Prose Poem

Inside a prose poem lies the twilight logic of an impasse.

Joan Miró, Catalan Landscape (The Hunter), 1924, oil on canvas

I love Your DeKalb Farmers Market and shop there regularly. There’s something stimulating about the commingling of cultures inside its cold interior. Outside the market, the city feels as if it exists in a resolved sense, one that, under the large canopy of American culture, filters the flickers of smaller ones. The farmers market, on the other hand, feels like a place that resists resolution.

Prose poems are like that, too. It’s often said that prose poems resist easy definition. The form straddles two genres and is typically described in simple terms, as poetry that rejects lineation. But for a form that’s been around for nearly two centuries, that definition tells us nothing about its peculiar nature, its effects and function.

Prose poems are ingenious in that they contain a built-in mechanism that forces the poet to do what ultimately every poem wants to achieve: rid us of our habitual way of seeing the world. This is Viktor Shklovsky’s idea of ostranenie, to estrange something so as to be able to see it with new eyes. This is not something that can be easily willed as we all have habitual ways of perceiving the world around us.

Part of this useful mechanism hides in its simplicity. Unlike a lineated poem, the prose poem conceals its art and acts like a cool, nonchalant piece of prose. Yet that simplicity is illusory, even subversive. James Tate called this “deceptively simple packaging” the prose poem’s “means of seduction.” This reminds me of a Croatian expression, sitna ali dinamitna, tiny but dynamite (except that the original rhymes, something like small but a pistol).

So what is it in that simple package that lends itself to avoiding habitual perception? A dynamic contradiction. The prose poem is by nature hybrid, and the combination of poetry and prose pressurize the deceptively simple package. Neither genre wants to give up its properties. It’s like a couple with markedly distinct personalities living in the same home. What happens can be an energetic, fiery dynamic. (Ask me how I know 🙂)

Inside a prose poem lies the twilight logic of an impasse. Prose, with its narrative impulse, and poetry, with its commitment to the economy of language, are pressed against each other until the pressure seeks release. That release is usually an imaginative surprise. Charles Simic refers to this imaginative release as “pulling rabbits out of a hat” and says that it is “one of the primary impulses” of prose poetry. He goes on to say:

Prose poetry is a monster-child of two incompatible impulses, one which wants to tell a story and another, equally powerful, which wants to freeze an image, or a bit of language, for our scrutiny. In prose, sentence follows sentence till they have had their say. Poetry, on the other hand, spins in place. The moment we come to the end of a poem, we want to go back to the beginning and reread it, suspecting more there than meets the eye. Prose poems call on us to make imaginative connections between seemingly disconnected fragments of language, as anyone who has ever read one of these little-understood, always original and often unforgettable creations knows. They look like prose and act like poems, because, despite the odds, they make themselves into fly-traps for our imagination.

But what makes a prose poem poetry rather than just clever prose? And how is prose poetry different from other hybrid forms?

Prose poetry was invented by 19th century French Symbolists like Charles Baudelaire and Aloysius Bertrand who rebelled against the predominance of the dominant form of the time, the Alexandrine. They wrote in blocks of text that behaved like poetry. So, the function of the prose poem is to push back and to divest itself of its earnest allegiance to form and formality. The prose poem is not the only hybrid form, but its ingenuity becomes clearer when looked at next to other ones, like the lyric essay. Unlike the lyric essay, the prose poem is markedly weirder and more imaginative.

In a lyric essay, the two impulses at play are the lyric expression and essayistic writing. The word essay comes from French essai, which means to attempt, and Latin exagium/exigere which means to examine. That points to intellectual work of using lyrical language in service of examination. The movement in a lyrical essay is in the service of that examination, and since examination seeks depth, the lyrical lingering on language harmonizes with it. We see this in Natalie Diaz’s piece “The First Body is the Water.”

On the other hand, the prose poem operates on the narrative principle of prose (old French prose means story or narration), which always moves, and the poetic principle, which lingers. Those are such contradictory, T-junction kinds of energies that beg for an innovation, a different solution, or best of all, an imaginative release. Where a lyrical essay explores, a prose poem, as Charles Simic says, pulls a rabbit out of a hat.

Any hybrid form is by nature a rebel, but because of its historic push against tradition, prose poem is the OG proto punk. That’s why we frequently see surrealist, absurdist elements in prose poems. To this day it reminds us not to be dogmatic about what we call a poem or precious about how we dress it. The ultimate commitment of a poet is to imagination. Language and form are simply materials. After all, the most electric things often are, paradoxically, an embrace of contradictions, like black and white stripes, or tragedy and comedy.

by Daniil Kharms, translated by George Gibian

There was once a red-haired man who had no eyes and no ears. He also had no hair, so he was called red-haired only in a manner of speaking. He wasn’t able to talk, because he didn’t have a mouth. He had no nose, either. He didn’t even have any arms or legs. He also didn’t have a stomach and he didn’t have a back, and he didn’t have a spine, and he also didn’t have any other insides. He didn’t have anything. So it’s hard to understand who we’re talking about. So we’d better not talk about him anymore.

“The Academic Sigh” by Russell Edson

Some students were stretching a professor on a medieval torture rack. He had offered himself to show them how an academic might be stretched beyond his wildest dreams like a piece of chewing gum.

        And as they turned the wheel the professor was getting longer and longer.
        Don’t make me too long, or I’ll look kind of goofy, sighed the professor as he grew longer and longer.

        Suddenly something snaps.
        What happened? sighs the professor from the rack.
        We were just stretching an academic when suddenly something snapped; you may have heard it ...
        Yes, I was there. Don’t you remember? sighs the professor.
        And then we heard an academic sigh ...
        Yes, I heard it, too, sighs the professor, it seemed to come from the rack where I was being stretched beyond my wildest dreams like a piece of chewing gum …

“Infiltration” by Denise Duhamel

When I was brushing my teeth this morning, I first noticed the prose poem on my forehead: The kiwi pities the bald lime... Then, the prose poem in my rearview mirror: Eight blue sleeves reach for the blue parrot... As I stepped on the gas, the tiniest prose poem of all on my big toenail: Fetus daisy. There was even a prose poem embroidered around my windshield: My spine is made of your footprints, my picture frame is made of your hair... Everywhere were little chunks of text, orderly graffiti, that baffled the critics on NPR. Harold Bloom was booming, claiming the prose poem didn’t even exist, when Terry Gross said, “Dr. Bloom, with all do respect, isn’t that a prose poem on your breast pocket?” There was a prose poem where the instructions for the parking meters used to be: Bend to kiss the water, find your lost hand in the nearest tree... The prose poem on the cop’s license plate began: The violin thunderstorm, the cumulus flute, the harp strumming in each woman’s heart...