Introduction

Maybe haunting doesn't make distinctions between prose poetry and poem, but instead is like a perverse perfume which emanates from decay. I am decaying, rotting with ancestors who come from another place and another history to haunt this place and leave the body with an open form that doesn’t exactly follow the delineations of prose poem and poem. Maybe haunting is what makes form interesting, opens the crevices of the heart and splits the heart: makes it impossible to move into the present because the present has never belonged to us.

Thus haunted, we are searching for form, to reconnect to other social groups without the burden of having to represent ourselves. Thus haunted, perhaps we are the precursors of a future place where all hauntings find release. The text I am writing is a place where haunting finds release. Theresa Cha writes: Our destination is fixed on the perpetual motion of search. Darwish, in “State of Seige” warns the reader not to trust the poem. The poem, he tells us, “is the sense of the abyss.”

The border provides a metaphoric anchorage for search.

John Olson: “To repeat Pound: 'Literature is language charged with meaning.' This, as LaFemina has stated, is the fundamental drive in poetry. To expand, dilate, intensify. To heighten our response to life, reality, ourselves. Lineation acts as if a lens to converge. Our attention is focused on a twist, a turn, a sudden leap to another perception. The prose poem is a lens that acts to diverge. To ramify, vary, deviate, digress. Veer, straggle, meander, drift. To be as inclusive as possible. To become an anomaly so wanton and supple the words dream themselves into a torrent of unbridled rhythms, irrepressible being.”

Olson's distinction between prose poem and poem has its origin in the postmodern desire to distance itself from modernism. Does the poem line converge and the prose line poem diverge? Why can't the prose poem break off into poetry and poetry break off into prose poem? If a poem converges, why can't it also diverge?

I follow an unravelling thread of twisted sound and yarn until, confounded and exasperated, I hit a wall. At this point, the poem might disperse like white clouds caught in crystal, or a prose block might condense like a fist -- flowering. Prose poem lines can converge and diverge and converge again. Why not shift the ground of both forms? I glimpse myself as condensation. I boil a phrase down to one revealatory future image. That allows another tone, an alteration of form, another text to emerge. This urge arises from the grinding of organs.

The exasperation with form allows inclusion to occur and makes all forms possible: condensation and dilation of the line, metaphor and metonymy: a synthesis between binary distinctions. Perhaps these distinctions are rooted in the West's preoccupation with its own cultural trends and forms.

The literature that engages me searches for its form. Being cannot be held in either the prose or the poetry line, but in a space between both forms where I reside as possibility. A different definition of prose poetry enables hybrid ways of being, being with conflict and unknowing, as well as moments of being. I am searching for a form to house something potentially infinite.

Brian Evenson

I don’t really think of fiction (except for maybe bad fiction) as either welcoming or hospitable, nor do I think of poetry as inherently more rigorous in its approach to rhythm, syntax, and language than prose, be it shorter or longer. I would argue that something like a Gary Lutz sentence (just to mention one name among many) offers as many possibilities as a really good line or as a wrought prose block for linguistic patterning and play. And it manages to bring about that patterning--that pleasure of rhythm and sound and repetition--at the same time as it offers a narrative progression. The result is a work that is steeped not only in the pleasures of language but also in those of story and fabula. At its best, the short prose piece has its so-called cake and eats it to; at its worst it just ends up smearing fragments of cake all over the walls.

I’m suspicious of the impulse to say what the short prose piece is. But I’m probably even more suspicious of the impulse to see short prose somehow as a liberated form, as a form that offers the lure of freedom. Once people start making such claims about a genre (or, for that matter, about a country) the freedom is already evaporating and the genre is already well on the way to being pretty seriously reified.

That’s the moment when you need first of all to spend time understanding the space that the genre has defined and then next slash and burn new paths through that space. You need to start cutting new paths into the forest of the genre itself, making new clearings where you can briefly catch your breath before hacking your way onward. But if you’re not careful, you’ll lapse back on the same old paths even as you preach freedom and liberation. The genre I’m speaking of is not poetry, not prose, but the genre of the short prose piece: it’s a genre now, equipped with various subgenres and has been for at least a hundred years: if you think otherwise, you’re willfully blind. But genre is a tool and a device like any other. It’s there to be taken advantage of. So take advantage.

Elisabeth Whitehead

See how tidy it is, homely even, no raised patterns to hug onto the cloak it wears—a simple garment pinned around its shoulders, comfortable in its own plainness. Initially the prose poem is quiet about itself until one enters and is caught—the possibility then of being suspended and surprised in a last light. I am always, ultimately, unprepared for what I find there, lulled at first perhaps by its faceless approach. Little windows, little chambers, eyes to look into and be looked back into—I begin to expect to not know what to expect. I believe there is something in the visual anonymity that will allow me to accept, for instance, that snow is really a contour of new dimes fallen, or that the dimes are a new rain, fallen, that the sea is covered in a sheath of salt. I appreciate being thrown into this place of a person blindfolded, which is never safe—and a falling. There seems to be some rebellion there, or at least a bit of mischief—this tension created between “flat” appearance and such wide possibility of gesture, story, fragmentation, and music. I’ve found that this form has allowed me more mobility in sound, not less. It affords tiny precision, little black and white keys of precise breath and rhythm.

Meg Sefton

I am not feeling clever enough to say clever things about prose and poetry. I have graduated from a place where people said all kinds of interesting things about literature, where people read challenging material. I am in a very dark hole at the moment. It's called mainstream America. People do not read here. Upon graduating with an MFA, I got a job teaching literature at a suburban prep school. The only thing upper school kids want to read Harry Potter, and I don't blame them. Kids are yearning to be kids and the culture fights against that in their push for kids to be both sexually mature and academically brilliant by the time they are eleven. This is what I think is missing in our prose: plot. This is why Harry Potter stole the kids. This is why J.K. Rolling steals the spotlight, and why other plot geniuses from other generations, such as Dickens, stole the spotlight once upon a time. In our attempts to be clever, we have forgotten the basic element of what makes great fiction. We think plot is too pedestrian. The best prose has many fine materials, is textured and layered and nuanced, but if that yearning to be told a story is ignored, any unit of prose is nothing but a collection of words.

Noah Eli Gordon

Today is Monday, September 1^st, 2008, and today I don’t believe in genre. Tomorrow, I’ll tell my students something different, I’m sure, but today is do I contradict myself, multitudes, etc. Tomorrow: Baudelaire said, Bertrand said, Rimbaud said, Mallarmé said, Joyce said, Beckett said… Why all the boys? Genre is preformative. There’s tokenism for you. I know a flower when I see it, says the dandelion leaning toward the light. What good is a theory of prose in the age of the author’s control of the margins? Verbal alchemy’s an oily mechanism, digitally speaking. If it’s a sentence, it must mean something, right? Très passé. The only post I believe in (today, right now, two minutes after the first sentence above) is the one pried from the ground in order to steal the bicycle that was locked to it. Writing. There it is. That’s what we’re doing. Okay, so writing is a genre. I know it when I see it: billboards, traffic signs, novels, menus—there is order and there is one’s order; and there are poisoned appetizers. What are you working on? I’m writing a menu for the How to Live What to Do Café. We do not serve Flash Fictions. Just because you’re engaged in an ancient craft doesn’t mean you’re any more likely to stay afloat. Robert Graves via God of War & Clash of the Titans means my menu makes hunger mute. Audio: a common word with the highest vowels to consonants ratio. There enough there to shape several formal allegories, but that’s the business of those intent on talking themselves into future commemorative plaques on student housing. Our literature does not age with us. It is we who are aged by it. Nothing is as indispensable as the notion of the time-honored mode, for time would continue working its rust over casting elements into a medallion destined for the display case. Nonetheless, our habitual return to particular scenarios speaks of the desire to canonize the footprints we’ve been following, even if they turn out to be our own. Would that the woods of literature really were so bewildering! A few trees make a forest not. A stranger’s arrival is another’s departure, which is to say there is only one form after all: disruption. Thus to begin to hack, saw, and mulch the remnants of whatever may have been rooted within our notion of genre is to honor its plurality by pointing to the remaining spot, and, no matter how bare it might appear, calling it the most spectacular verdancy one has ever seen. To trample a garden is to refuse again the world of shadows. I is never an empire. If I ever make it to the end of the board, I just ask for another pawn—the real work of fiction, poetically speaking a prose.

Jordan Sanderson

In response to Rolf Hughes and John Olson:

Possibility gives birth to the prose poem, and the prose poem perpetuates possibility. When giving someone a gift, one has a few options: one can simply hand the gift to the recipient; one can leave the gift in the bag in which the clerk placed it at the point of purchase, a bag often emblazoned with the store’s logo—slightly more surprising than simply handing over the gift itself, but the recipient still knows where you bought it and has some idea of what to expect; one can wrap the gift itself, but the wrapping paper—no matter how beautiful—takes the shape of the gift and too often reveals what is inside long before the recipient rips it off and wads it up; finally, one can place the gift inside of a box, then wrap it. The prose poem functions in a manner similar to the box: it creates mystery, excitement, curiosity. The sense that anything could be in there. Unlike the box, once the reader enters the prose poem, the feeling of possibility grows. The prose poem stretches boundaries, including the boundaries of space and time, and, frequently, it permanently enlarges boundaries. It is “inclusive,” as John Olson says. Ideally, each prose poem would build on previous prose poems, continuing to expand previously challenged boundaries, or else it would find new boundaries to push, ever widening the sense of possibility from which the poems began. However, a single prose poem can’t completely destroy all boundaries, so the task of each poem is to broaden boundaries as far as it can and to avoid closure for as long as it can. To maximize inclusivity. Some readers might object that expansion dilutes; however, as the space expands it also fills, producing a greater intensity. The prose poem rewards readers with a richer world.

Andrew Grace

My feelings about writing poetry in prose are very much in line with John Olsen’s description of the prose poem. For whatever reason, I feel that I can be more inclusive of wild shifts in language in and between prose poems than I can in lineated poetry. Maybe it’s because the shape of the prose poem itself is less expressive than a poem that uses the white space of the page, so I unconsciously feel like I have to push the boundaries of sense to counterbalance the “normal” look of prose. Or maybe it’s that the absence of line breaks, the continuous ribbon of language that a prose poem is, allows the mind to follow a thought to its strangest ends, unchecked by considerations of shape. Maybe the prose poem is the ideal vehicle for a mind to trace, and extend, its own boundaries.

Zach Savich

(In response to Jennifer K. Dick's thoughts about sound and space.)

I like the continuity of a prose poem for how it can hold varied material, the way the continuity of a sidewalk allows someone who trips to catch himself with a few running steps.

Or a few dancing steps -- fragment against run-on, sudden rhyme, snippet. I'd like to believe the prose poem can signal a failure of form in which formal gravities re-assert themselves. Like how sitting in a piazza can mark your failure at finding an apartment.

But if I love most moments of lushness, do they need a flat ground to spring up against? Or maybe prose poems aren't gardens marked by abrupt blossoms, but, in contrast to the constant blinking of line breaks, a way of keeping your eyes open until the whole landscape turns watery.

Jennifer K. Dick's focus on sonic and visual possibility seems right: I'd my prose poems to do more than transmit a "prose poemy" tone. Just as I'd like my meditative free verse lyrics to transmit more than a tea-sipping tone. Which in both cases can hold a lot together, and shade the cast of one's eyes, but to make what visible?

I like prose poems that illuminate (that is, hold like light does) like direct sun, which suggests there is nothing in this light we cannot see. That take the air, but do not make it solely internal.

How do prose poems do that? Here is a taxonomy, aligning the prose square with the city square:

1. A prose poem is a city square in which a fountain suddenly comes on.
2. Some dogs enter the fountain.
3. There is a city square full of dogs and we built a fountain around them.
4. When the fountain is dry, jugglers are more likely to perform in it.

Rauan Klassnik

This is not a direct response to any of the quotes sent to Rauan Klassnik, but it is what he says he jotted down after reading them:

The personality of in these prose poems is not me but I suppose it is more "me" (or just "more") than if I wrote in line-broken poems. I think this has something to do with the medium of prose. But I think this also that it has something to do with "me." I have in a sense taken refuge in the prose poem. Perhaps this means I am "lazy" or "unethical." In response to this I could say that I think I word hard and that I think I am a good person. (I am thinking now of Yeats. Whatever.) A part of me wants you, the reader, to enjoy the mix of sex/death/violence/God/love in my poems (ie, to like "me.") Another part of "me" (the part--or parts--that clenches "me" into a fist when I'm writing) does not want this. I think that all poets should (at least sometimes) write, playfully or seriously, in prose.

Peter Moore

Philosophy Master: Beyond a doubt. Is it verse that you want to write her?

Monsieur Jourdain: No, no, no verse.

Philosophy Master: You want only prose?

Monsieur Jourdain: No, I don’t want either prose or verse.

Philosophy Master: It has to be one or the other.

Monsieur Jourdain: Why?

Philosophy Master: For the reason, sir, that there is nothing to express ourselves in but prose or verse.

Monsieur Jourdain: There’s nothing but prose or verse?

Philosophy Master: That’s right, sir: whatever isn’t prose is verse, and whatever isn’t verse is prose.

--Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme

Monsieur Jourdain, maybe you’re right. Maybe, there is something else. Some prose can seem more disjunctive than verse. Some verse can seem more hyperjunctive than the most straightforward prose. It can all get so maddening. Every variation seems possible. Disjunctive associations can happen at the syllabic level--poets with their etymological wordplay. Other times you’re on familiar terra firma of some soothing text only to have all expectations violated with the final punctuation mark. How curious that such a simple morphological variable as a carriage return could be assigned such a dizzying array behavioral attributes. Maybe, Monsieur Jourdain, there is something else. Was it Valéry who proposed that poetry was a state of flux? I can’t remember now. Then I propose a New Quantum poetics based on the principles of quantum physics. Poetry is merely a state of flux, an excited state of atomic agitation. Does that make prose a stationary ground state? Or is one simply more metastable than the other? The orbitals may vary but it’s still the same hydrogen atom insisting on either ionization or decay.

Trina Burke

In response to Michael Cross, DR #7:

“How can we challenge ourselves as prose poets to rethink the form? I don’t think it’s enough to argue that a prose poem is different from verse simply because it doesn’t have line breaks, or that a prose poem is different from fiction simply because it relies on parataxis. How could we complicate the prose poem, critically, by rethinking these distinctions? Why would we want to “relax,” and aren’t we trying to come to conclusions that are not inevitable?

And finally: what does it even mean for a poem to be “honest”?

I’m interested in a poetry that challenges what can be done with the line. A poetry that never relaxes, but thinks itself, its composition, at every moment. Every turn of composition is decision, and the polysemy of this fact increases the poem’s potential to mean otherwise. The poem’s autonomy, the reader’s autonomy, is a product of multivalence—horizontal and vertical movement (and this is true of all poetry). I suppose I write a kind of prose poem, in the sense that I’m interested in the possibilities of the long line, but I absolutely cannot ignore the fact that the line must end (even in prose). I’m interested in challenging the line to hold all of its possibilities at once—a line that embeds verse in a prose sentence. Isn’t the “honest” poet working toward the complexity of the situation as she has it in the moment? And isn’t the “honest” reader comporting to this moment in the complexity of her understanding as a subject split into thousands of subjectivities? What does this have to do with the prose line specifically? Isn’t it time we give it more thought?”

Mr. Cross raises some important questions here that, for me, get at the distinction between definition and exploration. Indeed, it isn’t enough to determine the prose poem by its difference from other genres/modes. Cross says “I’m interested in challenging the line to hold all of its possibilities at once....” This is key, but to “embed verse in a prose sentence” is only one of the possibilities that the form holds.

When I write, I don’t necessarily sit down with the intention of writing a prose poem or a verse poem. It is an unfolding process. More often than not, I spend time to forge material into prose when it particularly and directly challenges the linearity of the traditional sentence. I run the material through this filter when it can most effectively undermine the reader’s expectations of prose. It’s a strategic move designed to do the most damage to the reader’s sense of complacency or trust in a (visually) familiar genre.

The line’s trusted brand status and relative inability to defend itself are other possibilities (in addition to embedding verse in prose, which is, in effect, another form of undermining the reader’s expectations) for exploration. These possibilities eschew the value judgment of honesty, which is, in my opinion, overrated in this context. The label of honesty assumes the very qualities of neatness and comfort and accessibility that currently limit the sentence to the status of commodity for passive consumption. I’m not interested in maintaining the sentence’s integrity as a safe haven. I’d rather promote the sentence as a dangerous place.

Stephen Nelson

Personally, I'm more interested in poetry with a visual component. Something that announces itself on the page as "a poem", with all the concomitant expectations of sound, syntax and sense which that brings seems to me increasingly outmoded and irrelevant. A prose poem on the other hand is as seductive as a visual poem, as alluring as a piece of illuminated text. In a day when a lot of poetry is read online from computer moniters, it's also kinder on the eyes.

A good prose poem is like a top welterweight or middleweight - fast, sleek, well-toned, powerful, graceful, elegant, deadly. Its older brother the verse is the dull, uninteresting heavyweight champion - fat, bloated, pudgy, slow and desperately in need of a Muhammad Ali to make it lively and relevant again. Unfortunately, the world at large is only concerned with the heavyweights, unaware of all the lively action exploding in other, less prominent categories. Incidently, one of my favourite prose poets of all time is Thomas "The Hit Man" Hearns.

J.M. Tyree

In her essay "The Narrow Bridge of Art," Virginia Woolf recommended the "democratic art of prose," arguing that "prose is so humble that it can go anywhere; no place is too low, too sordid, or too mean for it to enter." I think of Baudelaire's prose poems in similar terms, as an attempt to bind art to the grime of modern cities and contemporary life. I also think of Whitman at the same kind of work in New York City, around the same historical moment. In his poem "The City Dead-House," for example, he tries to assimilate the unclaimed corpse of a prostitute to his urban pantheism. The result is troubling, unsettling; perhaps not entirely successful, but new. In his own prose, Whitman spoke of the "beauty disease" of the Victorian mode, with its overly ornate, casket-like word-coverings for life. Contact with reality - with the prose of the world - would make poetry less Poetic and more prose-like. Today such work might even be called "creative nonfiction." To my way of thinking, poetry cannot and should not be replaced by prose. There is no substitute. Poetry is needful in any era. But I do think that the online universe craves prose. "Text" may be a better term than prose or poetry for digital writing. Many people who resist digital culture do not seem to recognize that its fabric is composed of text - of writing - on a fundamental level. I do think that, as with Baudelaire in Paris and Whitman in New York, new forms of writing eventually will emerge online. Most likely these works will be very short and if they are artful they may well have the appearance of prose poems - call them what you will.

Tony Tost

John Olson: “To repeat Pound: ‘Literature is language charged with meaning.’ This, as LaFemina has stated, is the fundamental drive in poetry. To expand, dilate, intensify. To heighten our response to life, reality, ourselves. Lineation acts as a lens to converge. Our attention is focused on a twist, a turn, a sudden leap to another perception. The prose poem is a lens that acts to diverge. To ramify, vary, deviate, digress. Veer, straggle, meander, drift. To be as inclusive as possible. To become an anomaly so wanton and supple the words dream themselves into a torrent of unbridled rhythms, irrepressible being.”

TT: “Ratios of Paradise” is in some spliced place between lineated and prosed poetry. My writing of it pivoted on the notion of a charged equivalency, of meaning generated in the gap between the two sides of each entry (and the entries themselves). At first blush, this ratio-nalization is pretty counter to my sense of my own mythic impulse, my need to step through the rational so to operate outside of it, to where things are more generative. But as Adorno and Horkheimer point out, the seed of the ratio (the base unit of logic) is in the mythic moment as well, and can be read in the ritual practice of sacrifice as a means of influencing the gods by offering to them some symbolic equivalency of the sins, needs or gratitude of the polis. That is, myth contains within itself the modality that would come to supercede it. And vice versa. Circles everywhere! In my piece here, I try to bring in the self-containment and forward direction of the declarative sentence, but to use the suggestion of a sacrificed copula to signal the relation between the parts. I am trying to construct a cascade of felt equivalencies (“The mouth” “a circle at the end of a ritual”) that combine together to suggest a total equivalency to some palpable, un-nameable X.

Ed Taylor

A prose poem is a fragment calved from a larger ongoing project most formally named by the Cubists but apparent in various forms many other places. Prose poetry attempts to open all approaches to particular material and decenter (deprivilege?) narrative, using language aware of itself and fully deployed in radioactive majesty, not merely as delivery vehicle for a unilateral negotiation with meaning.

The "prose" brings material as a kind of vaccination, more straightforwardly, rather than via the serpentine digestive path of something that is formally "poem." The effect is for the reader somatic and cognitive, music and lyrics, the house with hidden rooms, peyote and cocaine.

Such a project can be tackled in standard prose. However, as this requires strenuous perceptual activity on the reader's end and requires daunting focus and discipline from the writer, except in rare instances it's maximal miniature rather than marathon: prose poetry.

Rob Carney

First and last, I'm a poet. In between, I've written the occasional play and a fair amount of what various people call flash or sudden or micro fiction. Me, I call these pieces monologues, which doesn't do a lot to help clarify things, but I absolutely have the oral tradition in mind rather than any of the Issue 7 theory-chatter about visual this-and-that or "stadiums for competing language games. I mean, there's nothing about other literary forms that can't likewise "rush, gurgle, yelp, squeal, moan, whisper" in the ways Jennifer Dick asserts the prose poem does. Such qualities aren't particular to any one form; a poem (or prose poem, or short story, or play) might be amazing, might stink, or might fall somewhere in between, but what the words look like typed out on the page has less to do with it than what they sound like and what they mean. . . . As for Wittgenstein, Heidegger, John Cage, and all that crowd, I prefer Frost ("The Figure a Poem Makes") and Frank O'Hara ("Personism: A Manifesto"). Whether I write sonnets, free verse, prose poems, or sometimes things with no editorially established category, it's the subject or tone or theme that governs my formal/structural choices. Still, I've noticed that those pieces tend, a good chunk of the time, to be interior monologues or soliloquies, so my focus on the sentence rather than on line breaks makes sense to me, and in this way I'm most able to identify with what John Olsen was saying about "[t]he prose poem [being] a lens that acts to diverge . . . vary, deviate, digress[,] [v]eer," and so on. And I appreciate, too, that in making his distinction between prose poems and lineation ("[l]ineation acts as a lens to converge") he's being neither perjorative nor self-congratulatory. Oh, and I also like what Geoffrey Dyer was quoting: "It looks as though something had been tried and been found to work." Not a flashy expression or observation. But it makes up for that by being right.

Kellie Wells

Few people know that what Groucho Marx originally said is “Outside of a dog a prose poem is a fiction writer’s best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.” And I do think of the prose poem as a very solicitous, loyal form that allows me, as both a writer and reader, to baldly grope around associatively in the murk in just the way that I find pleasing and stimulating and eventually even illuminating. I take the form for a walk, toss it a tennis ball, give it a dentabone, and it responds to the cosseting, serves me well, allows me to strain a metaphor perversely. It’s a form that will more readily suffer a wag’s most questionable impulses—compression transforms gestures that a conventional story and its votaries would sniff at.

Gretchen Henderson

in response to Jennifer K. Dick:

Having trained as a classical vocalist, I too “think in sound,” like Jennifer K. Dick evocatively describes. In the prose poem, the sentence offers a capacious three-dimensional space, almost clandestinely. Each sentence links to ones before and behind, without formal lineation, appearing directional like fiction but building aurally and in constellation, guided more by pliability than by plot.

To me, classification matters less than the chance to enter a compressed stanza (in the sense of “room” or “dwelling”). To hear its acoustic potential: its implied lineation and sonic logic. I think of John Cage going into an anechoic chamber (“a room without echoes”) to hear absolute silence. Hearing two sounds, one high and one low (which the sound engineer identified as his nervous system and blood circulation), Cage realized that true silence doesn’t exist. By calling my prose poems “Exhibits,” I evade a specific generic label and enter the gallery space (as titled, Galerie de Difformité), where exhibits A, B, C, etc. aggregate like a curated collection and thus contain a narrative agenda, however masked, and secondarily become exhibits with political implications (allied to “exhibits,” as in a legal trial). Therewith exist other “mani-”pulations (since “exhibit” involves the hand, literally, meaning “to hold out”). While not “I” in an autobiographic sense, each “Exhibit” becomes an authorial offering of sorts. This physiologic dimension seems tethered to any vocal act—which I consider the prose poem to be, a vocal act—derived from a living, breathing body.

Jim Ferris has written intricately about “The Enjambed Body,” drawing upon A.R Ammons’ description (“A poem is a walk”), adding of himself: “when I walk, I aim to get somewhere. If my meters are sprung, if my feet are uneven, if my path is irregular, that’s just how I walk. And how I write.” The prose poem, to me, seems to embody our want, as a species, for movement—physical, aural, what have you—made apparent by limitations, which fuel shifts in perception. Restrictions may change; other constraints may be imposed. A sonnet can be curta(i)led, its lines streamed or cut. But I’m curious about what movement occurs within a “stark, box-like” block—the body of that block. Jennifer Dick refers to the gallery “as making us move through what is essentially a prose book in a gallery sort of way, constantly displacing us.” Such displacing movement is one of many aspects that draw me again and again to the gallery to think about narrative strategy. Generally speaking, displacement seems essential to understand where we are, where we’ve come from, where we yet might go. In the gallery, there’s not a determined path, since each vectored variation suggests an alternative path (and thus, requires choice), yet we’re still guided by a curator and bound (at least, in a traditional gallery) by a single entrance and exit.

What is restricted and what is not (the ubiquitous “Do not touch” versus “Please touch!”) converses and connects, like the voice is a part of and not apart from the body. Prose poetry (to call it by a name, ambivalently, throughout this response) is a generous and generative genre, a “between” that withstands deformity and mutation, almost evolutionary in nature. It is not without genre, still derived from genus (as Ron Silliman describes in Double Room #3). With modulation at work under the surface, there’s a musical quality, to be sure, but one that also seems diminished when forced into a superficially-bound musical analogy, like “polyphony.” Although silence in the prose poem may be less visually apparent, in terms of white space as described by Mallarmé, it exists as pulses of nerves and blood intercourse in the “stark, box-like” block, like Cage heard such sounds in his echo-proof chamber.

My relationship with prose poetry began as a high school teacher, taking a night course called “The Short Short Story.” Its title appealed to me because of economy: the intriguing “short short” seemed to be all that I had time for. Now (having received an M.F.A. in fiction and being in the final stages of a Ph.D. concentration in the same genre, coming at poetry through a backdoor all the while), I wonder what might have happened had the professor called that introductory course “The Prose Poem.”

Mark Lane

The following two statements converge with my own thoughts about prose poems.

Rolf Hughes: "Poetry can bully and buttonhole, announcing its own importance before we’ve even consented to sit and endure its recital. Prose poems, by contrast, do not instruct how to react in advance."

Geoffrey Dyer: "The fact that the essential formal material itself—words, punctuation marks, the occasional paragraph—are as rudimentary as writing, only makes the non-architecture of the prose poem more inhabitable, familiar, interchangeable, and functional."

Though I enjoy verse, I don't always trust it. It is my impression that at the current cultural moment, if not always in the past, to write in verse is to make (and/or reject, which amounts to the same thing) fairly specific assumptions about the reader. Prose poems don't, to my mind, start off as such narrowly specialized products. The boundary separating prose generated for practical purposes from prose generated for artistic purposes is happily indistinct. Poetry shows up in all kinds of unsuspecting prose. Prose can thus be packed with intent while appearing vaguely innocent. This is an illusion, sure, but an illusion that allows poems and stories to feel inevitable, which is important.

Craig Morgan Teicher

Responding to quotation 1

For the most part, I don’t like the idea of prose poem or flash fiction. I don’t actually quite believe that prose poetry and flash fiction represent forms, a genre, even a strategy for approaching writing. The idea I do like is the idea of prose as a substance with particular—and admittedly variable—qualities. Verse is also a substance, with some shared, and some unique qualities. Both are made of the same basic material—words—but in each, the material is deployed differently, engendering different effects, like the way water treated with cold becomes ice, making whatever it touches colder, whereas if it’s treated with heat, it boils and cooks things.

Maybe prose is more like water treated with cold, verse more like water treated with heat. That is far from being a rule. It may very well be the opposite.

Richard Howard says—and I’m not sure if he got this from someone else—that “verse reverses, prose proceeds.” That’s pretty much it: a page of prose tells you to read and then turn the page right away, whereas a page of verse tells you to turn around and read it again. Prose refers to an object, person, place that it means to conjure in your head or instruct you to seek in the experienced world. The whole life of verse, on the other hand, takes place amongst the words as they are arranged on paper, or as they hang in the air for your ear to receive. Poetry doesn’t refer, it is, or the only object to which it really refers is itself. Prose is the opposite.

And, of course, whenever anyone sets up that kind of opposition, it means the truth is somewhere between the poles.

So, as far as I can tell prose poetry/ flash fiction manages to combine some of the qualities of verse and some of prose into a single substance. Ice that burns a bit, hot water that makes things cold. No matter how it looks on the page—a pile of paragraphs, a big block of text, a parade of precariously long versy lines—this substance can be simplistically defined in one of the following ways: 1) verse meant to be read only once, 2) prose that compels you to read it again, 3) verse that refers to a world outside itself and isn’t its own object, or 4) prose whose life occurs only amongst its own words.

And, as above, the truth is of course somewhere in between. In fact, what this substance is doesn’t much matter. What’s important is what it does, how it acts when poured into the empty beaker of a blank page and combined with a pair of eyes. It’s necessarily an experimental scenario, in the literal sense, in as much as the substance a reader is confronted with could be any one of a number of things, or a combination of several, and the only way to tell which is to read.