Ask a seasoned Ohio or Indiana birder about Golden-Winged Warblers and Blue-Winged Warblers and you'll learn that both birds prefer open woodland habitats. You'll also learn that their ranges and romantic overtures overlap. The result? Two distinct varieties of hybrid, Brewster's Warbler and Lawrence's Warbler, along with other intermediate plumages that result when hybrids hook up with pure parental types. Backcrosses. Rule Breakers. And when boundaries blur, so does nomenclature. The emergence of hybrids led Linnaeus, the botanist and physician who laid the foundations for modern taxonomy, to see that species are not fixed and invariable entities. The same clearly holds true for poems--and there's no greater literary hybrid than the prose poem.

Readers of Double Room know all about work that explores hybridity on multiple levels and are likely familiar with the birth of the prose poem — it tracks back to Frenchman Aloysius Bertrand, whose collection Gaspard de la nuit, was published in 1842 after his death. Featuring singing masons, tulip merchants, a village flaming like a comet, dwarves, lepers, a thumb likened to a fat Flemish innkeeper with a bad temper, and a prophesizing cricket, Bertrand's clipped, imagery-laden paragraphs influenced the form's first bad-boy rock star, Charles Baudelaire. His posthumously published Petits Poèmes en prose (Little Poems in Prose) swam against the tide of French verse and its alexandrines, irreverently challenging formal expectations and inspiring jokers and literary malfeasants everywhere, including Rimbaud and Mallarmé, whose work then influenced a range of twentieth century poets–from symbolists to surrealists–like Léon-Paul Fargue, Benjamin Péret, Robert Desnos, and Max Jacob. Gertrude Stein might be our first American prose poet of note; William Carlos Williams, one of our more famous linear architects, also experimented with the form (with Pound labeling the work "incoherent"). The form finds itself alive and well today, with a number of journals and anthologies offering a range of practitioners.

Whenever the prose poem appears, discussions about form and the line and what constitutes a prose poem are never far behind: Double Room readers will want to check out the Q & A from issue #8, where a number of contemporary practitioners jump into the pool to discuss the differences between a free swim and lanes for laps. In his introduction to Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, David Lehman notes James Richardson's idea of the prose poem's kinship with the tomato: It might be a fruit in botany class but more likely a vegetable if you're making fruit salad. And a recent anthology, A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line, edited by Emily Rosko and Anton Vander Zee and out from the University of Iowa Press, also highlights such distinctions. Gabriel Gudding's delightful essay, "The Line as Fetish and Fascist Reliquary, goes all-out tongue-and-cheek yet offers some very grounded, sensible responses to navel-gazing debates about form in contemporary writing. Despite Gudding's challenges and a host of arguments and debates about line and form, it remains pleasurable and meaningful to read and practice a form that historically challenged and continues to challenge preconceived notions of how lines and sentences should behave.

And yet it's harder to lend Prose Poems any kind of outsider status, its rebel-with-a-clause origins notwithstanding. Much like a rebel faction that suddenly finds itself with seats in Parliament, it has learned how to play well with others. And over the years a number of terrific anthologies have introduced students to the pleasure of the form, ranging from Michael Benedikt's ground breaking anthology The Prose Poem to David Lehman's collection to David Young and Stuart Friebert's fantastic Models of the Universe: An Anthology of the Prose Poem. Into good company comes a recent newcomer, An Introduction to the Prose Poem, from editors Brian Clements and Jamey Dunham. It sports a pedestrian and potentially misleading title, but having playfully and loosely organized their anthology as a brickle of 24 thematic, strategic, and formal categories that link cousin poems, the editors have taken a useful and interesting tack so as to distinguish their collection from others. Smartly claiming that their categories—which include demarcations such as Anecdotes, Epistolary poems, Abecedarians, and Prose Poems about Prose Poetry—eschew any kind of static categorization into which all prose poems must fall, Clements and Dunham find common denominators between poems that "prose poem beginners [can find] models for their own poems." And here's where this anthology will prove most valuable: to young writers as a Creative Writing text and valuable supplement to other existing anthologies.

Because of their fresh take on grouping like poems and giving teachers and students new means of access to the form, it's a nice anthology to have on the shelf. After all, Pound's dictum to make it new works for editors as well as poets. Some particular highlights, aside from a broad variety of individual poems that will satisfy varied tastes, include sections on Fable, on Rant (I love that voice serves as a guiding principle here), and perhaps most enjoyably on Structural Analogues. This last category squares nicely with postmodern poetics' continued fracturing and meshing of forms, and here we find prose poems modeled after a T.V. Guide schedule, a Case Book, sonnets, and even screenplays. A fine ear for sound also generates an entertaining section of relevant poems that begs for out-loud reading as well as on-the-page contemplation.

As for petty yet grit-in-the-oyster complaints, there are a few. An introduction to something raises expectations of broad inclusion and historical perspective; that's not entirely the case here. Fewer than 10% of the entries are in translation, and a dearth of translation is notable for a form that's always held great relevance outside of North America. And there's a very particular sensibility at work in this anthology: Clements is the editor of Firewheel Editions, the publisher of both the anthology and Sentence: a Journal of Prose Poetics, from which more than a third of the anthology's poems originally called home. Dominant representation from one journal might (at worst) strike some readers as a narcissistic pat-on-the-back or–and this is more likely for this collection's target readership of university communities–simply strike others as a nod to the politics of professorship and publishing and the nightmares of permissions. But there's also a slightly sticky issue of self-inclusion, as the editors publish their own poems in the anthology, one of which unfortunately calls further attention to the presence of home-cooking by featuring an egregious typo. Fortunately, what's valuable and commendable in this collection far outweighs any allergens, and readers will easily get on with the more important work of enjoying the poems and models herein. Clements and Dunham give us a variety of distinct voices within a fresh matrix for students and practitioners of the form.