The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem

by Jeremy Noel-Tod

  Never did sun more beautifully steep

  In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;

  Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

  The river glideth at his own sweet will:

  Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;

  And all that mighty heart is lying still!29

  If Wordsworth had been moved to compose his sonnet in prose, the period covered by this anthology would itself have to expand by almost half a century. It’s not an impossible alternative history: in the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads, published the same year, Wordsworth argued that there was no essential distinction between the language of poetry and the language of prose, and that the ‘more philosophical distinction’ would be between ‘Poetry and Matter of Fact, or Science’.30 The idea of the prose poem, and even the term itself, crops up in various places before Baudelaire, including as the subtitle of one of Edgar Allen Poe’s last published works, Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848) – an extraordinary, unclassifiable essay, both mystical and scientific, in which Poe seems to anticipate modern cosmology with his vision of an expanding universe.

  The form did not come to fruition as a lyric poem, however, until the 1850s, when Baudelaire began to write and publish, over the course of a decade, the fifty short prose texts that would be gathered in Paris Spleen. In the private letter to his publisher that serves as the book’s preface, the poet asks:

  Which of us has not, in his ambitious days, dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and choppy enough to fit the soul’s lyrical movements, the jolts of consciousness?

  This obsessive ideal came to life above all by frequenting enormous cities, in the intersection of their countless relationships.31

  Thus the prose poem, at the moment of its birth, is associated with two kinds of expansiveness, one private and one public, one old and one new: the ‘lyrical impulses’ of the sensitive soul, and the rapidly enlarging modern world, in whose cities that soul is jostled by thousands of others every day. When Wordsworth stood on Westminster Bridge, the population of London was just over one million; by 1840, it had doubled. The same exponential growth happened in Paris over the same period, where it was made even more visible in the 1850s by Baron Haussmann’s sweeping programme of urban reconstruction, which accelerated the public ‘confluence’ of Parisian life with a web of wide new boulevards that routed the busy lives of the affluent through the traditional neighbourhoods of the poor, to the disturbance of both: in the bright, wide-open spaces of Haussmann’s Paris, in Marshall Berman’s words, ‘there is no way to look away’.32

  The Baudelairean prose poem, and all its ‘jolts of consciousness’, is a record of this historical moment: a private journal made public, as it were, with all the violent ambivalence towards art and humanity that Parisian life provoked in the poet (see ‘The Bad Glazier’ (here)). But even as lyric poetry, in Baudelaire’s prose, expands to map the public spaces of this new world, it is at the same time retreating into ‘the ebbs and flows of revery’, and the private depths of feeling to be found there. In doing so, Baudelaire combined the historical word-painting he discovered in Gaspard de la Nuit with the influence of two contemporary writers of hallucinatory English prose, Edgar Allen Poe and Thomas de Quincey, both of whom he had translated into French. Like Bertrand in his gothic poems, such as ‘The Madman’ (here), de Quincey and Poe are masters of what might be called visions of lucid darkness, a paradox upon which Baudelaire’s ‘Windows’ meditates (here):

  He who looks in through an open window never sees so many things as he who looks at a shut window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more fertile, more gloomy, or more dazzling, than a window lighted by a candle. What we can see in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind the panes of a window. In that dark or luminous hollow, life lives, life dreams, life suffers.

  For Baudelaire, the shut window is a symbol of the ‘dark or luminous’ mystery of modern life itself, as relished by the flâneur of a metropolis such as Paris, who drifts among the nameless masses of the street seeking a gleam of insight.

  Walter Benjamin characterized Baudelaire as a poet haunted by ‘the phantom crowd of the words’, and the restless cacophony of urban life returns again and again as the raw material of the prose poem, from the ‘blurring of horses and motors’ in Amy Lowell’s ‘Spring Day’ (here) to Cathy Park Hong’s stories of a sleepless Chinese mega-city viewed from ‘an apartment without its last wall’ (here), and Clifton Gachagua’s urgent enquiry into the unspoken secrets of Nairobi (‘In the old streets I besiege a man to translate the poems on the walls’, here).33 In a crowded world, the prose poem clears an imagined space for mind-expanding revelations, whether ‘a tiny incident [ … ] hidden like a rare jewel in the casket of Time’, as in Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘A Day’ (here); a moment of ramifying horror, as in Ottó Orbán’s ‘Chile’ (here); or an overwhelming feeling of love, as in Lisa Jarnot’s ‘Ode’ (‘the rest of the balance continuing huge’, here).

  ‘The prose poem’, Rod Mengham has recently suggested, ‘is modernity’s response […] to our fear of the receding horizon [ … ] it is the circle we draw around our interactions with the world.’34 However much the apocalyptic landscape of a prose poem reveals, more remains out of sight. As the critic Nikki Santilli has written, prose poetry resonates with ‘the absences that it accommodates’.35 ‘I alone know the plan of this savage sideshow’, teases Rimbaud in the final, standalone sentence of ‘Sideshow’ (here). Prose poems love to hint that they are themselves metaphorical unveilings of their own elusive nature: ‘I am dapper and elegant; I move with great precision, cleverly managing all my smaller yellow claws. I believe in the oblique, the indirect approach’, reflects Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Strayed Crab’ (here), slyly punning on the prose poet’s own means of sideways travel: the clause. As David Lehman observes in his anthology of Great American Prose Poems (2003), certain ideas inevitably recur whenever a critic attempts to pin down the paradoxical nature of the form: ‘it will be noted approvingly,’ for example, ‘that the prose poem blurs boundaries’.36 The prose poem, however, is the wittiest theorist of its own liminality, inviting us to see the ambivalence of identity as the way of the world: ‘Me and Molly, that’s M and M, melt in your mouth’, writes Thylias Moss in her poem about physically inseparable teenage girls who eventually give birth to each other (here); ‘the material of her actual body is loosely knit as steam or a colored gas [ …] and is very close to emotion’, muses Mei-mei Berssenbrugge of one of her happily freeform ‘Fairies’ (here); ‘Reason is Spirit’, claims Hegel, but according to Anne Carson this is not so much a statement of fact as a sentence in which two words ‘tenderly mingle in speculation’ (here).

  Baudelaire’s belief that poetic prose might articulate the modern experience of ‘the intersection’ of different lives continues to inform its contemporary ambitions. One of the most original exponents of the prose poem currently at work in Britain, Vahni Capildeo (here), has reflected on how her Trinidadian childhood experience of religious ritual informs her openness to the possibilities of mixed form. At Deepavali, the family garage and part of the house would be transformed into a ritual space, with lamps lit and Sanskrit chanted, leading to ‘other mixings: of space, and of language’:

  I see no problem, I take delight, within the space of the page, in crossing from mundane to heightened, elaborated, even opaque codes, registers, allusions. […] To this experience I can trace my instinctive revolt against such terms as ‘line break’, ‘white space’ or ‘margins of silence’. Without meaning to, I developed a poetics of reverberation and minor noise.

  This attitude and practice, Capildeo reflects, ‘may indeed have a politics, as well as a poetics, belonging to a modernity rooted in ways of life still not considered safe, polite or relevant to admit to the canon’.37 As Marguerite S. Murphy puts it in her study of the form from Wilde to Ashbery, the prose poem embodies, among other
paradoxes, a ‘tradition of subversion’.38 Over time it has attained sufficient respectability to be studied, prized, anthologized. But ever since Baudelaire’s dream of a form ‘musical without rhythm or rhyme’ rejected the strict conventions of classical French verse, the prose poem’s freedom to expand on any subject, and in any style, has attracted poets wanting to challenge restrictions imposed upon them – powerfully so, in the case of Wole Soyinka’s ‘Chimes of Silence’ (here), which was mentally composed while he was a political prisoner in solitary confinement.39 If the prose poem’s form is ad hoc, then so is its politics. The spirit of lyrical dissent that informs Paris Spleen returns, for example, in Fenton Johnson’s monologue ‘Tired’ (here), which is spoken by an African-American who is ‘tired of building up somebody else’s civilisation’; in Kim Hyesoon’s ‘Seoul’s Dinner’ (here), which liberates the descriptive appetite of prose in defiance of the decorum expected of the South Korean yŏryu siin, or female poet (‘I let the snow collect, then shove it into my mouth’);40 and in Sean Bonney’s ‘Letter Against the Firmament’ (here), a gnostic invective against the rhetoric of the British politician Iain Duncan Smith (‘that talking claw’).

  ‘If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it’ (Anne Carson).41 Far from becoming a literary party trick, the twenty-first-century prose poem seems full of energy to discover what emergencies it can cause next. Some contemporary poets continue to employ fragmentary prose as a prism through which to refract the ‘crystalline jumble’ of modernity (to use John Ashbery’s exquisite phrase from the preface to his translation of Rimbaud’s Illuminations).42 Others, however, are drawn to prose for the poetry of plain statement; what Vivek Naryanan calls, in his ‘Ode to Prose’, ‘the only heart we can trust if only because it beat so firmly’.43 The precise, documentary prose of a poet such as Claudia Rankine, for example – whose most recent books, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004) and Citizen (2014), are both subtitled ‘An American Lyric’ – evinces an ambition to rewrite literary tradition that recalls the radical claim made two centuries ago by Wordsworth, when, in Lyrical Ballads, he presented ‘incidents and situations drawn from common life’ in ‘language really used by men’.44 This anthology aims to capture something of the same moment of change and renewal in contemporary writing, as the prose poem dissolves and reforms along the same horizon that enraptured Baudelaire’s ‘stranger’ on the first page of his Little Poems in Prose: ‘the clouds that pass … over there … the marvellous clouds!’ (here)

  On the Selection and Organization

  Brevity has been associated with the prose poem ever since Baudelaire modestly acknowledged his own inventions as ‘petit’. In my selection, I have also tried to represent the prose poem in its lengthier manifestations as an extended sequence, but I have refrained from excerpting longer works that have not obviously been composed in readily separable units (such as the book-length ‘lyric essay’, which is increasingly being recognized as a contemporary form in its own right). I have also not tried to represent related traditions of mixed form, such as the haibun and the prosimetrum, which juxtapose prose and verse in order to make poetry from the tension between the two. My main rule of thumb has been only to include things that have already been published as poetry; to quote Michael Benedikt, editor of an earlier anthology of the form, these are poems ‘self-consciously written in prose’.45 This does, I realize, beg the question of definition, and raises the possible answer that – as Jorge Luis Borges suggested – poetry is in the eye of the reader (‘a passage read as though addressed to the reason is prose; read as though addressed to the imagination, it might be poetry’).46 It is also, I realize, unsatisfactory from the point of view of literary history: what comprehensive critical account of the poetic resources of modern prose could leave out, for example, the work of Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, or Virginia Woolf? But that way an infinite anthology lies. The secret poetry of prose can be uncovered even in popular fiction, as Margaret Atwood’s ‘In Love with Raymond Chandler’ (here) demonstrates, wittily rewriting noir realism as erotic languor. The published-as-poetry principle has also kept me away, with regret, from the neighbouring fields of short and flash fiction, despite the evident family resemblances here. I have also on the whole chosen poems over poets, with only a few notable figures represented by more than one selection.

  My reading has been concentrated on Anglophone poetry published in the United Kingdom and the United States, which has inevitably placed a limit on its internationalism. But one guiding principle was also to find prose poems in which it seemed as though something new was being presented to readers in different times and places, and I have tried, where translations were available – from Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish – to give at least a glimpse of the global variety of prose poetry over the last century. Once these various histories began to flow together in one channel, there seemed to be little meaningful way to part them, which led me to adopt a simple tripartite division of chronology. Everything from Bertrand and Baudelaire to 1945 I have gathered under the heading ‘modern’, on the grounds that the prose poem originates and develops at the same time as many of the other founding inventions of modernity: the railway, photography, the daily news (a number of Baudelaire’s prose poems first appeared as ‘feuilletons’, short literary items for newspaper readers). My next broad umbrella, ‘postmodern’, is a term which, like ‘prose poetry’, has been employed as often as it has been found unsatisfactorily capacious. For practical purposes, I have taken it to cover the second half of the twentieth century, a period when all the arts were in self-conscious conversation with the modernists who invented so many new forms of artistic expression between the 1910s and the 1930s. By cutting off the postmodern at 1999, I don’t mean to imply that a new literary period neatly began at the start of the new century. But there was undoubtedly a surge of interest in the prose poem around this time, which can be partly attributed to the rise of the defining invention of our own era – the internet – as a forum for literary experiment and exchange, and the evolution of new daily forms of prose such as the email, the blog, and the tweet.

  All poems have been presented in fully justified paragraphs divided by a single line break, with other distinctive aspects of formatting (such as the hanging indent) preserved where found in the original printing of the text. Where possible, I have used the first book publication for the dating of poems, and the chronology of the book has been ordered in reverse so as to foreground the importance of the present moment in the history of the form.

  Notes

  1. Gertrude Stein, ‘Poetry and Grammar’, in Look at Me Now and Here I Am: Selected Works 1911–1945, ed. by Patricia Meyerowitz (London: Peter Owen, 1967), pp. 123–45 (p. 123).

  2. Michael Riffaterre, ‘On the Prose Poem’s Formal Features’, in The Prose Poem in France: Theory and Practice, ed. by Mary Ann Caws and Hermine Riffaterre (New York: Columbia University Press), pp. 117–32 (p. 117); Michel Delville, The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998).

  3. Sir Philip Sidney, ‘The Defence of Poesy’, in Sidney’s ‘Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. by Gavin Alexander (London: Penguin, 2004), pp. 3–54 (p. 5); Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, in The Major Works, ed. by Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 674–701 (p. 679); Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘The Evolution of Literature’, in Selected Prose Poems, Essays and Letters, ed. by Bradford Cook (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1956), pp. 18–24 (p. 19).

  4. D. W. Harding, Words into Rhythm: English Speech Rhythm in Verse and Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 71.

  5. William Hazlitt, ‘On the Periodical Essayists’, in Lectures on the English Comic Writers (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1819), pp. 195–201 (p. 20
0).

  6. Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’ (1917), in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), ed. by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, pp. 3–24.

  7. Hermine Riffaterre, ‘Reading Constants: The Practice of the Prose Poem’, in The Prose Poem in France, pp. 98–115 (p. 115).

  8. For a recent anthology which locates the prose poem among a number of these other forms, see Short: An International Anthology of Five Centuries of Short-Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays, and Other Short Prose Forms, ed. Alan Ziegler (New York: Persea Books, 2014).

  9. Lisa Robertson, The Weather (London: Reality Street Editions, 2001), p. 80.

  10. For example, Vanessa Place’s Tragodía 1: Statement of Facts (2010), which is made up of redacted documents from her work as a criminal defence attorney specializing in sex offences.

  11. See Nick Admussen, ‘Trading Metaphors: Chinese Prose Poetry and the Reperiodization of the Twentieth Century’, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 22.2 (2010), 88–129.

  12. See The Poems of T. S. Eliot, ed. by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (London: Faber, 2015), pp. 444–6.

  13. Stein, ‘Poetry and Grammar’, p. 139.

  14. Rosmarie Waldrop, ‘Why Do I Write Prose Poems/When My True Love is Verse’ (2005), reprinted in Atlantic Drift: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics, ed. by James Byrne and Robert Sheppard (Todmorden: Arc/Edge Hill University Press), pp. 315–18 (p. 316).

  15. André Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ (1924), trans. by R. Seaver and H. R. Lane, reprinted with corrections in Modernism: An Anthology, ed. by Lawrence Rainey (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 718–41 (p. 726).

  16. Aimé Césaire, ‘Poetry and Knowledge’, trans. by Jon Cook, in Poetry in Theory: An Anthology 1900–2000, ed. by Jon Cook (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 276–87 (p. 285).

  17. Ibid., p. 278.

  18. Frank O’Hara, ‘Why I am Not a Painter’, in Selected Poems, ed. by Donald Allen (Manchester: Carcanet, 1991), p. 112.