19. Amy Lowell, Can Grande’s Castle (New York: Macmillan, 1918), p. xv.
20. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk (London: John Murray, 1835), I, p. 84; Stein, p. 136.
21. William Wordsworth, The Major Works, ed. by Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 598.
22. In Other Traditions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), Ashbery notes that his poem was inspired by Clare’s prose fragment musing on the neglected subject of ‘House or Window Flies’ (pp. 18–19).
23. The New Republic, 8 April 1985, p. 18.
24. Quoted in The Best American Poetry 1997, ed. by James Tate and David Lehman (New York: Scribner, 1997), p. 200.
25. Roman Jakobson, ‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances’, in Selected Writings (The Hague: Mouton), II (1956), pp. 239–59.
26. Aristotle, Poetics, in Classical Literary Criticism, trans. by Penelope Murray and T. S. Dorsch (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 88.
27. Virginia Woolf, ‘Impassioned Prose’, in Collected Essays (London: The Hogarth Press), I (1966), pp. 165–72 (p. 168).
28. See Keiko Mizuta, ‘Katherine Mansfield and the Prose Poem’, The Review of English Studies, 39.153 (1988), 75–83.
29. Wordsworth, p. 285.
30. Ibid., pp. 601–2.
31. Charles Baudelaire, ‘Preface to La Presse, 1862’, in The Parisian Prowler, 2nd edn, trans. by Edward K. Kaplan (Athens: The University of Georgia, 1997), pp. 129–30 (p. 129).
32. Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 2010), p. 153.
33. Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zorn (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 152–90 (p. 162).
34. Rod Mengham, ‘A Genealogy of the Prose Poem’, Countertext 3.2 (2017), 176–86 (p. 186).
35. Nikki Santilli, Such Rare Citings: The Prose Poem in English Literature (London: Associated University Presses, 2002), p. 22.
36. David Lehman, ‘Introduction’, in Great American Prose Poems (New York: Scribner, 2006), pp. 11–26 (p. 13).
37. Vahni Capildeo, ‘Letter Not from Trinidad’, PN Review 221 (January–February 2015), 6.
38. Marguerite S. Murphy, A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992).
39. Wole Soyinka, A Shuttle from the Crypt (London: Rex Collings/Eyre, Methuen, 1972), p. vii.
40. See Ruth Williams, ‘Kim Hyesoon: The Female Grotesque’, Guernica, 1 January 2012, online.
41. Kate Kellaway, ‘Anne Carson: “I do not believe in therapy” ’ [interview], The Observer, 30 October 2016, online.
42. Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations, trans. by John Ashbery (Manchester: Carcanet, 2011), p. 14.
43. Vivek Naryanan, Universal Beach (Mumbai: Harbour Line, 2006), p. 65.
44. Wordsworth, pp. 596–7.
45. Michael Benedikt, ed., The Prose Poem: An International Anthology (New York: Dell, 1976), p. 47.
46. Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems 1923–1967 (London: Allen Lane, 1972), trans. by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, p. xv.
THE PROSE POEM NOW
* * *
The End of Days
after Anselm Kiefer & for Elena Lydia Scipioni
A snake with honey-coloured eyes survived and told what had happened:
In our burning fields, Yesterday drew me with the spittle of its mouth on a charred wall, like a blackboard in front of frightened pupils. Thus you saw in me the image of my father, throwing my last pennies into the fountain of death, then sewing the buttons of his oil-green coat in the furrows of mud where you had planted seeds, arranged in the form of words, and they grew and blossomed when light rained down, warm as remorse, and again blood was made to flow on the palms of the earth. Canes grew high as poplars and we broke them to roof our refuge, and we jumped over our vein-streams to swim in our first sky. We fertilised our language with our debris. Mountains had become ripe heads for the fists of the sky and the slopes cheeks we ran down like melted ice, and at every point where the disappeared had fallen an unattainable flower sprang up, or a burning matchstick flickered before a schoolboy could close his mouth over it to put out the flame – as he hurries to do his homework on forgetting fear.
We will remember for a long time how we were before this harvest. Each of us will visit his own grave, carrying a whip on his shoulder, or behind his back a sickle or a knife. Time was a game. We bade farewell to our beds that had been smashed by our dreams. Gamblers offered us a moon that crumbled to dust at the touch of our fingers. Rats offered us their eyes as stars. Hunger blazed its suns behind our foreheads. Books we hadn’t read flittered down and landed on our ulcers. Great silences seeped through our bandages. No one uttered a word. The dots and signs with which we ended our lines leapt towards the words scattered about them, and all meanings changed.
Golan Haji (2017), translated from the Arabic by the author and Stephen Watts
Merry Christmas from Hegel
It was the year my brother died, I lived up north and had few friends or they all went away. Christmas Day I was sitting in my armchair, reading something about Hegel. You will forgive me if you are someone who knows a lot of Hegel or understands it, I do not and will paraphrase badly, but I understood him to be saying he was fed up with popular criticism of his terrible prose and claiming that conventional grammar, with its clumsy dichotomy of subject and verb, was in conflict with what he called ‘speculation’. Speculation being the proper business of philosophy. Speculation being the effort to grasp reality in its interactive entirety. The function of a sentence like ‘Reason is Spirit’ was not to assert a fact (he said) but to lay Reason side by side with Spirit and allow their meanings to tenderly mingle in speculation. I was overjoyed by this notion of a philosophic space where words drift in gentle mutual redefinition of one another but, at the same time, wretchedly lonely with all my family dead and here it was Christmas Day, so I put on big boots and coat and went out to do some snow standing. Not since childhood! I had forgot how astounding it is. I went to the middle of a woods. Fir trees, the teachers of this, all around. Minus twenty degrees in the wind but inside the trees is no wind. The world subtracts itself in layers. Outer sounds like traffic and shoveling vanish. Inner sounds become audible, cracks, sighs, caresses, twigs, birdbreath, toenails of squirrel. The fir trees move hugely. The white is perfectly curved, stunned with itself. Puffs of ice fog and some gold things float up. Shadows rake their motionlessness across the snow with a vibration of other shadows moving crosswise on them, shadow on shadow, in precise velocities. It is very cold, then that, too, begins to subtract itself, the body chills on its surface but the core is hot and it is possible to disconnect the surface, withdraw to the core, where a ravishing peace flows in, so ravishing I am unembarrassed to use the word ravishing, and it is not a peace of separation from the senses but the washing-through peace of looking, listening, feeling, at the very core of snow, at the very core of the care of snow. It has nothing to do with Hegel and he would not admire the clumsily conventional sentences in which I have tried to tell about it but I suspect, if I hadn’t been trying on the mood of Hegel’s particular grammatical indignation that Christmas Day, I would never have gone out to stand in the snow, or stayed to speculate with it, or had the patience to sit down and make a record of speculation for myself as if it were a worthy way to spend an afternoon, a plausible way to change the icy horror of holiday into a sort of homecoming. Merry Christmas from Hegel.
Anne Carson (2016)
Going Nowhere, Getting Somewhere
How was it that till questioned, till displaced in the attempt to answer, I had scarcely thought of myself as having a country, or indeed as having left a country? The answer lies peripherally in looming, in hinterland; primarily in the tongueless, palpitating interiority. Trinidad was. Trinidad is. In the same way, some confident speakers do not think of themselves as having an accent
. They will say so: ‘I don’t have an accent! You have an accent!’ In those accentless voices compass points spin, ochre and ultramarine flagella fling themselves identifiably towards this that or the other region. It is a motile version of that luxury, solidity, non-reflectivity that is the assumption of patria. So different is the expat from the refugee, who has her country on her back, or the migrant, who has countries at his back.
What would I have called home, before I began creating home? Before I had to learn to ravel up longitude, latitude, population, oil rigs, mobile phone masts, prayer flags, legality of fireworks, likely use of firearms, density and disappearance of forests, scarlet ibis, other stripes of scarlet, into a by-listeners-unvisited, communicable, substantial image of ‘Trinidad’?
Language is my home. It is alive other than in speech. It is beyond a thing to be carried with me. It is ineluctable, variegated and muscular. A flicker and drag emanates from the idea of it. Language seems capable of girding the oceanic earth, like the world-serpent of Norse legend. It is as if language places a shaping pressure upon our territories of habitation and voyage; thrashing, independent, threatening to rive our known world apart.
Yet thought is not bounded by language. At least, my experience of thinking does not appear so bound.
One day I lost the words wall and floor. There seemed no reason to conceive of a division. The skirting-board suddenly reduced itself to a nervous gentrification, a cover-up of some kind; nothing especially marked. The room was an inward-focused container. ‘Wall’, ‘floor’, even ‘ceiling’, ‘doorway’, ‘shutters’ started to flow smoothly, like a red ribbed tank top over a heaving ribcage. Room grew into quarter. Room became segment. Line yearned till it popped into curve. The imperfections of what had been built or installed: the ragged windowframe or peeling tile: had no power to reclaim human attention to ‘floor’ or ‘wall’ as such. Objects were tethered like astronauts and a timid fringe of disarrayed atmosphere was the immediate past that human activity kept restyling into present. The interiority of the room was in continuous flow. Wall, floor became usable words again in a sort of silence.
I had the sense to shut up about the languageless perception. Procedure for living.
Language is my home, I say; not one particular language.
Vahni Capildeo (2016)
Children are the Orgasm of the World
This morning on the bus there was a woman carrying a bag with inspirational sayings and positive affirmations which I was reading because I’m a fan of inspirational sayings and positive affirmations. I also like clothing that gives you advice. What’s better than the glittered baseball cap of a stranger telling you what to strive for? It’s like living in a world of therapists. The inspirational bag of the woman on the bus said a number of things like ‘live in the moment’ and ‘remember to breathe’ but it also said ‘children are the orgasm of the world’. Are children the orgasm of the world like orgasms are the orgasms of sex? Are children the orgasm of anything? Children are the orgasm of the world like hovercraft are the orgasm of the future or silence is the orgasm of the telephone, or shit is the orgasm of the lasagne. You could even say sheep are the orgasm of lonely pastures, which are the orgasm of modern farming practices which are the orgasm of the industrial revolution. And then I thought why not? I like comparing things to other things too. Like sometimes when we’re having sex and you look like a helicopter in a low-budget movie, disappearing behind a cloud to explode. Or an athlete winning a prestigious sporting tournament at the exact moment he realises his wife has been cheating on him. For the most part, orgasms are the orgasms of the world. Like slam-dunking a glass basketball. Or executing a perfect dive into a swimming pool full of oh my god. Or travelling into the past to forgive yourself and creating a time paradox so complex it forces all of human history to reboot, stranding you naked on some rocky outcrop, looking up at the sunset from a world so new looking up hasn’t even been invented yet.
Hera Lindsay Bird (2016)
Antico Adagio
Bring down the lights. Bring out the stars. Let the record sing; the vibraphone; the violin; the gong. We call this charm a festooned gazebo in twilight. We call night and her creatures to the summer screen; every beat a wheel every wheel aglow. The soft tight musical light a freshet. And happy who can hear the wood, the ferns bobbing, the stars splashing down. I wanted this glad light happy light inside the gloaming. I wanted glow. The piping anthem of a voyage listing in lamplight, oboe light; hear it and fly. Hear it fly like friendship like modernism beginning like a steamer pulling out to sea in an old reel dreaming. Married to a song; to a pebble of song.
Peter Gizzi (2016)
Knife
It has a broad axe shape, but is sliver-thin. Even at the blunt end, the ochre-coloured flint, smoothed and polished, is a slim-line product. It looks like a small spatula, and would be something of a puzzle to archaeology, but speculation is pointless, rendered futile at a touch. The obliging object tells the hand exactly where it wants to go.
As soon as I picked it up, the long haft made itself at home, slung between first finger and thumb on the elastic webbing of skin. The first fingerpad went straight to the back of the blade. After three thousand years of dumb neglect, the instrument was attuned, responsive, prompt to its ancient cue.
The leading edge is minutely pecked. Broken small craters, overlapping scoops, were quickly opened up in the glassy stone by the same degree of force aimed repeatedly, dozens of times, at the same hard margin of a few fingers’ breadth.
The life-knowledge of the flint-knapper dwells in the sparing of exertion at the very point of landing a blow. The effects of this knowledge, the depth and shape of indentations in the stone, are accordingly generic if not uniform. An even more precise and unthinking calculation is needed for end-on strokes that split the individual flint.
At some point the maker, under the spell of making, no longer sees the use to which the blade is put, seeing instead the bloom of a new shape begin to emerge from the flint’s uncertain depths. Sometimes this shape is only poorly divined, or glimpsed and avoided; sometimes it is nursed into life, by craftsmen who watch for the ideal form of knife-being, especially if this is a votive blade, intended for ritual deposit. Best of all is when the artist, setting his sights on perfect function, sees it rise above the horizon at the same point as beauty of form.
This tool for cutting was neither deposited nor lost. I think it was left beneath the roots of a broad oak with a clutter of flints, worked but unfinished, until the maker should return, and return soon. There it lay until the sea covered all the oaks whose stumps are now below the tides at Holme-next-the-Sea.
Lying there through storms that uncovered the massive inverted bole of roots at the centre of Seahenge, close by, it found another hand to belabour, to switch on, to gear up, when just enough sand had been swished aside for its pale surface to draw the eye.
It may never have been used, but was made for a hand that used others like it, and it would always transmit the same feeling for action, the same possible uses for butchery: severing, slicing, scraping. It was the lever between inner and outer worlds, it showed that the airs and waters, rocks and earth, moving and combining and resisting one another, obeying the spirits that ruled them, had their equivalent workings, their times of calm and upheaval, under the skin; in the wallowing lungs, the weeping flesh, the flowing heart, and in all the symmetries of bones and muscles, the asymmetries of lower organs, the random belt of the guts. It brought the cross-sections of life within grasp. Behind it, the physician’s trial and error, the surgeon’s initiative; the whole breathing, faltering body of science.
Rod Mengham (2015)
A Woman Shopping
I will soon write a long, sad book called A Woman Shopping. It will be a book about what we are required to do and also a book about what we are hated for doing. It will be a book about envy and a book about barely visible things. This book would be a book also about the history of literature and literature
’s uses against women, also against literature and for it, also against shopping and for it. The flâneur is a poet is an agent free of purses, but a woman is not a woman without a strap over her shoulder or a clutch in her hand.
The back matter of the book will only say this: If a woman has no purse, we will imagine one for her.
These would be the chapters:
On a woman shopping
On men shopping, with and without women
On children with women as they shop
On the barely moving lips of the calculating and poor
On attempting to open doors for the elderly and in the process of this, touching their arms
On the acquiring of arms in action movies
On Daniel Defoe
On the time I saw a homeless man murdered for shoplifting
On whether it is better to want nothing or steal everything
On how many of my hours are gone now because I have had to shop
On how I wish I could shop for hours instead
There would be more; lavish descriptions of lavish descriptions of the perverse or decadently feminized marketplace, some long sentences concerning the shipping and distribution of alterity, an entire chapter about Tender Buttons in which each sentence is only a question. And from where did that mutton, that roast beef, that carafe come?
But who would publish this book and who, also, would shop for it? And how could it be literature if it is not coyly against literature, but sincerely against it, as it is also against ourselves?
Anne Boyer (2015)
Notes Towards a Race Riot Scene
The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem Page 4