Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present

by Unknown

  Experimental writers have invested much energy in prose as a poetic medium while at the same time often repudiating or resisting the narrative impulse. In 1980 the Language poet Ron Silliman wrote a manifesto under the heading “the New Sentence.” He argued that the sentence—the liberated sentence in prose that works like poetry—is not a unit of logic but an independent entity that relates to the sentences before and after it in multiple, complex, and ambiguous ways. As Marjorie Perloff remarks about works by Silliman (Tjanting), Lyn Hejinian (My Life), and Rosmarie Waldrop (The Reproduction of Profiles), “In these prose compositions, a given sentence, far from following its predecessor or preparing the way for the sentence that follows, remains relatively autonomous, continuity being provided by word and sound repetition as well as by semantic transfer, in what the Russian Formalists called the ‘orientation toward the neighboring word.’ ” If poems resemble paintings, the prose poem could as easily correspond to a Mondrian abstraction as to a Flemish street scene.

  That this argument can be derived from a reading of Gertrude Stein is but one reason for considering her the mother of the American prose poem (as Poe, through his influence on Baudelaire, was an uncle of the French prose poem). The prose poems that constitute Stein’s Tender Buttons initiate a tradition of experimentation. Stein had a revolutionary poetic intent, and Tender Buttons is a sustained effort at treating words as objects in their own right rather than as symbolic representations of things. To this day no one has better captured the abstract music of sentences and paragraphs. Nor has anyone departed so radically from the conventions of making sense while making such richly evocative poetry. Consider “A Dog” from Tender Buttons. Here it is in its entirety:

  A little monkey goes like a donkey that means to say that means to say that more sighs last goes. Leave with it. A little monkey goes like a donkey.

  At first this seems a sort of riddle, as if the writer’s task were to suggest a thing without naming it (except in the title). It has charm, its rhymes are spirited, but it has something else as well. There is drama in the sentences and between them, the stock phrase (“that means to say”) repeated to lend urgency, then the four accented monosyllables in a row (“more sighs last goes”), and finally the appearance of a resolution (“Leave with it”), with closure achieved by recapitulation of the initial theme. In a sense this prose poem has, in Walter Pater’s famous formulation, aspired to the condition of music. It has achieved abstractness. But what “A Dog” also shows us is the abstract structure of syntax that precedes content and helps create meaning, charging common words like “sighs” and “goes” with a power of signification we didn’t know they had.

  * * *

  In verse, the tension between the line and the sentence can be fruitful. The canonical example is the opening of Paradise Lost, where Milton isolates the word fruit at the end of line one, and the word acquires triple or even quadruple meanings. In prose the poet gives up the meaning-making powers of the line break. The poet in prose must use the structure of the sentence itself, or the way one sentence modifies the next, to generate the surplus meaning that helps separate poetry in prose from ordinary writing. W. H. Auden, who habitually subdivided people into classes and types, favored antithesis as a syntactical principle in “Vespers” where he presents himself, a partisan of Eden, squaring off against an advocate of utopian socialism:

  In my Eden a person who dislikes Bellini has the good manners not to get born: In his New Jerusalem a person who dislikes work will be very sorry he was born.

  The antithesis creates balance but also invites the reader to weigh the scales. The repetition of clauses allows for significant variation, so when we’re told that the shirker in the New Jerusalem “will be very sorry he was born,” the locution itself exemplifies the sort of “good manners” that make Auden’s Eden a more attractive place.

  John Ashbery seems to incorporate self-contradiction as an operating principle in his prose poem “A Nice Presentation.” He enacts within the sentence a mazy motion:

  Most things don’t matter but an old woman of my acquaintance is always predicting gloom and doom and her prophecies matter though they may never be fulfilled. That’s one reason I don’t worry too much but I like to tell her she is right but also wrong because what she says won’t happen.

  The sentences embody reversal and hesitation; they suggest a kind of logic but mostly they reveal that logic is an illusion. They enact a paradox: that one can be in perpetual motion while remaining stationary, as the mind of a perennial fence-sitter may race from one thought to the next.

  Writing in prose you give up much, but you gain in relaxation, in the possibilities of humor and incongruity, in narrative compression, and in the feeling of escape or release from tradition or expectation. The prose poem can feel like a holiday from the rigors of verse, as is sometimes the case in Shakespeare’s plays. In Hamlet, for example, prose can serve the purposes of the “antic disposition” the prince affects to make people think he is mad. In Much Ado About Nothing, on the other hand, prose stands for plain sense, verse for hyperbole, ornament; Benedick is an inept rhymester, but his love for Beatrice and hers for him has a chance to endure because it is founded not on the fantastical language of romantic courtship but on the sallies and scorn of prose wit. The prose poem can have this antipoetical, down-to-earth quality, can stand as a corrective to the excesses to which verse is susceptible.

  Russell Edson is attracted to the idea of “a poetry freed from the definition of poetry, and a prose free of the necessities of fiction.” Robert Bly associates prose with “the natural speech of a democratic language.” For James Tate, the prose poem is an effective “means of seduction. For one thing, the deceptively simple packaging: the paragraph. People generally do not run for cover when they are confronted with a paragraph or two. The paragraph says to them: I won’t take much of your time, and, if you don’t mind my saying so, I am not known to be arcane, obtuse, precious, or high-falutin’. Come on in.” Robert Hass explains that he was happy with one of his efforts because it “was exactly what the prose poem wasn’t supposed to be. It was too much like the sound of expository prose.” At the time of writing it seemed to Hass that he was exploring unknown territory. And in retrospect? “It seems a sort of long escape.”

  Any of the forms of prose can serve, from traditional rhetorical models to newfangled concoctions. Mark Jarman writes an “Epistle” and Joe Brainard writes “mini-essays” in the form of one-sentence poems. James Richardson specializes in what he calls “Vectors,” which are aphorisms and “ten-second essays.” Paul Violi’s “Triptych” takes its form from TV Guide and Charles Bernstein taps the same source for the content of “Contradiction turns to rivalry.” Tyrone Williams’s “Cold Calls” consists of a sequence of footnotes to an absent text. There are prose poems in the form of journal entries (Harry Mathews’s 20 Lines a Day), radically foreshortened fictions (Lydia Davis’s “In the Garment District”), a fan letter (Amy Gerstler’s “Dear Boy George”), a rant (Gabriel Gudding’s “Defense of Poetry”), a linguistic stunt (Fran Carlen’s “Anal Nap,” in which only one vowel is used), an essay (Fanny Howe’s “Doubt”), a political parable (Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel”), and other inventions, some of which can’t be easily summarized. Mark Strand’s “Chekhov: A Sestina” demonstrates that prose can accommodate the intricacies of that verse form, just as “Woods” in Emerson’s journals can serve as a “prose sonnet.” The appearance of such a poem as Tom Whalen’s “Why I Hate Prose Poems” indicates that the prose poem has, for all the talk of its “subversive” nature, itself become a self-conscious genre inviting spoofery.

  The prose poem has achieved an unprecedented level of popularity among American poets. The evidence is abundant to one who closely monitors literary magazines. There are excellent journals devoted exclusively to prose poems. Both Key Satch(el) and Untitled yielded work you will find in this anthology. So did a quartet of magazines that seem to have sectioned off parts of t
he territory. Quarterly West specializes in the prose poem as short fiction. The Seneca Review favors the prose poem as lyric essay. Quarter After Eight announces that its editorial mission is to “provide a space for work that fits neither genre: a space that demonstrates the tension between poetry and prose,” while the Rhode Island–based magazine whose title is the diacritical sign for a paragraph considers the single block of text to be the prose poem’s ideal shape or default structure. There are magazines whose whole existence is based on advocacy. Brian Clements has just started Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics. Founded in 1992 by Peter Johnson, The Prose Poem: An International Journal recently went under but not before proclaiming a prose poem renaissance and articulating a strong case for the form. Fascinating adventures in the prose poem have turned up in many other magazines as well. I found poems for this book—poems I wanted to spread the news about—in The Hat and The Germ and Shiny, in New American Writing and Conjunctions and Another Chicago Magazine, American Poetry Review and Conduit and Verse, Hambone and Ploughshares and American Letters and Commentary, and this is not an exhaustive list.

  Seven of the poets who have served as guest editors of The Best American Poetry—Simic, Strand, Ashbery, Robert Bly, Robert Hass, John Hollander, and James Tate—have championed the prose poem or done some of their best work in that form (if it is a form) or genre (if that’s what it is). As many prose poems as sonnets—more probably—have been chosen for The Best American Poetry since the inception of the annual anthology in 1988. And certainly signs of the prose poem’s belated respectability abound. Several “international” anthologies were published in the 1990s, the first since Michael Benedikt’s in 1976. One was the culminating issue of The Prose Poem (2000), the other Stuart Friebert and David Young’s valuable Models of the Universe (1995). Recent academic studies, such as Steven Monte’s Invisible Fences (2000) and Michel Delville’s The American Prose Poem (1998), overlap surprisingly little, so fertile and various is the field. The issue of TriQuarterly that is current as I write, with Campbell McGrath as guest editor, includes a section called “Prose Poetics.” I’ve just read provocative articles on the subject in Rain Taxi and the Antioch Review. Undoubtedly the conference on the prose poem, replete with “craft lectures,” that was held in Walpole, New Hampshire, in August 2001, was the first of many to come. This is all a far cry from the situation in 1978 when The Monument was denied the Pulitzer, excellent prose poems were being written but it still seemed a secret, and the editor of this volume, then a thesis candidate at Columbia University, defended his dissertation on the prose poem in English, choosing Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, W. H. Auden, and John Ashbery as four exemplars.

  All anthologies are partial in one and sometimes two senses, though I’d rather sin on the side of ecumenicism than exclusivity. I wanted to present the prose poem in its American context, showing what Elizabeth Bishop did with the form, and how Delmore Schwartz handled it, and what poets ranging from James Wright and Robert Bly to Terence Winch and Andrei Codrescu were doing in the 1970s, and what young writers such as Sarah Manguso and Anselm Berrigan are up to today. Every anthology is also a personal statement. I had a few rules. Excerpts from long works had to be self-contained to warrant inclusion. Though dating poems is a notoriously approximative art, the gain in our historical understanding make it well worth doing, and I have followed each poem with the year of either composition or publication. I have ordered the contents chronologically by year of the poet’s birth but arranged the contributor’s notes alphabetically for the reader’s ease. Poe, born after Emerson, precedes him in the subtitle for reasons that may seem self-evident. For the purposes of this anthology, both T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden qualify as “American,” and the same goes for such Canadian poets as Margaret Atwood and Anne Carson. There are always more poems than you have room for, but the final criterion is the most important one: Do I love it? Is it something I can’t bear to do without? You have no choice but to trust your instincts and, in Frank O’Hara’s phrase, to “go on your nerve.”

  There is a moment in O’Hara’s poem “Why I Am Not a Painter” when the poet—urbane, bohemian buddy of avant-garde painters that he is—exultantly says of his latest poetic effort: “It is even in / prose, I am a real poet.” There is an ambiguity here that readers may not notice at first. If the excerpt were shortened to “even in prose, I am a real poet,” it would mean “I am a real poet even when I write prose,” and prose would be counted not a virtue but a defect. But of course we read the line to mean, “It is even in prose, [and therefore] I am a real poet”—the act of writing a prose poem certifies me as an authentic one hundred percent avant-garde American poet (though at this moment I happen to be writing in verse). While we shouldn’t overlook the characteristically ironic spin O’Hara gave to his words, they retain their element of truth and their larger element of ambiguity, and their bravado is exactly what readers should have in mind as they prepare to encounter the American prose poem in all its glorious variety.

  RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803–1882)

  Woods, A Prose Sonnet

  Wise are ye, O ancient woods! wiser than man. Whoso goeth in your paths or into your thickets where no paths are, readeth the same cheerful lesson whether he be a young child or a hundred years old. Comes he in good fortune or bad, ye say the same things, & from age to age. Ever the needles of the pine grow & fall, the acorns on the oak, the maples redden in autumn, & at all times of the year the ground pine & the pyrola bud & root under foot. What is called fortune & what is called Time by men—ye know them not. Men have not language to describe one moment of your eternal life. This I would ask of you, o sacred Woods, when ye shall next give me somewhat to say, give me also the tune wherein to say it. Give me a tune of your own like your winds or rains or brooks or birds; for the songs of men grow old when they have been often repeated, but yours, though a man have heard them for seventy years, are never the same, but always new, like time itself, or like love.

  (1839)

  EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809–1849)

  Shadow—A Parable

  Yea, though I walk through the valley of the Shadow.

  —Psalm of David.

  Ye who read are still among the living; but I who write shall have long since gone my way into the region of shadows. For indeed strange things shall happen, and secret things be known, and many centuries shall pass away, ere these memorials be seen of men. And, when seen, there will be some to disbelieve, and some to doubt, and yet a few who will find much to ponder upon in the characters here graven with a stylus of iron.

  The year had been a year of terror, and of feelings more intense than terror for which there is no name upon the earth. For many prodigies and signs had taken place, and far and wide, over sea and land, the black wings of the Pestilence were spread abroad. To those, nevertheless, cunning in the stars, it was not unknown that the heavens wore an aspect of ill; and to me, the Greek Oinos, among others, it was evident that now had arrived the alternation of that seven hundred and ninety-fourth year when, at the entrance of Aries, the planet Jupiter is conjoined with the red ring of the terrible Saturnus. The peculiar spirit of the skies, if I mistake not greatly, made itself manifest, not only in the physical orb of the earth, but in the souls, imaginations, and meditations of mankind.

  Over some flasks of the red Chian wine, within the walls of a noble hall, in a dim city called Ptolemais, we sat, at night, a company of seven. And to our chamber there was no entrance save by a lofty door of brass: and the door was fashioned by the artisan Corinnos, and, being of rare workmanship, was fastened from within. Black draperies, likewise, in the gloomy room, shut out from our view the moon, the lurid stars, and the peopleless streets—but the boding and the memory of Evil they would not be so excluded. There were things around us and about of which I can render no distinct account—things material and spiritual—heaviness in the atmosphere—a sense of suffocation—anxiety—and, above all, that terrible state of existence which the nervous experience when
the senses are keenly living and awake, and meanwhile the powers of thought lie dormant. A dead weight hung upon us. It hung upon our limbs—upon the household furniture—upon the goblets from which we drank; and all things were depressed, and borne down thereby—all things save only the flames of the seven lamps which illumined our revel. Uprearing themselves in tall slender lines of light, they thus remained burning all pallid and motionless; and in the mirror which their lustre formed upon the round table of ebony at which we sat, each of us there assembled beheld the pallor of his own countenance, and the unquiet glare in the downcast eyes of his companions. Yet we laughed and were merry in our proper way—which was hysterical; and sang the songs of Anacreon—which are madness; and drank deeply—although the purple wine reminded us of blood. For there was yet another tenant of our chamber in the person of young Zoilus. Dead, and at full length he lay, enshrouded; the genius and the demon of the scene. Alas! he bore no portion in our mirth, save that his countenance, distorted with the plague, and his eyes, in which Death had but half extinguished the fire of the pestilence, seemed to take such interest in our merriment as the dead may haply take in the merriment of those who are to die. But although I, Oinos, felt that the eyes of the departed were upon me, still I forced myself not to perceive the bitterness of their expression, and gazing down steadily into the depths of the ebony mirror, sang with a loud and sonorous voice the songs of the son of Teios. But gradually my songs they ceased, and their echoes, rolling afar off among the sable draperies of the chamber, became weak, and undistinguishable, and so faded away. And lo! from among those sable draperies where the sounds of the song departed, there came forth a dark and undefined shadow—a shadow such as the moon, when low in heaven, might fashion from the figure of a man: but it was the shadow neither of man nor of God, nor of any familiar thing. And quivering awhile among the draperies of the room, it at length rested in full view upon the surface of the door of brass. But the shadow was vague, and formless, and indefinite, and was the shadow neither of man nor of God—neither God of Greece, nor God of Chaldaea, nor any Egyptian God. And the shadow rested upon the brazen doorway, and under the arch of the entablature of the door, and moved not, nor spoke any word, but there became stationary and remained. And the door whereupon the shadow rested was, if I remember aright, over against the feet of the young Zoilus enshrouded. But we, the seven there assembled, having seen the shadow as it came out from among the draperies, dared not steadily behold it, but cast down our eyes, and gazed continually into the depths of the mirror of ebony. And at length I, Oinos, speaking some low words, demanded of the shadow its dwelling and its appellation. And the shadow answered, “I am SHADOW, and my dwelling is near to the Catacombs of Ptolemais, and hard by those dim plains of Helusion which border upon the foul Charonian canal.” And then did we, the seven, start from our seats in horror, and stand trembling, and shuddering, and aghast, for the tones in the voice of the shadow were not the tones of any one being, but of a multitude of beings, and, varying in their cadences from syllable to syllable fell duskly upon our ears in the well-remembered and familiar accents of many thousand departed friends.