Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present

by Unknown

  Mary Ruefle was born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, in 1952. She is the author of seven books of poetry, including Apparition Hill (CavanKerry Press, 2002), which she completed in China in 1989, and Among the Musk Ox People (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 2002). A Guggenheim Fellow, she lives in Massachusetts. “Monument” appeared in Seneca Review in 2001.

  Ira Sadoff was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1945. His books include Barter (2003) and Grazing (1998), both from the University of Illinois Press. He is also the author of The Ira Sadoff Reader (poems, stories, essays) and Uncoupling, a novel. He teaches American literature at Colby College in Maine. “Seurat” is from his first book, Settling Down (Houghton Mifflin, 1975).

  Leslie Scalapino has written more than twenty books of poetry, fiction, essays, and plays. New Time (poetry) and The Public World/ Syntactically Impermanence (poetry and essays) were published by Wesleyan University Press. Her newest book of poetry (from Post-Apollo Press) is It’s Go/In Quiet Illumined Grass/Land.

  James Schuyler was born in Chicago in 1923. Freely Espousing, his first collection of poems, did not appear until he was forty-six. His subsequent books include The Crystal Lithium (Random House, 1972), Hymn to Life (Random House, 1974), The Morning of the Poem (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), A Few Days (Random House, 1985), and the posthumous Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993). The Morning of the Poem (1980) won the Pulitzer Prize. He was also the author of three novels, one of them, A Nest of Ninnies, in collaboration with John Ashbery. Schuyler died in New York City in April 1991.

  Delmore Schwartz was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1913. His first book was In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (New Directions, 1939). The title story caused a sensation when it appeared in Partisan Review. He later became an editor of that magazine, taught at Harvard, and wrote brilliant poems and essays as well as stories. In “Coriolanus and His Mother,” Schwartz describes a performance of the Shakespeare tragedy as witnessed by Aristotle, Beethoven, Freud, Kant, and Marx. “Justice” is one of the prose poems that divide the acts. A volume of selected poems appeared in 1959 under the title Summer Knowledge. He died in the elevator of a seedy Times Square hotel in 1966.

  Maureen Seaton was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1947. Her books include Little Ice Age (Invisible Cities Press, 2001) and Furious Cooking (University of Iowa, 1996). With Denise Duhamel she is coauthor of Exquisite Politics (Tia Chucha Press, 1997), Oyl (Pearl Editions, 2000), and Little Novels (Pearl Editions, 2002.) She teaches at the University of Miami.

  Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1938, and immigrated to the United States in 1954. As a poet and translator, he has published more than sixty books since 1967. He teaches at the University of New Hampshire. Jackstraws, a book of poems, and Selected Early Poems were published by Harcourt Brace in 1999. He was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1992. “The Magic Study of Happiness” appeared in his book on Joseph Cornell, Dime-Store Alchemy; “Contributor’s Note” was published in Verse in 1997.

  Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, in 1874, to wealthy German-Jewish immigrants. At the age of three, her family moved first to Vienna and then to Paris. They returned to America in 1878 and settled in Oakland (“no there there”), California. Stein attended Radcliffe College, where she studied with William James. She moved to Paris in 1903, and her apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus became a legendary international avant-garde salon. Picasso, Matisse, Ezra Pound, Hemingway, and Scott Fitzgerald were among the writers and artists who paid court. In 1907 she met Alice B. Toklas, who became her lifelong companion. Three Lives was published in 1909, Tender Buttons in 1914. Her writing earned her such sobriquets as the “Mama of Dada” and the “Mother Goose of Montparnasse.” Of Tender Buttons she commented: “I struggled with the ridding of myself of nouns. I knew that nouns must go in poetry as they had gone in prose if anything that is everything was to go on meaning something.” Stein told Hemingway that his was a “lost generation,” and Hemingway repeated the line as the epigraph of The Sun Also Rises. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), which Stein wrote, became a best-seller. Four Saints in Three Acts, the opera she wrote in collaboration with Virgil Thomson, enjoyed a six-week run on Broadway in 1934. She died at the American Hospital at Neuilly on July 27, 1946, of inoperable cancer.

  Mark Strand was born on Canada’s Prince Edward Island in 1934. His books include Blizzard of One (1998), which won the Pulitzer Prize, and Dark Harbor (1993), both from Knopf. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States and was guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1991. “In the Privacy of the Home” and “Success Story” appeared in his first book, Sleeping with One Eye Open (Atheneum, 1964). “From a Lost Diary” and “Chekhov: A Sestina” are from The Continuous Life (Knopf, 1990). He teaches in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

  James Tate was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1943. Selected Poems received the Pulitzer Prize for 1991. Worshipful Company of Fletchers won the National Book Award in 1994. Recent books include Memoir of the Hawk (Ecco Press, 2001) and Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee (Verse Press, 2001). He was guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1997. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Asked about Memoir of the Hawk, which consists of narrative “prose poems” with line breaks, Tate told Eric Lorberer that “early on I knew I was keeping my line breaks. Not that they’re terribly significant either, so that’s what’s funny. And when The Prose Poem did away with mine, I wasn’t upset in the least. I’m somewhere lost in this No Man’s Land of the prose poem world.”

  Jean Toomer was born in Washington, D.C., in 1894, the son of a Georgian farmer. Though he passed for white during certain periods of his life, he was raised in a predominantly black community and attended black high schools. Cane, a book of poems and prose poems, was acclaimed when published in 1923. After Cane he came under the strong influence of the Russian mystic George Gurdjieff and conducted experiments in community living. Much of his work remained unpublished at the time of his death in 1967.

  Paul Violi was born in New York in 1944. His most recent books are Fracas and Selected Accidents, Pointless Anecdotes, both from Hanging Loose Press, and Breakers, a selection of his long poems, from Coffee House Press. “Triptych” appeared in his book Splurge (Sun, 1982).

  Karen Volkman was born in Miami in 1967. Her books of poetry are Crash’s Law (W.W. Norton & Co., 1996) and Spar (University of Iowa Press, 2002). She teaches at the University of Chicago.

  Anne Waldman teaches at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa in Boulder, Colorado, a program she cofounded with Allen Ginsberg in 1974. Her books include Marriage: A Sentence (Penguin Poets, 2000), which includes “Stereo,” and Vow to Poetry: Essays, Interviews & Manifestos (Coffee House Press, 2001). She was the director of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project from 1968 to 1978. With Lewis Warsh she is coeditor of The Angel Hair Anthology (Granary Books, 2001).

  Rosmarie Waldrop was born in Kitzingen, Germany, in 1935. Her most recent books of poems are Reluctant Gravities (New Directions, 1999), Split Infinites (Singing Horse Press, 1998), and Another Language: Selected Poems (Talisman House, 1997). She has translated works by Edmond Jabès, Jacques Roubaud, and Emmanuel Hocquard from the French and Friederike Mayröcker, Elke Erb, and Oskar Pastior from the German. Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès, a memoir, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2002. With Keith Waldrop she is coeditor of Burning Deck Press. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

  Joe Wenderoth, born in 1966, lives with his wife and daughter in Marshall, Minnesota, where he teaches at Southwest State University. His first two books of poems, Disfortune and It Is If I Speak, were published by Wesleyan University Press. Letters to Wendy’s, excerpted here, appeared from Verse Press in 2000.

  Tom Whalen was born in Texarkana, Arkansas, in 1948. His first prose poem was published in 1976. His books include Roithamer’s Universe (a novel), Winter Coat (poetry), and, with Daniel Qui
nn, the comic fiction A Newcomer’s Guide to the Afterlife. He lives in Stuttgart, Germany.

  Susan Wheeler was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1955. Her three books of poetry are Bag ‘O’ Diamonds (University of Georgia Press, 1994), Smokes (Four Way Books, 1998), and Source Codes (SALT Publishing, 2001). She has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, and teaches at Princeton University and at the New School in New York City.

  Thornton Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1897. As a teenager he lived in China, where his father was consul-general. Educated at Oberlin, Yale, and Princeton, he also studied archaeology in Rome. In 1927 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Two of his plays won Pulitzers: Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942). His 1955 play, The Match-maker, was made into the musical Hello, Dolly! He died in Hamden, Connecticut, in 1975.

  Tyrone Williams was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1954. He has published C.C., a book of poems, and coedited a collection of writings by the homeless in Cincinnati. “Cold Calls” appeared originally in the fall 2000 issue of Hambone. He is completing books on quotation in modern art and rap music and the public. He teaches at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio.

  William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1883. He began writing poetry while a student at Horace Mann High School. He received his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and resolved to be a poet and practicing physician for the rest of his life. His major works include Kora in Hell (1920), Spring and All (1923), Pictures from Brueghel (1962), and the five-volume epic Paterson (1963). He wrote the prose improvisations of Kora in Hell on a daily basis. “So that scribbling in the dark, leaving behind on my desk, often past midnight, the sheets to be filed away later, at the end of a year I had assembled a fairly bulky ms.” Later, he added “notes of explanation, often more dense than the first writing.” He wasn’t sure what to call the finished product. It was obviously not verse, but it was different from “the typically French prose poem.” He decided there was “nothing to do but put it down as it stood, trusting to the generous spirit of the age to find a place for it.” Williams’s health began to decline after a heart attack in 1948 and a series of strokes, but he continued to write until his death in New Jersey in 1963.

  Terence Winch was born in New York City in 1945. He has published three books of poems, The Drift of Things (The Figures, 2001), Irish Musicians/American Friends (Coffee House Press, 1986), and The Great Indoors (Story Line Press, 1995). He has recorded three albums with Celtic Thunder, an Irish band he started with his brother in 1977. His second album with the band, The Light of Other Days (Green Linnet Records), won the INDIE for best Celtic recording.

  James Wright was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio, in 1927. He attended Kenyon College on the GI Bill and studied with John Crowe Ransom. The Green Wall, his first book, won the Yale Younger Series Prize (1957). Subsequent books include Saint Judas (1959) and The Branch Will Not Break (1963). He translated works by Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, and Georg Trakl. In 1972 he received the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. He died in New York City in 1980. The poems anthologized here are from the posthumously published This Journey (1982). Above the River: The Complete Poems, with an introduction by Donald Hall, was published in 1990 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux and University Press of New England).

  John Yau was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1950, shortly after his parents fled Shanghai. He received his BA from Bard College and MFA from Brooklyn College. His recent books are Borrowed Love Poems (Penguin, 2002), My Heart Is That Eternal Rose Tattoo (Black Sparrow, 2001), and a collaboration with the artist Archie Rand, 100 More Jokes from the Book of the Dead (Meritage, 2001). He lives in New York City.

  Andrew Zawacki was born in Warren, Pennsylvania, in 1972. He is the author of By Reason of Breakings (University of Georgia Press, 2002), coeditor of Verse, and editor of Afterwards: Slovenian Writing 1945–1995 (White Pine Press, 1999). A doctoral student in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, he won the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award for his prose poem sequence, “Masquerade,” from which the two poems in this anthology were chosen.

  INDEX OF POEMS

  “Aaron,” Edwin Denby, 56

  “According to the Appetites,” Katherine Lederer, 305

  “Acknowledgments,” Paul Violi, 169

  “Agreement,” Lydia Davis, 192

  “Album,” Ron Padgett, 157

  “The Allegory of Spring,” Kenneth Koch, 78

  “Always Have a Joyful Mind,” Nin Andrews, 272

  “An American Story,” Jamey Dunham, 307

  “Anal Nap,” Fran Carlen, 244

  “An Anointing,” Thylias Moss, 245

  “Anna Karenina,” Fran Carlen, 240

  “The Anthropic Principle,” Harryette Mullen, 255

  “Antistrophe,” H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), 44

  “Appointed Rounds,” Louis Jenkins, 152

  “Avant-Dernières Pensées,” Dionisio D. Martínez, 264

  “A word is coming up on the screen . . .,” Michael Palmer, 158

  “Bases,” Rae Armantrout, 187

  “The Bear-Boy of Lithuania,” Amy Gerstler, 262

  “Because the ones I work for . . .,” Killarney Clary, 238

  “Be Like Others,” Czeslaw Milosz, 63

  “Bernie at the Pay Phone,” James Tate, 164

  “Bitter Angel,” Amy Gerstler, 261

  “Borges and I,” Frank Bidart, 132

  “Calling Jesus,” Jean Toomer, 49

  “The Canoeing Trip,” Russell Edson, 121

  “Chekhov: A Sestina,” Mark Strand, 114

  “The Chessboard Is on Fire,” Aaron Fogel, 193

  “Cold Calls,” Tyrone Williams, 247

  “The Colonel,” Carolyn Forché, 217

  “Color,” Barbara Guest, 73

  “Commencement Address,” Stephanie Brown, 275

  “Comraderie turns to rivalry . . .,” Charles Bernstein, 212

  “Contributor’s Note,” Charles Simic, 127

  “A Conversation About Memory,” Michael Burkard, 190

  “Crocus Solus,” John Hollander, 107

  “The Crowds Cheered as Gloom Galloped Away,” Matthea Harvey, 308

  “The Dachau Shoe,” W. S. Merwin, 101

  “Dear Boy George,” Amy Gerstler, 260

  “Death,” Michael Friedman, 273

  “Death, Revenge and the Profit Motive,” Tom Clark, 140

  “A Defense of Poetry,” Gabriel Gudding, 285

  “Delighted with Bluepink,” Kenneth Patchen, 65

  “De Natura Rerum,” Andrei Codrescu, 185

  “Disagreeable Glimpses,” John Ashbery, 97

  “Distance from Loved Ones,” James Tate, 162

  “The Doorway of Perception,” Michael Benedikt, 116

  “Doubt,” Fanny Howe, 135

  “Epistle,” Mark Jarman, 234

  “Epode,” H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), 45

  “Esse,” Czeslaw Milosz, 62

  “Everything’s a Fake,” Fanny Howe, 135

  “Exegesis,” April Bernard, 259

  “The Exodus (August 3, 1492),” Emma Lazarus, 31

  “The Famous Boating Party,” Kenneth Patchen, 66

  “Fish Eyes,” Linh Dinh, 281

  “Five Fondly Remembered Passages from My Childhood Reading,” Billy Collins, 141

  Five Poems from The Reproduction of Profiles, Rosmarie Waldrop, 123

  “Football,” Louis Jenkins, 152

  “Footnote,” James Schuyler, 76

  “Freud,” Joe Brainard, 151

  “From a Lost Diary,” Mark Strand, 113

  “Haibun 6,” John Ashbery, 95

  “The Hanoi Market,” Yusef Komunyakaa, 198

  “On Happiness,” Kenneth Koch, 77

  “Havana Rose,” Hart Crane, 52

  “On Having My Pocket Picked in Rome,” James Wright, 104

  “He appeared then . . . ,” Jenny Boully, 308

  “On Hedon
ism,” Anne Carson, 216

  “His Pastime,” Maxine Chernoff, 228

  “History,” Joe Brainard, 151

  “The Hockey Poem,” Robert Bly, 80

  “Honey,” James Wright, 105

  “Hot Ass Poem,” Jennifer L. Knox, 301

  “Humble Beginning,” W. S. Merwin, 101

  “Hysteria,” T. S. Eliot, 46

  “Imaginary Places,” Rae Armantrout, 189

  “In C,” Christopher Edgar, 278

  “In Love with Raymond Chandler,” Margaret Atwood, 131

  “The Inner Life,” Maxine Chernoff, 229

  “In Order To,” Kenneth Patchen, 64

  “Intermission in Four Acts,” Claudia Rankine, 282

  “In the Bahamas,” Robert Hass, 144

  “In the Garment District,” Lydia Davis, 191

  “In the Privacy of the Home,” Mark Strand, 111

  “Invective: You Should Know,” Susan Wheeler, 257

  “I sink back upon the ground . . .,” David Ignatow, 71

  “It Could Be a Bird,” Karen Volkman, 296

  “i was sitting in mcsorley’s,” e. e. cummings, 47

  “Justice,” Delmore Schwartz, 67

  “Kentucky, 1833,” Rita Dove, 231

  “Lateral Time,” Maureen Seaton, 200

  “Lecture,” Michael Friedman, 273

  “Life is boundless . . .,” Killarney Clary, 238

  “Light as Air,” Ron Padgett, 154

  “The List of Famous Men,” James Tate, 161

  “The Lonely Child,” W. S. Merwin, 103

  “Magic (or Rousseau),” Carla Harryman, 232

  “The Magic Study of Happiness,” Charles Simic, 126

  “Mango, Number 61,” Richard Blanco, 300

  “Matter” Carla Harryman, 233