The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem

by Jeremy Noel-Tod

  Every effort has been made to trace and contact the copyright-holders prior to publication. If notified, the publisher undertakes to rectify any errors or omissions at the earliest opportunity.

  Editor’s Acknowledgements

  I am indebted to everyone who has pointed me in the direction of prose poems over the last three years, including the generous suggestions of many people on Twitter, both known to me and anonymous. Among those people who also offered thoughts and texts either in conversation or by correspondence, I must particularly thank: Rachael Allen, Emily Berry, Jen Calleja, Vahni Capildeo, Simon Collings, Patricia Debney, Nathan Hamilton, Beau Hopkins, Daniel Kane, Amy Key, Dominic Leonard, Andrew McDonnell, Leo Mellor, Rod Mengham, Jane Monson, Vivek Naryanan, Sandeep Parmar, Sam Riviere, Michael Robbins, Andy Spragg, Toh Hsien Min, and David Wheatley. Peter Gizzi was a good friend to this project from the start, as was Carrie Etter, who kindly shared her own teaching anthology of prose poems as I was beginning to assemble a first draft.

  The idea for this book took shape during research leave granted by the University of East Anglia, and many UEA colleagues have contributed to how my thinking about it has developed, including Stephen Benson, Tom Boll, Giles Foden, Ross Hair, Thomas Karshan, David Nowell Smith, Rachel Potter, Cecilia Rossi, and Sophie Robinson. I am also grateful to both the Centre for Modern Poetry at the University of Kent and the School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen’s University, Belfast, for inviting me to speak at their research seminars, and for the stimulating discussions with staff and students that followed. Warm thanks for hot meals to my hosts David Herd, Ben Hickman, and Robbie Richardson (Kent), and Gail McConnell and Alex Murray (Belfast).

  The invitation from Gatehouse Press to guest-edit the Spring 2016 issue of Lighthouse magazine on the subject of ‘poetry into prose’ gave me a chance to begin thinking about ideas developed in my introduction, as did writing a chapter for British Prose Poetry: The Poems Without Lines (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), ed. by Jane Monson.