their alluring familiarity and suspense. Among the handful of prose poems famous enough to be anthology pieces already are Joy Harjo’s ‘Deer Dancer’ (here), which draws on the Native American oral tradition to imagine a modern myth, and Carolyn Forché’s ‘The Colonel’ (here), which was written after travelling to El Salvador during the country’s civil war. ‘What you have heard is true’, Forché begins, before recounting an almost unbelievably horrifying encounter with a military man in simple, declarative sentences that read like an eye-witness report. This is a poem, it seems, that has been written in defiance of the colonel who mocks: ‘Something for your poetry, no?’
The story-telling prose poem also lends itself to the comic anecdote, and this has been its most popular manifestation in America and Britain since the 1960s, under the influence of up-the-garden-path absurdists such as Russel Edson (here), James Tate (here), and Maxine Chernoff (here). Prose poems in this vein often feel like jokes that overshoot their punchlines into something more serious. When Peter Didsbury titles his downbeat monologue about a divorcé, a lodger and some stray dog hairs ‘A Vernacular Tale’ (here), he is studiously avoiding its vernacular name: a shaggy dog story. To quote Cathy Wagner’s ‘Chicken’ (here) in full:
A poem goes to the other side. It’s different there, but that’s not why I wrote it. There’s all there is, in the chicken joke. Where are you going with this.
Another kind of fabulism in which post-war poets have excelled is the mythology of an everyday object. Foreshadowed by the elemental meditations of Gabriela Mistral (‘In Praise of Glass’, here), the prose object-poem is pioneered in French by Francis Ponge, with his first collection, Le parti pris des choses (1942) – a title recently translated by Joshua Corey and Jean-Luc Garneau as Partisan of Things. Ponge employs a seemingly clean, scientific prose to muse upon humdrum subjects (a door, a crate, rain) as if they were the most exquisitely fascinating phenomena, with secret lives of their own. The punchline of a Ponge poem, however, is that words themselves are elusively alive. At the end of his hyperreal description of ‘Rain’ (here), ‘the brilliant apparatus’ of language evaporates into the simplest syllables: ‘it has rained’ (‘il a plu’). Ponge’s combination of simplicity and sophistication has made him the postmodern prose poet’s postmodern prose poet, and the fine line he draws between mind and matter can be traced through many later poems here, including James Schuyler’s ‘Milk’ (here), Robert Bly’s ‘A Caterpillar’ (here), Shuntarō Tanikawa’s ‘Scissors’ (here), and Brian Catling’s ‘The Stumbling Block Its Index’ (here), which catalogues a shape-shifting sculpture that exists only in words (‘The Stumbling Block is a graphite font’).
The prose poem’s tendency to dwell on image over narrative begins with the curious book that Baudelaire acknowledged as his model: Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit (1842), a collection of historical vignettes offered to the reader as the vision of an old man who may be the Devil. Its first piece, ‘Haarlem’ (here) – the last poem in the present anthology’s reverse chronology – exemplifies the picturesque quality of Bertrand’s work. Distilling scenes from seventeenth-century Flemish genre painting into sentences that suspend time by omitting a main verb, ‘Haarlem’ captures a little world in the amber of the ongoing moment (‘And the drinkers smoking in some dark dive, and the inn-keeper’s servant hanging up a dead pheasant in a tavern window’). The realism of Bertrand’s prose derives from the novel, but its haunting amplification of image – its hanging-up of dead pheasants – leaves it in the realm of dream, a place the prose poem has repeatedly explored. In his first ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ (1924), André Breton cited several prose poets among the movement’s influences, including Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Reverdy, and Saint-John Perse, as well as the wild prose nightmares of the Comte de Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror (1869). Breton sought to liberate the poetry of the unconscious mind by jotting down sentences while on the verge of sleep, a method he believed Rimbaud had also followed.15 By the 1930s, the sleeping mind was speaking in prose poems written in many countries, from David Gascoyne in England to George Seferis in Greece, Anzai Fuye in Japan, and César Vallejo in Peru. In 1941, the Martiniquais poet Aimé Césaire praised the ‘strange cities, extraordinary countrysides, twisted, crushed, dismembered worlds’ of Rimbaud’s Illuminations as ‘the most authentic vision of the world’.16 A century after the midnight visions of Aloysius Bertrand, the prose poem bore prophetic witness to the way that modern life itself had become violently surreal.
II
Prosaic France passed over to poetry. And everything changed.
– Aimé Césaire17
Versification varies from language to language and its subtleties are notoriously difficult to translate. One convention is simply to accept the loss of poetic form and render verse as prose – and one subgenre of the prose poem is to perform the translation of an absent original, as in Allen Upward’s invented classical Chinese poems, ‘Scented Leaves – from a Chinese Jar’ (here); Don Paterson’s mock-scholarly recollection of a ‘scrawny Orpheus’ (here); or Éric Suchère’s exacting
ekphrasis of comic book panels collaged from Hergé’s Tintin adventure The Shooting Star (here). The translation of prose into prose, however, does not so obviously require the sacrifice of formal effects, allowing the prose poem to move with relative ease between national traditions. This is its implicit role in Seamus Heaney’s ‘Fiddleheads’ (here), a poem which offers itself to a friend from Japan as a ‘basket’ containing a delicacy common to both countries. As my selections have tried to show, prose poets themselves have significantly contributed to the translation of prose poems, and thereby helped to create an international tradition. Nor does it seem entirely coincidental that so many Nobel Laureates should figure in the history of a form that is uniquely cosmopolitan in its origins: Rabindranath Tagore, Gabriela Mistral, T. S. Eliot, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Saint-John Perse, Pablo Neruda, Eugenio Montale, Czesław Miłosz, Wole Soyinka, Octavio Paz, Wisława Szymborska, Tomas Tranströmer, and Heaney himself. As the American Frank O’Hara joked of one of his own poems in the 1950s: ‘it is even in / prose, I am a real poet’.18
Without the visual architecture of verse, the prose poem is not immediately identifiable on the page. When read aloud, however, it is often characterized by the kind of echoic patterning that we associate with verse, arriving at its conclusion with a resonant neatness – what Amy Lowell, writing in defence of her own ‘polyphonic prose’, called the ‘spherical effect’ of poetic form.19 One marker of form in the prose poem is the drawing of a verbal circle, as in Ernest Dowson’s narcotically languid ‘Absinthia Taetra’ (here), which repeats its first line as its last, or Barbara Guest’s unsettling film-making fantasy ‘The Cough’, which calls back to its title with its last words (here). Mark Strand’s ‘Chekhov’ (here) is an especially ingenious instance of the looped monologue, repeating the same six words at the end of its sentences according to a pattern borrowed from a ‘fixed’ form of verse, the sestina. The thematic emphasis on word choice introduced by such a conceit suggests Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s distinction between the two modes: ‘prose = words in their best order; poetry = the best words in the best order’ (Gertrude Stein was getting at something similar when she said that ‘poetry has to do with vocabulary just as prose does not’).20 Less traditional constraints that enforce a similar poetic economy include Christian Bök’s Eunoia (here), which is written in chapters that only allow themselves to use one of the English vowels (‘Enfettered, these sentences repress speech’); Harryette Mullen’s ‘Denigration’ (here), in which every sentence turns on a word that might be cognate with the Latin for black (‘niger’), itself only one letter away from the unspoken racial slur; and Peter Reading’s C (here), which begins with the speaker, having received a diagnosis of cancer, planning to write ‘100 100-word units. What do you expect me to do – break into bloody haiku?’ (He then does this anyway: ‘Verse is for healthy / arty-farties. The dying / and surgeons use prose.’)
But if poetry is not synonymous with verse – as canonical anthologies such as The Oxford Book of English Verse assume – how do we define a poem at all? This question, at least, has been answered by many authorities. ‘All good poetry’, wrote William Wordsworth in the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads (1802), ‘is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.’21 Verse serves as a mould to a moment of emotion, shaping it to a rhythmic pattern. Without line breaks, the prose poem is free – like this paragraph – to extend across and down the page as far as the printer’s margins will allow. And it is in this freedom that we can locate the distinctive feeling to which the prose poem gives form: expansiveness. Unchecked by metre or rhyme, prose poetry flows by soft return from margin to margin, filling the empty field of the page, like the vision of Aloysius Bertrand’s ‘Mason’ who, on his scaffolding above the cathedral roof, sees further into the surrounding landscape with every sentence, from ‘gargoyles spewing water’ to ‘a village set afire by troops, flaming like a comet in the deep-blue sky’ (here). If the prose poem had a motto for itself as an ideal form, waiting to be realized, it might be from John Ashbery’s ‘For John Clare’: ‘There ought to be room for more things, for a spreading out, like’ (here).22
As Ashbery’s artfully banal sentence suggests, prose is a mode of writing that allows the stylist plenty of slack. In the critical vocabulary of everyday English we use ‘poetic’ as a term of high praise, ‘prosaic’ to express disappointment with something unimaginative. Poetry is the beautiful ideal, prose the unlovely real: ‘You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose’, as the New York politician Mario Cuomo is reported to have said.23 The challenge for the prose poet is to undo the distinction: to make the prosaic poetic, so that it expands a powerful feeling without dissipating its force. Agha Shahid Ali (‘Return to Harmony 3’ (here)) saw this as a question of bringing the same ‘energy’ to prose as to strict forms such as the sestina and the sonnet, ‘by making the sentence (and paragraph) rather than the line (and stanza) the be-all and end-all of my emotion. I had to teach myself to discard the line completely’.24
The prose poem’s genius for expansiveness is not only due to its freedom from formal constraint, however. The linguist Roman Jakobson distinguished the ‘poetic’ and ‘prosaic’ uses of language as being dominated respectively by the figures of metaphor (which finds resemblance between things) and metonym (which assumes continuity between things).25 Poets are famous, of course, for ‘comparing stuff to other stuff’, in the words of Hera Lindsay Bird (here), and for Aristotle, to have mastered the imaginative use of metaphor (which in Greek means ‘to carry over’) was the mark of ‘great natural ability’ in poetry.26 But the poet’s talent for noticing resemblances is a matter of the ear as well as the eye: the verbal repetitions of versification – alliteration, metre, rhyme – depend on similarities of sound, which implicitly invite us to make connections between words. So verse itself can be considered part of poetry’s tendency to stimulate the metaphorical movement of the mind. Prose, on the other hand, puts one thing after another in a logical chain, and this is why it tends to be dominated by metonym (which means ‘change of name’). If, for example, I refer back at this point to ‘Jakobson’, I am using the surname as a metonym for ‘Jakobson’s theory of poetry and prose’. Metonymy is the preferred trope of the prose writer because it is unobtrusive and efficient, a shorthand that assumes the reader’s understanding of an abbreviated meaning. And because metonymy leads the mind by meaning rather than metre, it subordinates the sound of words in order to streamline the flow of sense – thus making it the ideal figure of speech for news reports, legal documents, and realist novels.
Virginia Woolf, a novelist intensely concerned with the poetry of prose, saw its continuous nature as what kept it earthbound: ‘it rises slowly off the ground; it must be connected on this side and on that.’27 The expansiveness of feeling that characterizes the prose poem is often created by a moment of metaphor giving it a sudden lift, like the flare of the burner in a hot-air balloon. This is what happens in the poem ‘Pulmonary Tuberculosis’ by Katherine Mansfield, a writer best known for her short stories, who in 1918 experimented with poems in free verse – that is, verse with no fixed rhythm or rhyme – but decided that the results read better when printed as a form of ‘special prose’:28
The man in the room next to mine has the same complaint as I. When I wake in the night I hear him turning. And then he coughs. And I cough. And after a silence I cough. And he coughs again. This goes on for a long time. Until I feel we are like two roosters calling to each other at false dawn. From far-away hidden farms.
In the first sentence, Mansfield sets the scene with a diary-like frankness. We are in the prosaic world of one thing next to another: ‘the man in the room next to mine’ serves as a metonym for the whole sanatorium of TB patients. The second sentence introduces the real-time narration of night waking, with four short sentences that imitate the lonely, arrhythmic volleying of coughs, which – like the most tedious prose – ‘goes on for a long time’. The poetic only enters with the penultimate sentence, whic
h employs metaphor to imagine a deeper affinity between the suffering human beings: they are transformed into ‘roosters’, fulfilling their animal instinct of crowing for sunrise. The final, verbless sentence expands the landscape from the roosters to the farms they metonymically imply, while at the same time deepening the metaphor as a fantasy of escape: to live on ‘far-away hidden farms’ would be the opposite of life in the sterile and crowded sanatorium.
Of course, powerful feelings of expansiveness are not in themselves exclusive to the prose poem. Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802’ evokes the whole of London in a single line of metonymic compression – ‘Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples’ – then rapturously expands this landscape with a metaphorical double exposure of city and countryside:
The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem Page 2