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The concept of prose poetry, a literary form that challenges the traditional definition of poetry. Discover its origins, characteristics, and influential poets, from Han Dynasty fu poems to modern prose poetry by Gertrude Stein and Language poets. Learn how prose poetry embraces poetic devices without line breaks and how it has evolved over time.
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By Bonné A. de Blas Earl Braggs James Arnett Professor of English Assistant Professor of English Committee Chair Committee Member Bryan Hampton Associate Professor of English Committee Member
By Bonné A. de Blas A Thesis Submitted to The Faculty of The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Degree of Master of Arts: English The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Chattanooga, Tennessee March, 2016 ii
As always, for Robin. iv
Gratitude is offered to each of my professors at The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in the Department of English. Special thanks to Earl Braggs, Dr. James Arnett, and Dr. Bryan Hampton for their thoughtful and engaged reading of my essay and manuscript. I am indebted to my fellow workshop participants who provided, over the course of two years, much insightful feedback throughout the writing of these poems. I acknowledge the manuscript, The Rule of Contraction , has been published previously in its entirety in 2016 by Kattywompus Press. v
The poem in prose is the form of the future— Charles Henri Ford What is poetry and if you know what poetry is what is prose— Gertrude Stein The sequence of prose poems forming my thesis manuscript The Rule of Contraction , patterns the processes of creation, fragmentation, reconfiguration, destruction, and recreation, taking as inspiration the origin stories of the Abrahamic traditions as interpreted by the metaphysics of emanation and withdrawal espoused by both the Kabbalists and the Faylasufs. Fascinated as I am with foundation stories, with how these stories struggle to express in language an experience of transcendence, an experience of an ultimate reality and power lying behind the transient phenomena of the mundane world, I write to explore the place where language becomes crushed and splintered upon its encounter with the numinous. My poems are purposefully dense, their diction exacting, making use of highly allusive and elliptical language in order both to break the chains of logic and to celebrate the possibilities of intuition so as to represent the shifting mosaic pattern of loss and displacement, experiences that are in themselves part of our collective, ancestral myths. The poems present how one line of thought branches into another in unpredictable ways, working conjointly with the connective tissue of the white space both on the individual pages and between each of the poems to create places for the reader to investigate, to take pause, to breathe inside the gaps occurring when stepping outside a linear arc and into the fractures that are memory and myth. In The Rule of Contraction , the poems function within the image of the braided river, an image where things
come apart, spread across the field, and then come back together again. In these assemblages of destruction and creation, disruption and repurpose, the poems interact as a quantum entanglement where the interaction among the poems is as a whole rather than of discrete units. Such repetition and reconfiguration of elements, as they create fragmentary tapestries, also celebrate the hybrid, the “thing” that defies specific location in order to celebrate a new revelation, a place where each poem can stand alone as a singular expression, and at the same time offering additional possibilities within a unifying construct. From The Epic of Gilgamesh to Blondie’s “Forgive and Forget” from the album No Exit , the question of how humanity came to be on the planet has fascinated storytellers. We Westerners acquired our sense of the narrative arc from the ancient Greek dramatists with their focus on the introduction of a problem, the heightening of that problem, and the resolution of that problem. The ancient Hebrews, however, did story-telling differently, and after the destruction of the temple by the Romans during the siege of Jerusalem, the leading rabbis developed certain “rules of reading,” stating that literally, there is no sense of linear time in the Torah, no early and no late, no beginning, no ending. Chronological time is of no importance to the stories comprising the Hebrew scriptures. The Hebrew Bible is full of echoes that emphasize the idea that time and event are multifaceted; the creation story, as the primary example, resonates again in the Book of Isaiah, with images and phrases repeating in a new location. With an ancient text that repeats and sometimes appears to contradict itself, a willingness to consider various possibilities is essential. In my studies, I’ve read the Torah from books called in English the “great scriptures” or the Rabbinic Bible. These books consist of pages crammed with translated commentary surrounding the text of the Bible in different languages, scripts, and fonts. Presented in this way
water, deep water; the wind/spirit. The question becomes should the reader align with an interpretation of the verb in the first line as bara, in the past tense, so that it means “In the beginning God created ” or should it be read it as bro , a form of the infinitive, so that it reads “in the beginning of God’s creating .” Many Jewish commentators believe in the reading rule of smichut —that the words and ideas that are neighbors are often situated near each other for a reason. Add to this the fact that ancient Hebrew has no periods, commas, semicolons, colons, exclamation marks, question marks, or quotation marks. No punctuation whatsoever. English, however, does. The phrase “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” ends in a period in English. In Hebrew, there is the sof-pasuk, two dots that come at the end of each verse, whether the verse is a sentence or a phrase, a statement or a question, a description or a command. It is similar to a line-ending in poetry; all it indicates is that a line ends there, it is not a period. All these factors—the roots to words, the lack of vowels, and the lack of punctuation—create ambiguity in the text, making it multivalent and polysemic with a variety of interpretations. Is the Book of Genesis poetry? Is it prose? A prose poem?
I recall the day I met my first prose poem. I was at Arizona State University, enrolled in a poetry workshop with Norman Dubie while working on my undergraduate degree in Art History, where I was writing lineated poetry heavily influenced by T. S. Eliot and Stéphane Mallarmé, playing with all the white space on the page, captivated by symbolism and allusion. My friend Jenny and I were hanging out in her tiny studio, arranging the pieces for her upcoming MFA exhibition, when she stopped to hand me a book of poetry. “Here, take a look at this.” I read the words forming a dense block upon the white space:
Can it be that She’ll have me acquitted for ambitions consistently squelched?— that wealth in the end will make up for years of privation—that one day's success will wipe out the memory of my fatal lack of skill? This is the opening stanzagraph to the poem “Anguish” as found in Arthur Rimbaud’s prose poetry collection Illuminations, translated from the French by Bertrand Mathieu. I had never read anything like it before. I asked to borrow the book. A third of the way through the collection, I could see that the way Rimbaud’s poetry inhabits language was not diminished in any way by his elimination of the line break. The character of the images and the coordination of phrases remained no matter how the poem appear upon the page. The power inherent in the tension created by brevity and mastery of voice fascinated me. I struggled through writing my own poor imitations, looking to find both subject and voice. I began to look for other prose poems. Scouring local bookstores, I discovered the poetry of Russell Edson, full of his fabulist and surreal cubes of text. Edson led me to James Tate, Tate to Charles Simic, Simic to John Ashbery, Ashbery to Charles Baudelaire, Baudelaire to Francis Ponge and Jean Follian. From there, I discovered Stuart Friedbert and David Young’s anthology Models of the Universe , which lead me to Gertrude Stein and Czeslaw Milosz and … I was inundated by prose poets, each of whom added something to the genre, making the prose poem their own. Eventually, I found the way into my own prose poems. I opened myself to what Baudelaire calls “the lyric movements of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jolts of consciousness.” Now, after several years, my writing inhabits the prose poem, exploiting its form through a commitment to the lyrical and textual possibilities of language through sound, repetition, and sentence structure, put askew against common expectations. I appreciate that the
only a few poets and critics believe they have seen, but for which there is only uncertain evidence (16). Baker continues, writing that, much like Voltaire’s God, “the prose poem got itself invented simply because it did not exist (16). It is clear Baker either has not seen, or willfully ignores, the thousands and thousands of prose poems as published in journals, anthologies, and collections around the world since the middle of the the 19th^ century. While in Field Guide to Prose Poetry Gary McDowell and F. Daniel Rzicznek suggest that the earliest tradition of prose poetry can be found in in the writings of Han Dynasty poets who practiced a lengthy poem in rhymed verse called fu which is both descriptive and narrative (XV), the consensus among scholars and critics is that the Western tradition of the prose poem has its roots in the writings of the French poets Aloysius Bertrand and Charles Baudelaire. Thanks to this tradition, in France today, according to Marguerite Murphy writing in A Tradition of Subversion, a poem is just as likely to be written in prose as in verse (2). The French poeme en prose appeared, and then quickly blossomed, in the mid- 19 th century, when Aloysius Bertrand wrote Gaspard de la nuit , a series of picturesque prose sketches and vignettes set in several Dutch cities and in Paris, described by Robert Alexander in Family Portrait as poetic prose written as an adaptation to a modern, fast-paced, and more abstract life (235). For these oneric, prose-driven scenes, shaped more as moods and impressions than prose narratives, Bertrand drew on the form of the medieval ballad. This new poetry became a way for writers to reevaluate the expressive possibilities, and the social functionality, of prose itself. Charles Baudelaire credited Bertrand as his model for what Baudelaire called his petites poems en prose. Baudelaire sought to write musically but without poetry’s traditional rhythm and rhyme. For Baudelaire, the prose poem’s brevity and condensation established a point of resemblance and contact with lyric, lineated verse in order to underscore and highlight its
deficiencies and weaknesses in meeting the requirements of modernity. Baudelaire’s dedication in Paris Spleen , as translated by Robert Alexander in Family Portrait, asks, “Which one of us has not dreamed, in his ambitious days, of the miracle of a poetic prose… supple enough and jarring enough to be adapted to the soul’s lyrical movements, to the undulations of reverie, to the sudden starts that consciousness takes (235). Written in 1862, Paris Spleen allows for multiple entrances and egresses, combinations and recombinations throughout the text. In this collection, prose poetry acquires its modern sensibility, and with the relative stability of the term achieved within Baudelaire’s life, prose poetry establishes itself as a genre. Alexander notes that the observations about which Baudelaire writes help to link the prose poem to the urban environment (23). Baudelaire’s collection consists of prose poems offering detailed meditations on the idea of the city as presented through Paris—its corners and passages, its narratives of fleeting and random experience on its sidewalks and streets—the descriptions of activities peculiar to urban life. Charles Bernstein, writing in The Attack of the Difficult Poems , declares Baudelaire to be a crucial poet in terms of what he calls the modern history of the representation of the everyday. Baudelaire, he says, takes French poetry down from the lofty subject matter traditionally thought of as appropriate for poetry: the beautiful, the expensive, the royal, the mythological, the important, and crucially, the uplifting, instead identifying with the ordinariness around him—the people on the street and in the café (176). In turn, Baudelaire influenced the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud, like Baudelaire, wrote lineated poetry before turning to prose poetry. Rimbaud uses the prose poem structure throughout Illuminations to create a disjunctive appropriation of both verse and prose. Through prose poetry, Rimbaud’s poetry speaks in the language of the seer and the shaman, able to alter
Wilde’s prose poems, brought in evidence during his trial, became proof of the form’s decadence, and applied a stigma of effeminacy to the genre. That stigma was hard to remove from the mind of British poets as they approached the prose poem. For T.S Eliot, the prose poem is an oxymoronic attempt to revive the stylistic preciousness and technical “charlatanism” of those British poets favoring artifice over nature, the relationship between decay and desire, passion and fading beauty. However, as Clements and Dunham state, Eliot does praise the prose poems of Baudelaire and what he calls the “pure prose” of Rimbaud’s Illuminations ; it wasn’t the form that presents the problem for Eliot but rather the naming of the form itself (8). Throughout the mid- 20 th^ century, the prose poem was embraced throughout Europe and Latin America. Poets such as Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Pablo Neruda, and Gabriella Mistral each incorporated both narrative and free-form verse meditation into the poem without sacrificing lyricism. According to Michael Benedikt in his seminal work, The Prose Poem: An International Anthology, the characteristics of the prose poem in the 20th^ century are an intense use of poetic devices without the stricture of line breaks or meter; mundane diction; ironic wit, skepticism and tough mindedness; focus on the workings of the unconscious and the inward imagination (12). These characteristics appear in the language experiments of Gertrude Stein demonstrated in Tender Buttons , in Ernest Hemingway’s narrative pieces throughout In Our Time , in William Carlos Williams’s Kora in Hell, in Kay Boyle’s image-sequences, and in Charles Henri Ford’s surrealism. Stein is perhaps the Modernist poet most associated with prose poetry. Jonathan Moore writes in A Poverty of Objects that Stein saw the prose poem’s potential for dismantling
“dominating narrative” along lyric modes. As prose poetry struggled to become a genre, it became engaged in what Stein called the “politics of gender,” something important to her as Tender Buttons explores the porous boundary between male/female though the porous boundary of prose/poetry (11). Stein, through her extremely eccentric syntax and unexpected juxtapositions in composing many passages of virtually impenetrable density, the fundamental elements, or words, of her text cannot entirely detach themselves from the social-historical context and uses in which they are embedded. Moore states that in the “Objects” section of Tender Buttons Stein’s approach to the concrete takes the form of violent verbal abstraction, so that what “hasn’t yet been” can appear only as the dazzling negative image of everyday uses of language (207). By means of its object-like appearance on the page—a distinct block of text— the prose poems constituting Tender Buttons suggest that passing through the condition of reification, or being treated as though an object, first requires taking on the form of the object. The prose poem proves to be adaptive beyond Modernism. Alexander, in his dissertation The American Prose Poem , notes that in America after 1964, small literary magazines and presses began publishing prose poetry written by Americans in greater numbers than in previous decades (8). The anti-authoritarianism and yearning for personal creative freedom of the 1960s and 1970s provided fertile ground for the prose poem in America. Poets who hoped to abandon bankrupt tropes and liberate themselves from tired traditions turned to the prose poem in sufficient numbers to prompt Benedikt to comment in his introduction that in America, the prose poem was no longer an “underground affair” (10). Robert Bly, John Ashbery, James Tate, and W.S. Merwin wrote and translated prose poetry during this renaissance. These Deep Imagist poets created prose poems that embraced and expanded the qualities of their European ancestors. Bly approaches prose poetry by focusing on
Gertrude Stein’s poetics. Their use of words and images garner meaning through association and sound rather than through dictionary definition, and their prose poems depend on the sonic qualities of language to provide meaning. David Keplinger considers the prose poem a form of jazz. In his essay “No Easy Way Out” found in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry , Keplinger calls prose poetry a “revolt against traditional music, the way the avant-garde departed from traditional patterns of jazz in the early 60s” (58). The prose poem is a jazz solo, its melody in the white space. For Keplinger, no rhythm is as complicated as the rhythm of the poem written without line breaks.
What grows in that place is possessed of a beauty all its own, ramshackle and unexpected. Campbell McGrath McGrath paints the prose poem as a ragged but welcoming gully between a field of wheat and a field of corn, a liminal place of wildflowers, weeds, frogs, and birds. It is a place between poetry and fiction; however, not everyone believes in this divide within literature. As noted by Murphy, William Wordsworth, in his “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” argues against an existential distinction between the language of prose and language of poetry in defending the use of prosaic diction in poetry (9). Literature has, however, a presupposition of a stability of genres—a static standardization of form against with the prose poem will always be recognized as “other.” Due to its marginality, however, the prose poem must continually subvert prosaic conventions in order to establish itself as an authentic “other.” It must not subvert only the conventions of verse, but it also must subvert those of prose as a basic distinguishing feature of the genre, which has few, if any conventions of its own. This requires that every prose poem
must suggest a traditional prose genre to some extent in order to subvert that tradition. Murphy labels this subversion a “battlefield” where conventional prose appears and is “defeated” by the text’s drive to innovate and to differentiate itself to “construct a self-defining ‘poeticy’,” a term in itself made problematic by the prose poem (3). The suggestion of a traditional genre of discourse can lend authority to the “new” prose, despite the eventual subversion through defeat of convention. It’s true that every text may to some extent alter its own genre. The prose poem draws in and alters other genres or modes of discourse as part of its own peculiar self-definition, and it is the most basic example of mixed-genre writing; it is a genre whose very possibility was created the moment when the genre was born, inscribed in it even though it is the genre that wants out of genre. It is a genre which marks the problem of genre even as its own history of genre markers develops. As quoted by Jonathan Moore in A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre, theorist Tzvetan Todorov states the prose poem is a genre “based on the union of opposites” and is “the appropriate form for a thematic of duality, contrast, and opposition” (18). Benedikt believes the best working definition for a prose poem is to say that it is “a genre of poetry, self-consciously written in prose” (12). Understanding prose poetry as a genre necessitates exploring the interpretive consequences of reading what has been called the poeme en prose , or prose poem as if it is a genre. The very tradition of affronts to tradition—what is prose, what is poetry—gives this genre its vitality and power to continue to revise the boundaries of what is poetry, or indeed, what is literature. The simple definition of prose poetry—“poetry written in prose”—is uncomfortably tautological, forcing the question as to what is prose and what is poetry. The prose poem resists
