Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present

by Unknown

  The words poetry and prose seem to be natural antagonists. The French Renaissance poet Pierre Ronsard said they were “mortal enemies.” Matthew Arnold, thinking to damn the poets Dryden and Pope, called them “classics of our prose.” Oscar Wilde subtly refined the insult: “Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning. He used poetry as a medium for writing in prose.” In these examples, it is prose that has the negative charge, but the opposite can sometimes be true. Not every poet accused of writing poetic prose today will feel complimented, though to Baudelaire in Paris in 1862 it represented an ideal. No doubt poetry and prose will continue to exist in an antithetical relationship if only because they, and poetry in particular, are not neutrally descriptive but have an evaluative meaning. This complicates any discussion of the prose poem and assures that it will probably always retain its oxymoronic status. Nevertheless, there is a way to cut to the quick. As soon as you admit the possibility that verse is an adjunct of poetry and not an indispensable quality, the prose poem ceases to be a contradiction in terms. Verse and prose are the real antonyms, and the salient difference between them is that verse occurs in lines of a certain length determined by the poet whereas prose continues to the end of the page. In Richard Howard’s formulation, verse reverses—the reader turns at the end of the line—while prose proceeds. The form of a prose poem is not an absence of form. It is just that the sentence and the paragraph must act the part of the line and the stanza, and there are fewer rules and governing traditions to observe, or different ones, because the prose poem has a relatively short history and has enjoyed outsider status for most of that time. Writing a prose poem can therefore seem like accepting a dare to be unconventional. It is a form that invites the practitioner to reinvent it.

  In an aphorism contest, the winning definition would come from Charles Simic. “The prose poem is the result of two contradictory impulses, prose and poetry, and therefore cannot exist, but it does,” he writes. “This is the sole instance we have of squaring the circle.” Elsewhere Simic proposes a gastronomic analogy for this “veritable literary hybrid,” this “impossible amalgamation of lyric poetry, anecdote, fairy tale, allegory, joke, journal entry, and many other kinds of prose.” Prose poems “are the culinary equivalent of peasant dishes, like paella and gumbo, which bring together a great variety of ingredients and flavors, and which in the end, thanks to the art of the cook, somehow blend. Except, the parallel is not exact. Prose poetry does not follow a recipe. The dishes it concocts are unpredictable and often vary from poem to poem.” Sticking with kitchen metaphors, James Richardson comments that the prose poem’s shifty position is akin to that of the tomato, which may be a fruit in botany class but is a vegetable if you’re making fruit salad.

  The problem of nomenclature is—as Marianne Moore observed of attempts to differentiate poetry from prose—“a wart on so much happiness.” Amy Hempel summed up some of the options in her title for a lecture she and I planned to give together at Bennington College: “Prose poem, short short, or couldn’t finish?” There will always be exceptions, prose pieces that defy category or fit into more than one, but a practical way of proceeding is to make a division between work that the writer conceives as fiction and work that is conceived as poetry. Writers are under no obligation to classify their writing for us. But their intentions, if articulated, could be thought decisive. For the fiction writer, the prose poem (or “short short”) may be exhilarating because it allows an escape from the exigencies of the novel, novella, and short story. But that writer may nevertheless conceive the result to be not poetry but fiction. For the poet, writing in prose gains one entry into a world of formal possibility—the poem as anecdote, as letter, as meditation, as plot summary—but what is produced is still conceptually a poem. (Editorial intervention can complicate matters. The late Kenneth Koch, pleased that three pieces from his book Hotel Lambosa were chosen for this anthology, asked me nevertheless to note that he regards them not as prose poems but as stories in the manner of Yasunari Kawabata’s Palm-of-the-Hand Stories). Of terms now in use, “short short” sounds like an undergarment, “flash fiction” evokes the image of an unshaved character in a soiled raincoat, and “poem in prose” sounds a bit tweedy. That leaves the poet with “prose poem,” which has at least the virtues of simplicity and directness. Perhaps the prose poem’s ironic motto could come from the moment in Citizen Kane when the newspaper magnate, played by Orson Welles, receives a telegram from a reporter in the field: “Girls delightful in Cuba STOP Could send you prose poems about scenery but don’t feel right spending your money STOP There is no war in Cuba.” And Kane wires back: “You provide the prose poems, I’ll provide the war.”

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  Baudelaire wasn’t the first to write prose poems in French. Aloysius Bertrand beat him to the punch with his remarkable and still underrated Gaspard de la nuit in 1842. But it was Baudelaire who launched the genre, giving it a local habitation and a name. He gave his book alternate titles. One was Spleen de Paris, the other Petits Poèmes en prose (Little Prose Poems). In a letter to a friend, Baudelaire wrote a sentence that scholars have quoted ever since: “Who among us has not, in his ambitious moments, dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without meter or rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of the psyche, the jolts of consciousness?” Liberated from the implacable requirements of formal French verse, Baudelaire wrote with a sort of infernal energy that the prose medium helped to release. He employed a cruel irony that joined suffering to laughter. Paris is the setting and sometimes the subject, and man is not a wonder but a creature of vanity, lust, disgust, and gratuitous nastiness.

  Writing prose poems may have been cathartic for Baudelaire. They were the agency by which he could transform ennui and daydreams into symbolic action. The imp of the perverse, on loan from Edgar Allan Poe, makes its way out of the shadows like an unrepentant id. The impulse results variously in an argumentative prose poem counseling that it’s better to beat up a beggar than to give him alms; a sort of drinking song in prose advising the reader to “be always drunk” [“Toujours être ivre”] whether “on wine, on poetry, or on virtue”; and a prankish narrative [“Le Mauvais vitrier,” or “The Bad Glazier”], in which the narrator yields to the spontaneous urge to abuse a seller of window glass who has done him no harm. From a high window he drops a pot of flowers on the glazier’s head, and shouts: “Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!” The narrator acknowledges that such antics may exact a price. But he won’t let that stand in the way. He summons the amoral didacticism of a fallen angel when he concludes: “But what is an eternity of damnation compared to an infinity of pleasure in a single second?”

  “The Stranger,” the first poem in Baudelaire’s sequence, establishes the poet and artist as an outsider, almost an alien: a disillusioned city dweller, who feels his aloneness most acutely in a crowd, and who might, under different circumstances, pack a gun and set himself up as a hard-boiled gumshoe. “The Stranger” takes the form of a brief dialogue, and so we learn nothing about the man other than what he says in reply to a friendly if persistent interlocutor, perhaps in a railway car or café, a neutral place where strangers meet and feel obliged to converse. He reveals that he is indifferent to the claims of family, the pleasures of friendship, the duty demanded by God or country, the perquisites of money. What does he, the “enigmatic stranger,” love? And here he bursts into a lyric exclamation: “The clouds passing by . . . over there . . . over there . . . the marvelous clouds!” Why are they marvelous? Presumably it’s because they constantly change shape, are perpetually in motion, and are far from the sphere of human sorrow. Baudelaire gave an English title to another of his prose poems, “Anywhere Out of This World,” which embodies the romantic wish to escape. It begins with a characteristic assertion: “Life is a hospital and all the patients keep wanting to change beds.” Equally romantic, equally epigrammatic, is the conclusion of “The Confiteor of the Artist
”: “The study of Beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in fright before being vanquished.”

  If Baudelaire set the prose poem in motion with his anecdotes, parables, short essays, and aphorisms, Arthur Rimbaud provides the great counterexample in Illuminations and Une Saison en enfer [A Season in Hell]. The precocious Rimbaud—“You’re not too serious when you’re seventeen years old,” he wrote when he was fifteen—renounced poetry and headed to Africa for a more “serious” career in the munitions trade. But before he was twenty, he had created the “visionary” prose poem or, in Martha Kinney’s phrase, “the prose poem as a lantern, an illuminated container, casting images and phrases needed but barely understood.” The prose poems in Illuminations are like dream landscapes and journeys, visionary fragments, brilliant but discontinuous. They represent a considerable advance in abstraction and compression, and they are revolutionary, too, in recommending a breakdown in order, “a willful derangement of the senses,” as a necessary regimen.

  Rimbaud, the poet as youthfully debauched seer, will take a romantic theme and render it in idiosyncratic and abstract terms. Consider his prose poem “Guerre” [“War”] from Illuminations:

  When I was a child, certain skies sharpened my vision: all their characters were reflected in my face. The Phenomena were aroused.—At present the eternal inflection of moments and the infinity of mathematics drive me through this world where I meet with every public honor, adored by children with their prodigious affections.—I dream of a War, of might and of right, of unanticipated logic.

  It is as simple as a musical phrase.

  At its heart, this is a reworking of a familiar Wordsworthian trajectory (There was a time “when like a roe I bounded o’er the mountains . . . . That time is past, and all its aching joys are now no more. . . . Other gifts have followed. . . . Therefore am I still a lover of the meadows and the woods”). The structure is the same in Rimbaud: a movement from childhood to the present, great loss and a new compensatory resolution. In Rimbaud, however, to get from one clause to the next requires a long leap. The clauses themselves are like free-floating fragments, and the conclusion has an air of revolutionary menace very far from the consolation Wordsworth found in nature.

  In France, the prose poem quickly became a genre. Prose represented freedom from the alexandrine, the tyrannical twelve-syllable line that ruled over French poetry with an inflexibility that made English blank verse seem positively libertine in comparison. For Stéphane Mallarmé, the prose poem afforded a pretext to digress or pursue a detour; “La Pipe” [“The Pipe”] is a fine pre-Proustian exploration of the involuntary memory. Max Jacob, in The Dice Cup (1917), crafted fables that unfold with an absurd logic, with a comic edge sometimes and a non sequitur where we expected to find an epiphany. There is beauty in the inconclusive anecdote terminating in ellipses—as when we’re told, in “The Beggar Woman of Naples,” that the person thus described, to whom the narrator had tossed some coins every day, was “a wooden case painted green which contained some red earth and a few half-rotten bananas . . .” Henri Michaux made a cunning use of personae (“I like to beat people up”) and ironic protagonists (the hapless Plume, who is arrested in a restaurant for eating an item not on the menu). Francis Ponge “took the side of objects” in poems that spurned the self-conscious ego and discovered themselves as studies of things. The achievement of these poets and others (Pierre Reverdy, René Char) made Paris the indisputable capital of the prose poem.

  In the English-speaking world, the prose poem never quite graduated to the status of a genre. But then it didn’t really have to. The opportunity to write prose poetry, by whatever name, had long existed. The King James Bible, as Shelley observes, was a triumph of prose as a vehicle for “astonishing” poetry. Coleridge singles out “the writings of Plato, and Bishop Taylor, and the Theoria Sacra of Burnet” as furnishing “undeniable proofs that poetry of the highest kind may exist without metre, and even without the contra-distinguishing objects of a poem.” No list of English precursors of modern prose poetry would be complete without Shakespeare’s prose (in Hamlet, for example, the “quintessence of dust” speech, and “the readiness is all”), John Donne’s sermons, Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation, James MacPherson’s hoax translation of the Scottish bard Ossian, and the “Proverbs of Hell” and “memorable fancies” of Blake’s “Marriage of Heaven and Hell”: a list so diverse that it resists any effort at codification.

  The American prose poem owes much to the French but veers off decisively to accommodate the sui generis work that transcends category. In 1959, the French scholar Suzanne Bernard could stipulate that there were four requirements that every prose poem had to fulfill. It had to embody the poet’s intention, it had to have an organic unity, it had to be its own best excuse for being, and it had to be brief. In other words, a prose poem was a short poem that happened to be written in prose. There may be something in the Gallic temperament that gravitates toward systematic classification, but it seems anathema to poets who identify prose with the wish to escape from strictures and injunctions. Brevity is not a requirement for an American poet. I think immediately of wonderful prose poems that are too long to be represented in this book, such as W. H. Auden’s “Caliban to the Audience” and John Ashbery’s “The System.” In 1848, Poe, whose influence on Baudelaire and Mallarmé was so great, wrote a 150–page treatise on the nature and origin of the universe, in which he intuitively grasped the Big Bang theory of cosmic creation. Poe called this lengthy work Eureka and subtitled it A Prose Poem, despite his own earlier declaration that a long poem is a “flat contradiction in terms.”

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  Some prose poem enthusiasts approach the subject in a self-deprecatory manner. Simic depicts the poet in mad pursuit of a fly in a dark room: “The prose poem is a burst of language following a collision with a large piece of furniture.” Russell Edson, a master of the comic surreal fable, likens the prose poem to the offspring of a giraffe and an elephant that may look grotesque but is hailed nonetheless as a “beautiful animal.” Or perhaps the prose poem is “a cast-iron aeroplane that can actually fly, mainly because its pilot doesn’t seem to care if it does or not.” When Louis Jenkins compares the writing of a prose poem to throwing a crumpled piece of paper into a wastebasket (“a skill that, though it may improve hand-eye coordination, does not lead necessarily to an ability to play basketball”), it’s as if failure were a premise of the enterprise. Perhaps it is, or perhaps the fellows are being impish as much as diffident. Jenkins would rather chuck paper into basket than listen to the teacher “drone on about the poetry of Tennyson.” Edson jovially stresses the capaciousness of the genre. “You could call the pieces in Tender Buttons prose poems,” he tells an interviewer who has asked about Gertrude Stein. “Heck, one can call most anything a prose poem. That’s what’s great about them, anything that’s not something else is probably a prose poem.” The interviewer persists. How about “the 70’s when you, Bly, Tate, and others were writing prose poems”? And Edson, sensing the hunger for a myth, obligingly concocts one. There was a time when “prose poems were illegal” and he, Jim [Tate], and the Captain [Bly, after the stern Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty] began their clandestine activities. “After long evenings of talking prose poems we’d relax by trying to guess who was ghostwriting all the stuff that was appearing in all the poetry magazines. It looked like the work of a single hack.”

  In the 1970s, the prose poem afforded a means to depart or dissent from what that “single hack” was producing. The prose poem as surreal fable, in the manner of Edson or Maxine Chernoff, seemed a compelling option. “There is a shorter distance from the unconscious to the Prose Poem than from the unconscious to most poems in verse,” Michael Benedikt said. There was never any danger of a new orthodoxy, but someone quipped that if you said prose poem in a word association game the next word to come to everyone’s mind would be surrealist or surreal. Certainly the prose poem in the United States today is not as predicta
bly unpredictable, in part because it has loosened its ties to the French tradition. There is a renewed sense that the homemade American prose poem is a thing that could not exist without the idea of America preceding it. This is not entirely a new story. In a 1957 prologue to his early Kora in Hell: Improvisations, William Carlos Williams took pains to distinguish the book from “the typically French prose poem,” whose “pace was not my own”—despite the debt, evident in the title, to Rimbaud’s Season in Hell. The question “what is American about the American prose poem” remains second to “what is American about American poetry” as a topic that can be debated and discussed endlessly without any prospect of a resolution. But surely Joe Wenderoth’s Letters to Wendy’s, which he composed on a fast food chain’s customer comment cards, is but one recent instance of a rule-breaking prose poem that is saturated with American culture and the American vernacular.