In Praise of Prose Poetry, by Norbert Hirschhorn
For sale: baby shoes, never worn (1) Some years ago, in a workshop with my mentor, Pulitzer Prize winner Frank Bidart, I shared a poem I thought was pretty good, something about my personal life, lines broken into roughly nine to eleven syllables per line. Bidart looked closely and said with some disdain, “chopped up prose.” Poetry is generally recognized as creative writing with deliberate line breaks. James Longenbach, who prefers the term line endings, says, “Poetry is the sound of language organized in lines...line is what distinguishes our experience of poetry as poetry, rather than some kind of writing....” (2) He goes on to describe three artful categories of line endings: parsed, where the line ending follows the syntax; annotated,where the line breaks across the syntax, and end-stopped (with or without rhyme). My poem disdained by Bidart wasn’t at all artful — the line breaks were arbitrary and the lines based loosely on iambic pentameter. “Chopped up prose.” We see the latter style of work in the “this poem is about” category, mostly in free-verse, telling of health crises, abuse, true-to-life adventures, identity, the environment, grandmothers, or any other quotidian moments. Many modern poems now eschew any formal structure at all with words scattered across the page and much white space included. But one can write poems without line breaks, in paragraphs rather than lineated stanzas or as a single block. These are the so-called prose poems. When 19th Century French poet Charles Baudelaire wrote prose poems it was in rebellion against the constraint of alexandrines — six iambic feet. Similarly, prose poetry in English evades the constraints of formal meter and line breaks. As Longenbach explains, “We are used to thinking of prose poetry as writing that sacrifices lineation in order to partake more readily of certain aspects of prose: our attention shifts from line to sentence, and syntax must hold our attention without the additional direction of line (or meter or rhyme).” The evolution of lineated poems into prose poetry is illustrated by in James Wright’s May Morning. Originally a rhymed Petrarchan sonnet, it was found among Wright’s papers in a suppressed collection (“Amenities of Stone”, 1961)(3). Wright was giving up on the constraints of rhyme and meter and so, when later published in Poetry Magazine (November 1981) it was as a prose poem, one also found in his posthumous collection, This Journey. The block, when broken open by scanning of the meter, turns into a sonnet, with a tight rhyme scheme in the octet, only a little less tight in the sestet. The prose poem allows for relaxation, perhaps less full of itself, sometimes surreal, sometimes whimsical and contains more information than a lineated poem can provide even as it may also be suited to lyricism and stream-of-consciousness. It may as well be a better form for “short-short” stories (aka flash fiction), anecdotes, dream-accounts, parables, fables, aphorisms, each providing thematically its own sense of poetic closure. (4) There is no fixed definition of how a prose poem looks on the page. The attributes most commonly enlisted by poet-analysts are brevity, not exceeding two pages, and by its recognizable fully justified block, unthreatening. The form’s best-known modern practitioner, Louis Jenkins, said, “Think of the prose poem as a box, Think of the prose poems as a small suitcase.” (5) (His work mainly dealt with anecdotes from Minnesota.) But even these characteristics find numerous exceptions: the form is slippery, hard to pin down, with as many variations as practitioners. David Lehman, for example, insisted on a fully justified box to fit properly in the page margins of a collection of poetry. (However, his anthology ignores the typical wider spaces between lines, which are easier for the reader to follow.(6)) Over the past quarter century many poet-analysts have provided a range of commentaries on the form, which I consulted to find critical views on its history, use and structure. Jack Myers and Don C. Wukasch, for instance, are bullish on the style (7). Modern prose poetry, they say, is “a larger and looser form than lined poetry, it can carry more information and often shows a close interest in everyday affairs,” and is often meant to entertain. John Ashbery was a modernist practitioner in the form. Robert Wallace (8) defines the prose poem as a “short composition...that asks for the concentrated attention usually given to poetry rather than the more discursive attention usually given to prose. It is normally shorter in length than the short story or essay.” Prose poems longer than two pages become more like true prose as flash fiction or disquisition. Don Paterson, doyen of British poetry, takes a quizzical attitude to prose poems: “They may be praised for vague qualities of ‘sonorousness’ and ‘rhythm’ in lieu of lyric and metre, but these are the qualities we already ascribe to prose when we’re inclined to call it ‘poetic’.... I feel the problem lies simply in its declared hybridity, combined with the usual uninterrogated belief in the intrinsicality of certain qualities — like ‘poeticity’. Call it ‘unlineated poetry’ and the problem virtually disappears.... [ It] may be that ‘designation’ is all we need; perhaps all the prose poem requires is to be found in a book called Poems.” (9) The authoritative Princeton Encyclopedia (10) meanwhile characterizes the prose poem as employing “high patterning, rhythmic, and figural repetition, sustained intensity, and compactness.” (It will be noted, however, that perhaps the majority of published prose poems aren’t even that constrained.) At least a half dozen books in English are devoted entirely to the form, from Michael Delville’s 1998 omnium- gatherum, The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre (11) to Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton’s 2020 Prose Poetry: An Introduction (12), each “rediscovering” a long tradition readily found in the Bible and other ancient poetics, with prose poetry becoming dominant in 19th Century French poetry as composed by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Valéry, Bertrand, and Mallarmé. Delville brought attention to a genre “that has not yet received the attention it deserves,” perhaps poets being put off by T.S. Eliot’s scathing critique. (13) Delville cites the prose poem as a “supremely hybrid medium capable of accommodating various tones, modes and discourses,” such as Gertrude Stein’s eccentricities, Carl Sandburg’s expostulatory lyricism, Sherwood Anderson’s oracular chants, and Kenneth Patchen’s family vignettes, and Language Poets’ exposition of the surreal or absurd. Charles Simic’s mordant The World Doesn’t End, won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for a poetry collection whose poems are entirely in prose form. (Poetry purists were aghast at the award.) In Simic’s recently uncovered essay on the form (14) he called it subversive, “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.” Following Simic, top ranked American poets have taken up the form. Ben Lerner’s vibrant collection of prose poems, Angle of Yaw, was a 2006 National Book Award Finalist. (15) Mary Ruefle, master of lineated verse, has published two collections of prose poetry (16). No need for apologies — the form is here to stay. I would add to these commentaries that prose poetry shouldn’t be boring. It should be generous. Many do work well in performance from a stage. Recent writers celebrate the now modern form of poetics. A 400-plus page anthology, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem: From Baudelaire to Anne Carson (17), was edited by Jeremy Noel-Tod who writes, “The prose poem has proven one of the most innovative and versatile poetic forms of recent years.... Yet, even now, this peculiarly rich and expansive form is still misunderstood and overlooked.” Anne Caldwell and Oz Hardwick differ; “There is no doubt that the prose poem is enjoying a surge of popularity in the twenty-first century,” celebrating its plasticity as “...protean, sometimes playful, sometimes perplexing, and always provoking....” (18) Another of my mentors, the late Stanley Plumly, celebrated the prose-poem: “Not breaking the line makes all the difference, as the language in the prose poem begins to resemble a landscape as opposed to a work of architecture... And while exposition may be the enemy of the lyric, in the prose-poem it replenishes, frames up, fills out a world that the verse lyric is too often the fragment of.... Thus, the prose-poem can be yet another alternative to lyricism, sustaining a sentence rhythm, duration, and emotional texture less likely in lineation.” (19) I remember the late Donald Justice saying at a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference that he regretted spending so much time worrying about line breaks. He was right, good poetry survives its structure. ** 1. Anon. Spawned the six-word memoir and flash fiction. Arguably shortest prose poem. 2. “The Art of the Poetic Line”, Graywolf Press, Minneapolis 2008. 3. Kevin Stein. “These Drafts and Castoffs. Mapping Literary Manuscripts.” The University of Michigan Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv65swqh.11 4. Barbara Hernnstein Smith. “Poetic Closure. A study of How Poems End.” University of Chicago Press (Chicago), 1968. 5. Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton. Prose Poetry. An Introduction. Princeton University Press, 2020. 6. Great American Prose Poems from Poe. Scribner, New York, 2003. 7. Dictionary of Poetic Terms. University of North Texas Press, Denton Texas, 1985. 8. Writing Poems. Little, Brown and Company, Boston, Toronto, 1982. 9. The Poem. Lyric, Sign, Metre. Faber and Faber, London, 2018. 10. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics. Fourth Edition. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2012. 11. University Press of Florida, Gainseville, 1998. 12. Princeton University Press, Princeton 2020. 13.poets.org/text/fallacy-prose-poetry-extension-eliots-reflections-vers-libre 14. Plume, #102, February 2020. https://plumepoetry.com/essay-on-the-prose-poem-by-charles-simic/ 15. Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend WA, 2006. 16. The Most of it, The Book. Wave Books, Seattle, 2008, 2023. 17. Penguin Books/Random House, UK, 2018. 18. Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice. Routledge/Taylor and Francis, London/New York, 2022. 19. “Narrative Values, Lyric Imperatives.” The American Poetry Review, September/October 2003, pp. 33-50. Norbert Hirschhorn is a public health physician, commended by President Bill Clinton as an “American Health Hero,” proud to follow in the tradition of physician-poets. Hirschhorn has published seven previous collections, recently a bilingual Arabic-English co-translation with Syrian physician-poet Fouad M. Fouad, Once Upon a Time in Aleppo, Hippocrates Press, London, 2020. His latest collection, Over the Edge, was published in 2023, by Holland Park Press, London. He is now compiling a manuscript of prose poems. |