Chekhov’s Mistess

April 24, 2005

When a Poet Turns Prose

 

Prose poetry is defined most simply, as T.S. Eliot said of vers libre, by what it is not. It has no formal line arrangements or metrical structure and therefore falls into a nebulous space between poetry and prose. Unless it is classified as such, prose poetry is only really identifiable by the ‘I knows it when I sees it’ rule.

“Her only friend her bitterest foe!”

What should make prose poetry discernible from prose is its musical quality or voice that is assumed in verse. But still that doesn’t necessarily lead us to a classification of prose poetry. Take this passage for example:

When on that shivering winter’s night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in midwinter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights ‘gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!

– Moby Dick, Ch. 23

I’ll be damned if that’s not poetry, but as we know, it is merely a passage in a novel. Perhaps I wouldn’t react so strongly to this passage if it were standing out there alone as opposed to being part of a novel, but there it is, in all its glory of melodious language, an anaphoric “port” as its fulcrum and an entire world contained within one paragraph.

Denying free verse its classification in “Reflections on Vers Libre”, Eliot said…

‘Blank verse’ is the only accepted rhymeless verse in English – the inevitable iambic pentameter. The English ear is (or was) more sensitive to the music of the verse and less dependent upon the recurrence of identical sounds in the metre than in any other. There is no campaign against rhyme. But it is possible that excessive devotion to rhyme has thickened the modern ear. The rejection of rhyme is not a leap at facility; on the contrary, it imposes a much severer strain upon the language. When the comforting echo of rhyme is removed, success or failure in the choice of words, in the sentence structure, in the order, is at once more apparent. Rhyme removed, the poet is at once held up to the standards of prose. Rhyme removed, much ethereal music leaps up from the word, music which has hitherto chirped unnoticed in the expanse of prose…

Ah, rhyme, the poet’s “only friend her bitterest foe!”

Eliot closes…

“as for vers libre, we conclude that it is not defined by absence of pattern or absence of rhyme, for other verse is without these; that it is not defined by the non-existence of metre, since even the worst verse can be scanned; and we conclude that the division between Conservative Verse and vers libre does not exist, for there is only good verse, bad verse, and chaos.”

What Mr. Eliot was denying was not vers libre’s existence, but its freedom from the constraints of metrical verse. I believe prose poetry is the same in that its lack of formal structure is itself a constraint; a daunting one at that, judging by the “chaos” so often present in prose poetry. Unsuccessful prose poems are little more than disjointed thoughts or run-on sentences supposedly brought together with a meaning where the sum is greater than its parts.

Maybe it’s best to think of prose poetry as not a “form, but a language strategy,” as Gloria Frym said in a 1997 essay (“Recombinatory Poetics: The Poem in Prose”) reprinted in the latest issue of the journal Sentence. She says that prose poetry, “once the bastard in the basement of poetry,… dismantles and reunites certain distinctions between traditional genres, and possibly brings them closer and potentially enables them to live on the same page. If anything, the poem in prose is an anti-form that can never achieve or become it’s own model. It has a counter-poetics that is strategic not categorical.”

A prose poem exists on its own – it is not verse with a backspace. It is deliberate, even if it’s a passage from a Ralph Ellison novel or a speech by Martin Luther King Jr. However, we are still left without any way of classifying it other than the ‘I knows it when I sees it’ rule. At its best, prose poetry gives us a progression where ideas flow seamlessly through the paragraph, the unifying form in its “anti-form,” and gives us a speech pattern, a voice like that of blank verse that can sound natural and musical at once. Breaks between paragraphs give us more pause than those between stanzas and allow for a more conscious shift of ideas and images, beyond which there are few signals. Like “normal” poetry the affect in the end is the same; the language sears our memory while the ideas seep in from conscious and subconscious re-readings.

One of the great things about the journal Sentence is its variety of forms of prose poems and the discussion sandwiched between the poetry (I’ve only read issue #2 and eagerly await #3, which will arrive in the mail this summer). One poem I thought particularly successful (although I’m not sure everyone I read it to agreed) is Susan Hoahan’s “Loss:”

Like the son of a pastry chef who’d walk in smelling like a cookie and spend weekends building croquembouches for love, he revealed a tendency to canoodle you couldn’t connect to cannoli. So naturally he made his way in pasta made from heart-whole wheat, the shyest virgin olive oil, water clear as his life-course. Lovingly, floury, he tied farfalle, he shot fusilli, set his ear to conchiglie. But quick as fresh angel hair turns mushy, the market for “natural” collapsed like a soufflé flattened by a tramontana. Squeezed from spaghetti to vermicelli, he lost his nerve. He skinnied down to capellini. The poor sucker turned picky as a koala. Couldn’t live on what he lived for. Even the words of the trade, like the leaves of eucalyptus left to grow in sand, grew foul in his mouth. I am dying, he whimpered, I am dying – to eat.

I like this light poem precisely because it is not just a light poem. There’s a whole life contained here and ideas that don’t require a foody to appreciate – a pure life corrupted by a market at one level, the shapes and sensuality of food at another. Interestingly, it is the words (e.g. croquembouches, etc. ) that act as punctuators instead of line breaks but also the sentences slow down toward the end of the poem following a trajectory from youthful exuberance to the end of a life; not necessarily ‘a life’ but at least a way of living.

SCMZZZZZZZ.jpg” class=“floatimgleft”/> One thing I’ve noticed about many prose poems is that they tend to start mid-sentence or thought, as if needing to announce themselves. That works in Loss, just like the adage about storytelling that says to bring the reader into the story as late as possible. Dionisio D. Martinez does this in his 2001 collection, Climbing Back, a book which in some ways exemplifies the art of the prose poem.

Martinez, Cuban born, living in Florida from a young age, has populated his poetry with everything from pop culture to jazz and philosophy and art. In his world of the “Prodigal Son,” who is ostensibly the character (the poet) experiencing these occasions of reflection throughout, there is no place or time, only instances. Sometimes those instances are two people passing one another on Green Dolphin Street 1958 (keep in mind that it is destructive to these poems to excerpt from them):

…Say Eliot lives down the street, or is visiting someone down the street, and hears enough to make him stay longer, to make him walk out alone. Sometimes rereading Eliot, these men are present. Sometimes they’re nowhere in the vicinity – it’s all empty streets and empty windows, it’s as if he meant for the men to peer from the windows only occasionally. Follow this shattered logic for a moment: Miles and Eliot run into each other on one of these streets. Maybe it’s an alley, but this is not important. They brush against each other. One of them mutters something, the other looks away. This is very important. Eliot has everything by which he’ll be remembered behind him and seven years ahead of him. Miles just played the Plaza Hotel. One of the two men – hard to say which one – is doomed and the street will get the better of him.

Now this is enigmatic. I like this poem for the idea behind Miles Davis and T.S. Eliot, both creative giants in completely opposite worlds but complimentary art forms, juxtaposed physically as they walk down Green Dolphin street (which, if you’re not a jazz fan, is a standard popularized by the tragic and talented pianist, Bill Evans, but played by Davis as well), where Eliot is most likely visiting and Miles metaphorically makes his home. It must be Davis that mutters and Eliot looks away, but there are so many possibilities to think about; these two men meeting was it them or their art encountering one another, that emptiness… Everything here is put into concrete or physical terms, but described like a dream. The language of the poem is perfectly suited to its “anti-form” because it reads as though we are being told this story or dream by a sagacious old man (Martinez is not very old), almost remembering.

Not remembering is a theme in the poem “The Prodigal Son loses his wife:”

It’s not what you think. They are walking in a crowd when she suddenly dissolves. Tired of looking, he tells himself she must have gone home. At home, he finds the children waiting, demanding to know where their mother is. Understandable, he thinks, but he’s sure she’s on her way back. It was a small crowd, after all, and she couldn’t possibly have gone too far. But the children soon grow restless. There have been numerous reports lately of missing people suddenly showing up in a strange family. The children want to know if their mother is watering blue geraniums on someone else’s terrace. They propose an all-out search, but the father becomes suspicious, believes they want to plant in him whatever seeds of guilt they managed to find around the house. He thinks they’ve been through his papers, in his pockets, and under his mattress. One day he cannot remember his wife. He sees the children and tries to find her face in theirs, but it does not come. He listens for her voice in the voices of the children and only hears the children.

Most of this poem resides close to the surface, yet it works for me in the way it encapsulates a difficult transition in a family and the accompanying emotional implications with such brevity and quietude, the same qualities that run throughout the book. Spareness characterizes Martinez’s prose poetry where his metaphors never get in the way and the tempo is something like a bebop tune that you might find lurking in one his poems.

Yes, prose poetry is largely undefinable, unclassifiable, but I think there is more to it than it would seem not being constrained by form. Unfortunately, I think that its absence of form invites abuse and there is probably much that is bad, but in thoughtful hands it has the potential to sing.

And lastly, I am happy to point out that I have discussed prose poetry for something like an obnoxiously long 2,000 words without bringing up Baudelaire. Cheers!

Read widely, think well, and write often

• posted by Bud Parr
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