Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present

by Unknown

  Gabriel Gudding was born in Anoka, Minnesota on Bloom’s Day, 1966. Raised in Minnesota, North Dakota, and Washington, he was educated at the Evergreen State College, Purdue and Cornell universities, and has begun creative writing programs in two prisons. He teaches at Illinois State University. A Defense of Poetry won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2002.

  Barbara Guest was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1920. She grew up in Los Angeles, was graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, and lived for many years in New York City. She has published twenty-six books, twenty-three of them poetry, including If So, Tell Me (Reality Street, London, 1999); Rocks on a Platter: Notes on Literature (Wesleyan University Press, 1999); and Symbiosis (Kelsey St., 2000). “Color” appeared in The Confetti Trees (Sun & Moon, 1999). She wrote a biography of the poet H. D. under the title Herself Defined (Quill, 1984). She lives in Berkeley, California.

  Carla Harryman was born in 1952. Her books include two volumes of selected writing, There Never Was a Rose without a Thorn (City Light Books, 1995) and Animal Instincts (Sun & Moon Press, 1989). Known for her genre experiments and gender irreverence, Harryman, a native Californian, now lives in the Detroit area and teaches English at Wayne State University.

  Matthea Harvey was born in 1973 and is the author of Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form (Alice James Books, 2000). She is the poetry editor of American Letters & Commentary and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  Robert Hass was born in San Francisco in 1941. His books of poetry include Sun Under Wood: New Poems (Ecco Press, 1996); Human Wishes (Ecco Press, 1989); and Field Guide (1973), which Stanley Kunitz selected for the Yale Younger Poets Series. His prose poems are in Human Wishes (Ecco Press, 1989). He has also cotranslated several volumes of poetry with Czeslaw Milosz. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and was guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2001. He lives in California and teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

  Lyn Hejinian was born in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1941 and lives in Berkeley. Her recent books include Slowly (Tuumba Press, 2002), The Language of Inquiry (a collection of essays, from the University of California Press, 2000), and A Border Comedy (Granary Books, 2001). She is also the author of My Life (1987) and The Cell (1992), both from Sun & Moon Press. She is codirector (with Travis Ortiz) of Atelos, a literary project commissioning and publishing cross-genre work by poets.

  Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899. At seventeen he joined the Kansas City Star as a reporter, then volunteered to serve in the Red Cross during World War I. After the war he settled in Paris and wrote the novels that made him famous (The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms) and the short stories (in our time, Men Without Women that caused a revolution in prose style). “Montparnasse” was written in Paris in 1922. The italicized prose that divides the stories in in our time (1925)—fifteen “chapters” plus an envoi—has been claimed for the province of the prose poem. Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1954. He took his life in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1961.

  John Hollander was born in New York City in 1929. He has published eighteen books of poetry, the most recent being Figurehead (Knopf, 1999) and a reissue of his Reflections on Espionage with added notes and commentary (Yale University Press, 1999). His books of criticism include The Work of Poetry (Columbia University Press, 1997) and The Poetry of Everyday Life (University of Michigan Press, 1998). He is Sterling Professor of English at Yale University. He was guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1998. Of “The Way We Walk Now,” he has commented that the poem is “about prose, as well as about life after verse.”

  Fanny Howe was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1940. She grew up in Boston and raised her three children there, but much of her life has been spent in California. Her most recent collections of poems are One Crossed Out (Graywolf, 1997) and Selected Poems (University of California Press, 2000). Her most recent novel, Indivisible, was published by Semiotexte/MIT Press in 2001. A new collection of poems and a new collection of essays are expected from the University of California Press in 2003.

  David Ignatow was born in Brooklyn in 1914 and spent most of his life in the New York City area. His many books of poetry include Living Is What I Wanted: Last Poems (BOA Editions, 1999), At My Ease: Uncollected Poems of the Fifties and Sixties (BOA, 1998), and Against the Evidence: Selected Poems, 1934–1994 (Wesleyan University Press, 1994). He was president of the Poetry Society of America from 1980 to 1984. He died in 1997 at his home in East Hampton, New York. “The Story of Progress” was published in Verse and was selected by Robert Bly for The Best American Poetry 1999.

  Mark Jarman was born in Mount Sterling, Kentucky, in 1952. His recent collections of poetry, both published by Story Line Press, are Unholy Sonnets (2000) and Questions for Ecclesiastes (1997), which won the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He has two book of essays on poetry: The Secret of Poetry (Story Line Press, 2001) and Body and Soul (University of Michigan Press, 2002). Story Line Press will publish his book of prose poems, Epistles, in spring 2004. He teaches at Vanderbilt University.

  Lisa Jarnot was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1967. “Still Life” and “Ode” appeared in her Ring of Fire (Zoland Books, 2001). She lives in New York City and is completing a biography of Robert Duncan.

  Louis Jenkins was born and raised in Oklahoma and now lives in Duluth, Minnesota. His books of poetry include An Almost Human Gesture (Eighties Press and Ally Press, 1987), Nice Fish: New and Selected Prose Poems (1995), Just Above Water (1997), and The Winter Road (2000), the last three named all from Holy Cow! Press. The Thousands Press released a CD recording of Jenkins reading his poems, Any Way in the World, in 2000.

  Peter Johnson was born in 1951 and has published two books of prose poems: Miracles & Mortifications (White Pine Press, 2001), which received the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Pretty Happy! (White Pine Press, 1997). He is the editor of The Best of the Prose Poem: An International Journal (White Pine Press, 2000).

  Jennifer L. Knox was born in Lancaster, California (“where everyone’s got a hot ass”), in 1968. Her work appeared in The Best American Poetry 1997. She teaches at Hunter College, lives in Brooklyn, and is finishing her first book, A Gringo Like Me.

  Kenneth Koch was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1925. He received a doctorate from Columbia University and taught there for many years. His recent books of poetry are A Possible World (2002), Sun Out: Selected Poems 1952–1954 (2002), and New Addresses (2000), all from Knopf. Also published recently were two books about poetry: The Art of Poetry (University of Michigan, 1996) and Making Your Own Days (Scribner, 1998). “On Happiness,” “The Allegory of Spring,” and “The Wish to Be Pregnant” are all from Hotel Lambosa (1993). He died on July 6, 2002.

  Yusef Komunyakaa was born in Bogalusa, Louisiana, in 1947. His books of poems include Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975–1999 (Wesleyan University Press, 2001); Talking Dirty to the Gods (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000); Thieves of Paradise (Wesleyan University Press, 1998). Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977–1989 (Wesleyan University Press, 1994) received the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Prize. He is on the faculty of Princeton University.

  Ruth Krauss was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1901. A prolific author of children’s books, whose titles include The Carrot Seed and Charlotte and the White Horse, she collaborated with illustrator Maurice Sendak on eight books between 1953 and 1960. Nearing sixty, she took Kenneth Koch’s course in poetry writing at the New School. “News” appeared in the avant-garde magazine Locus Solus in 1961. She died in Westport, Connecticut, in 1993.

  Emma Lazarus was born in New York City in 1849, growing up in a prominent fourth-generation Jewish family. A volume of her Poems and Translations was published in her teen years (1867). Her work attracted the attention of Ralph Waldo Emerson, with whom she had a lifelong correspondence. In 1883 she published �
��The New Colossus” for an auction to benefit the Statue of Liberty, which was erected in New York Harbor three years later. “The Exodus (August 3, 1492)” is from By the Waters of Babylon (1887). Emma Lazarus was thirty-eight when she died of cancer in 1887. Not until 1903 were her famous lines from “The New Colossus” added to a bronze plaque at the base of the statue.

  Katherine Lederer was born in New Hampshire in 1972. Educated at the University of California at Berkeley and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is the author of Winter Sex (Verse Press, 2002). She lives in New York City.

  Amy Lowell was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1874. She published her first book of poems in 1912. In London in 1913 she joined Ezra Pound as one of the founders of the Imagist Movement, which put a high value on “sharp and precise” imagery, common speech, the “exact word, not the merely decorative word,” freedom in choice of subject matter, the omission of needless words, and a goal of “poetry that is hard and clear, not blurred and indefinite.” Lowell and Pound inevitably quarreled, and after he withdrew from the group she became its chief spokesperson. Her posthumous volume, What’s O’Clock, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1926. She died in 1925.

  Sarah Manguso was born in 1974, grew up in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and was educated at Harvard University and the University of Iowa. She is the author of The Captain Lands in Paradise (Alice James Books, 2002). She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  Dionisio D. Martínez was born in Cuba in 1956. He is the author of Climbing Back (W.W. Norton & Co., 2001), selected by Jorie Graham for the National Poetry Series; Bad Alchemy (W.W. Norton & Co., 1995); and History as a Second Language (Ohio State University Press, 1993). He lives in Florida.

  Harry Mathews was born in New York City in 1930. He divides his time between France and Key West, Florida. His most recent books are The Way Home: Selected Longer Prose (Atlas Press, London, 1999) and Sainte Catherine, a novella written in French (Éditions P.O.L, Paris, 2000). 20 Lines a Day, an experiment in daily writing, was composed in 1983 and 1984 and published by Dalkey Archive Press in 1988.

  Bernadette Mayer was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1945. Her books include Two Haloed Mourners: Poems (Granary Books, 1998), The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters (Hard Press, 1994), The Bernadette Mayer Reader (New Directions, 1992), and Sonnets (Tender Buttons Books, 1989). She has taught writing workshops at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York City for many years, and she served as the Poetry Project’s director during the 1980s.

  Campbell McGrath was born in Chicago in 1962. He is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Florida Poems (2002) and Road Atlas (1999), a collection of prose poems, both from Ecco/HarperCollins. He has received the Kingsley Tufts Prize as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations. He lives in Miami and teaches at Florida International University.

  James Merrill was born in New York City in 1926, the son of financier Charles E. Merrill, one of the founders of the brokerage firm Merrill Lynch & Co. A graduate of Amherst College, he published his First Poems in 1951. The epic poem begun in Divine Comedies (1976) and extended in two subsequent volumes was published in its entirety as The Changing Light at Sandover (Atheneum, 1983). The three poems anthologized here are from “Prose of Departure,” a sequence appearing in The Inner Room (Knopf, 1988). Merrill’s Collected Poems (2001) and Collected Novels and Plays (2002), edited by J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser, were recently published by Knopf. He died on February 6, 1995.

  W. S. Merwin was born in New York City in 1927, and has lived in Spain, England, France, and Mexico. His recent books include The Pupil (2001), a translation of Dante’s Purgatorio (2000), and The River Sound (1999), all from Knopf. His prose collections The Miner’s Pale Children (1970) and Houses and Travellers (1977) were reprinted by Henry Holt in 1994. He lives in Haiku, Hawaii.

  Czeslaw Milosz was born in Szetejnie, Lithuania (then under the domination of the Russian tsarist government) in 1911. In 1931 he cofounded the Polish avant-garde literary group “Zagary.” He spent most of World War II in Nazi-occupied Warsaw working for underground presses. After the war, he came to the United States as a diplomat for the Polish communist government. In 1950 he was transferred to Paris, and the following year he requested and received political asylum. He moved to the United States to teach Polish literature at the University of California at Berkeley in 1960. He has written virtually all of his poems in his native Polish, although his work was banned in Poland until after he won the Nobel Prize in 1980. His recent books include Road-Side Dog (1998), in which “Be Like Others” appears, and To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays (2001), both from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

  Thylias Moss was born in Cleveland in 1954. “Infected with the spirit of a cosmologist, [she] continues to do much writing and thinking, attracted to the inexplicable, the quirky, the contradictory, the apparently aberrant.” Her most recent book of poetry is Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler (Persea Books, 1998). Soon to be published is Slave Moth, a narrative in verse. She teaches at the University of Michigan.

  Harryette Mullen was born in Florence, Alabama, and grew up in Fort Worth, Texas. She is the author of six poetry books, most recently Blues Baby: Early Poems (Bucknell University Press, 2002) and Sleeping with the Dictionary (University of California Press, 2002). She teaches African-American literature, American poetry, and creative writing at UCLA.

  Alice Notley was born in 1945. She grew up in Needles, California, and was educated at Barnard College and the University of Iowa. She lived for many years in New York City. Her books include Disobedience (2001), Mysteries of Small Houses (1998), and The Descent of Alette (1996), all from Penguin, USA. Since 1992 she has lived in Paris. “Untitled” appeared in the magazine Courier in 2002.

  Frank O’Hara was born in Baltimore in 1926. He served in the navy in World War II. In 1951 he joined his Harvard friends John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch in Manhattan, and the New York School was on the way. O’Hara wrote for Art News and worked his way up from postcard clerk to associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art. His monograph on Jackson Pollock appeared in 1959. His books of poems include Meditations in an Emergency (Grove Press, 1957), Lunch Poems (City Light Books, 1964), and the posthumous Collected Poems (Knopf, 1971). He died in July 1966, having been hit by a dune buggy on Fire Island. Edwin Denby said O’Hara was “everybody’s catalyst.” The painter Phillip Guston called him “our Apollinaire.”

  Ron Padgett was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1942. His books include New & Selected Poems, 1963–1992 (Godine, 1995), The Straight Line: Writings on Poetry and Poets (University of Michigan Press, 2000), and You Never Know (Coffee House Press, 2002). He is the translator of Blaise Cendrars’s Complete Poems. In 2003 the University of Oklahoma Press will publish his memoir of his father, Oklahoma Tough. “Light as Air” appeared originally in Boulevard, “Album” in Shiny.

  Michael Palmer was born in Manhattan in 1943. He has lived in San Francisco since 1969. He is the author of The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972–1995 (1998), and The Promises of Glass (2000), both from New Directions. The poem anthologized here appeared in Sun (North Point, 1988). Recent projects include May I Now, a collaboration with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company.

  Kenneth Patchen was born in Niles, Ohio, in 1911. His books include Before the Brave (Random House, 1936), First Will and Testament (1939), and Journal of Albion Moonlight (1941), the latter two from New Directions. The three poems in this anthology appeared in The Famous Boating Party (New Directions, 1954). For more than thirty years, he lived with a severe spinal ailment that caused him almost constant physical pain. He died in 1972.

  Wang Ping was born in Shanghai, China, in 1957, and came to the United States in 1985. Her publications include Foreign Devil (novel, 1996) and Of Flesh and Spirit (poetry, 1998), both from Coffee House, and Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China (2000) from the University of Minnesota Press. She edited and cotranslated New Generation: Poetry from China Today (Hanging Loose Press, 1999)
. She teaches at Macalester College in Minnesota.

  Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1809. Orphaned at the age of three, he was raised by a foster father in Richmond, Virginia. Gambling debts forced him to leave the University of Virginia. In 1827 he enlisted in the army and published Tamerlane, his first book of poems. He made his living as a writer of stories and reviews and later as a magazine editor in New York City and Philadelphia. Often condescended to—T. S. Eliot said Poe had the mind of “a highly gifted young person before puberty”—he was astonishingly inventive in ways that still inspire. He cannot be bettered as an author of macabre tales. With “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in 1841, he created the detective story as a genre with nearly all its conventions in place. He exerted a profound influence on Baudelaire and Mallarmé, who translated him, and on French Symbolism in general. In his “Tomb of Edgar Poe,” Mallarme wrote that Poe’s legacy was to “give a purer sense to the words of the tribe.” Following his young wife’s death from tuberculosis in 1847, Poe feuded, flirted, caroused, and eventually drank himself to oblivion. On October 3, 1849, he was found in a state of semiconsciousness in Baltimore and died four days later of “congestion of the brain.”

  Claudia Rankine was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1963. She is the author of PLOT (Grove Press, 2001), The End of the Alphabet (Grove Press, 1998), and Nothing in Nature Is Private (Cleveland State University Press, 1994). She is coeditor, with Juliana Spahr, of American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language (Wesleyan University Press, 2002).

  James Richardson was born in Bradenton, Florida, in 1950. His recent books include Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays (Ausable Press, 2001), How Things Are (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 2000), and As If (National Poetry Series, 1992). He teaches at Princeton University.

  Kit Robinson has been active as a poet, teacher, and performer on the San Francisco Bay Area poetry scene for thirty years. He is the author of The Crave, 9:45, Cloud Eight (with Alan Bernheimer), Democracy Boulevard, Balance Sheet, and a dozen other books from such small presses as Atelos, Chax, Post-Apollo, Potes & Poets, Roof, The Figures, This, Tuumba, Whale Cloth, and Zasterle. He lives in Berkeley and works as a marketing executive in the information technology industry.