August 21, 2023 • 25 mins
The prose poem offers a wide canvas for experimentation, attracting innovative voices in contemporary poetry. In this episode, we cover the rebellious roots of the form and how it stepped into the current moment. Join Danielle as she geeks out on her favorite form, discussing the challenges and opportunities presented to us when we focus on the sentence as a unit of measure. At the end of the episode, Danielle reveals some of the prose poem’s secret powers and a list of her favorite collections to get you started on your prose poetry reading and writing journey.
Visit thepoetrylab.com to find the Show Notes for this episode. The Poetry Lab Podcast is produced by Lori Walker and Danielle Mitchell with assistance from Karen Zheng. Hosted by Danielle Mitchell, Lori Walker, and bridgette bianca.
Theme song: "Simply Upbeat" by Christian Telford, Kenneth Edward Belcher, and Saki Furuya.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
(00:00):
I'm Danielle Mitchell, and this is the
Poetry Lab Podcast.
I started the Poetry Lab 10 years ago
to help struggling, self-taught writers like me
find a place in their community to write,
read,
(00:20):
learn, and collaborate.
As an intersectional feminist, writer, and
teaching artist,
I help writers tap into their craft with
radical self-compassion,
unlike anything they've ever seen in the
creative writing classroom before.
If you're a creative person trying to
establish a writing practice in the real world,
this podcast is designed to help you carve
(00:42):
out the time,
the courage,
and the inspiration to keep writing your
new shit.
Are you ready, poet?
Let's get into it.
Hello, my friends, and welcome to the
Poetry Lab Podcast.
I am really hyped for today's episode
(01:03):
because I get to talk about one of my most
favorite things to write in the whole world.
If you know my work at all, you know that I
am primarily a prose poet,
and that is a topic of today's episode.
We are going to do a really quick deep dive
into the prose poem.
The prose poem is a very special invention.
(01:24):
like a chair that flies or a small dish
that produces food for 40 people?
In turning to it, the poet seems to put
aside the discreet or flamboyant costume of
poetic identity,
and in a swift and unpredictable gesture,
raid the other world, the world of prose.
(01:45):
Those lines are from David Young's
anthology, Models of the Universe, which
was published in 1995.
But I think that Jung makes an excellent
case for why we should all be writing prose poems.
Who wouldn't want to be set up to raid the
other world in your creative work?
I think prose poems really connect us to
the cosmic.
(02:06):
We go beyond the limits of our own
understanding.
Today, I wanna talk about why we do this.
I really wanna talk about how we do this in
our prose poems.
So
are you ready, poet?
Let's get into it.
Okay, deep breath for all of you poets who
love your line breaks, because today I want
(02:28):
to introduce you to something new,
an idea maybe you haven't considered
before.
As we begin to talk about the prose poem,
there's always one question at the top of
everyone's mind.
Sometimes in essays, you see essayists
labor over this question.
Critics are always trying to pin it down.
And that question is very basic and almost
(02:49):
primal in a way.
What is a prose poem though?
Is it a paragraph?
Is it a block of text? Is a prose poem
creative nonfiction or is it poetry for
goodness sake?
I'm not here to tell you everything that a
prose poem can and will be,
but I do have some loose guidelines to
(03:10):
offer you that will help you begin to shape
your thoughts when you
approach prose poetry.
It's very important to me
that as I give you this definition, you
recognize that it's something that you
are meant to
move beyond, right? It's like a Yoda moment
where he laughs at Luke Skywalker and says,
We are what they grow beyond.
(03:32):
That's what I want this definition to be
for you.
I want it to be a starting place
that you grow beyond.
The poet Howard Nemerov once wrote,
To define something was to put an end to it.
I do not want to define prose poetry for
you and by end
prose poetry and what prose poetry can be
for you.
But I do have some guidelines.
(03:53):
Sometimes I like to offer my students
the idea
of
poetry rules being more guidelines than
steadfast rules, kind of like a pirate's
code situation.
It's more guidelines.
And so I want you to really embrace that
idea as we go forward talking about the
prose poem today.
But I'll start with a heavy hitter of a
thought, which is that
(04:13):
There are some folks out there,
specifically there's a literary journal
that I'm thinking of, that defines prose
poetry exclusively
as creative nonfiction.
And my
argument, I guess,
the hill that I'm really willing to die on,
is to say that,
no,
prose poetry is not creative nonfiction.
(04:35):
It might be
something beyond categorization.
It might need its own new genre,
category.
Sure, I will
accept that.
But to say that it's creative nonfiction
means that we would approach the writing of
it as if we're writing nonfiction.
And that is where I fundamentally disagree.
(04:56):
Because when you approach the writing of a
prose poem,
I really believe that you are still writing
poetry.
The biggest difference you're going to
encounter, which is probably very obvious to you,
is that you're working in the
unit of the sentence and not in the unit of
the line.
So let me go back.
What is a prose poem, though?
(05:17):
This is the short little definition I like
to use in my classes.
A prose poem
is a block of text
that retains the qualities of poetry.
I'll say that again.
A prose poem is a block of text
that retains the qualities of poetry.
(05:38):
Now, what do we mean by qualities of
poetry?
Those are the elements of craft that go
into building a poem that we all have
become familiar with.
Aside from line breaks,
we're dealing with
diction choices, syntax choices.
We're dealing with
momentum, with building rhythm,
(05:59):
pacing, punctuation,
Building image, figurative language, all of
that metaphor, simile, all of those things
are still going on in a prose poem.
You could still have dialogue in a prose poem.
You could still use parataxis in a prose poem.
You could still have objective correlative
in a prose poem.
There's lots of things that could go into
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your prose poem that are still those
elements of poetry craft.
This is that fundamental reason why I
push back against calling it creative
nonfiction.
Because
not all of these elements of craft are
going to really be inherent in creative
nonfiction like they are in poetry.
I have created a guide with all of these
(06:41):
elements of craft discussed for my feedback
circle workshop.
where we build a baseline of what all of
these terms mean, and then how to ask
questions about them when we're revising
our work. But
that's also a good place to start when
we're just looking at what
all of these, quote,
qualities of poetry could be, because
there's tons of things there.
(07:02):
You don't have the line to work with in a
prose poem,
but there's still some of the logic of the line
that you could retain in your poem.
So you are still very much dealing with
poetics when you approach a prose poem.
One of the things I really love about prose
poetry, and I try to impart this to
the poets that I work with in my class
(07:24):
Brickbox Paradox,
the prose poem is
permissive.
what I mean by that is that it grants us
permission
to explore, to collaborate, to cut up, to
break up, to
burst out, to build upon.
There's so many things we can do with the
prose poem
(07:45):
that by writing that form, we are both
rebelling and innovating at the same time.
The poet Ariel Goldberg writes,
Prose poems, for me, are the best of many
worlds.
They are solid blocks of text, but
dependable, accessible-looking little bricks
in which I am set free to be as fanciful as
(08:06):
I like.
My prose poems tend to be the ones that
most heavily rely on folklore and dream
imagery.
They give me permission to be narrative or
autobiographical,
non-narrative and inventive.
They let me make poems that look like
traditional prose, and they let me make
poems with weird margins and blanks and
other assorted surface oddities.
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They allow me to tell lies, to be abrupt,
to be glib,
to be wholly sincere.
That is what I want for you in a writing
experience when you approach a prose poem.
Literally
all of those things.
And I absolutely agree with Goldberg here
when she says that prose poems are
permissive.
They are, they grant us permission to do
(08:50):
all of the things, to contradict ourselves.
But I want you to focus on one of the
things that she says there,
accessible looking little bricks.
One of the distinctive features of a prose
poem is its thick,
brick-like structure.
This is why my
my poetry class is called brick box
paradox. Brick.
(09:10):
Because when you look at a block of text,
especially when it's got that
nice, straight,
full justification
on
it, it does look like a brick.
It's sturdy.
Unlike lineated poems that rely on ample
white space, the prose poem embraces a
compact and dense composition.
It demands our dedication to be in it, to
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be in the world of that poem, almost
trapped inside of it.
Or
think of it like the Three Little Pigs, and
one builds a house with
sticks, and one builds a house with bricks,
and one builds a house with straw.
Is that the other one, straw? I think I
went in the wrong order,
but you get what I'm saying.
It's the brick house that is the sturdiest
house that doesn't get knocked over.
(09:54):
I also named my class Brick Box Paradox
because for me, a brick is the start of it all.
When I think of the brick aspect of prose poems,
it takes me to its rebellious roots.
So let's go back and do a mini history
lesson here on the origins of the prose poem.
The origin of the modern prose poem is
(10:16):
credited to the French.
a group of late-stage Romantic era poets in
the late 1800s.
These men are historical contemporaries,
but not necessarily besties.
In other words, they are all kind of
credited with the birth of the prose poem,
but they may not have in fact known each
other in real life.
(10:37):
Romanticism was an era defined by its turn
towards nature
and the interior world of feelings.
What these poets were beginning to
discover, however,
was that the feelings of a bourgeois
writing class reflecting on flowers didn't
really represent the world around them.
This was the rise of the Industrial
(10:58):
Revolution.
Cities and urban centers were forming
around factories instead of farms,
and this created a new working class.
So let's name some names,
Aloysius Bertrand, he lived from 1807 to 1841.
And then Charles Baudelaire, who you've
probably heard of
1821 to 1867.
(11:20):
We also have Stephen Mellermay and we have
Arthur Rimbaud.
He was the latest of them all, and he only
lived for about 25 years,
but he was the last to come along.
He died in 1891.
I like to call all of these dudes
Baudelaire and company.
They are said to have wanted to break free
from strict formulaic metered poetry.
(11:42):
Specifically at that time, and in French,
it was the Alexandrine line,
which was a 12 syllable line
with stresses on each 6 syllable.
The push towards a new sound, a new
utterance,
was one that brought us away from,
like I said, the bourgeois looking at
flowers and into
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an utterance that valued the mundane, the
working class, and reflected on a move away
from country life.
Baudelaire lived in Paris, and Paris was
changing.
The first prose poem collection is written
by Charles Baudelaire in the 1840s and
published in 1869.
I call it Paris Spleen, but of course it's
said most lovely in French, which I do not
(12:26):
like to attempt.
Paris Spleen, Charles Baudelaire, is often
credited as one of the first books of prose
poetry.
Now, there was an earlier book by Bertrand
called Treasurer of the Night, published in 1842,
that is said to have influenced or heavily
influenced Baudelaire,
but it wasn't exactly prose poems yet.
But it's worth mentioning that somewhere
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around this time, in the 1840s, the modern
prose poem
about.
And it did so as an act of rebellion,
working against
the modes of the time,
the metered Alexandrian line, which was
that everyone was writing in,
and these writers decided to do something
totally different.
That's why we say it's an act of rebellion.
(13:06):
It's also really interesting to me that the
roots of the prose poem lie in the idea of
the working class.
Something I think is really important to
note here.
No women or people of color are credited at
the birth of this form.
Not because women and other people of color
and other countries weren't writing prose
poems, but because no one was publishing
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the prose poems that they wrote.
This tradition carries on into American
prose, poetry and poetics at large, where
you find so many people, women and people
of color left out of the Canon.
At the turn of the century, around 1900,
modernism begins in the United States.
And because we are who we are, a lot of our
scholarship then turns to focus on the
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American poets of that time, and not so
much on what continued to unfold for the
French.
So if we're going to look at modernist poets,
we have to maybe establish a timeline for
ourselves in that thinking.
Pre-modernists are poets like Walt Whitman,
Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, right,
that whole gang.
Modernist poets Marianne Moore, William
(14:12):
Carlos Williams, T.S.
Eliot H.D.,
and of course led by Ezra Pound.
But Pound was following the footsteps of
the French and breaking out of literary
traditionalism.
And there we have free verse poetry.
This is always a fun thing for me to note
as a prose poet, which is that the prose
poem predates the birth of free verse
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poetry.
And some scholars have argued that it even
influenced that shift away from the formal mode.
Something that's really key in noting about
free verse poetry and in prose poetry
is that when we shifted away from rhyme and
from metered verse,
we also move towards natural speech in poems.
That's something that prose poems
(14:55):
definitely traverse today
is
diction and syntactical choice in the
length of the sentence that you're using in
the prose poem.
To recap what we just talked about, the
history of the prose poem, it started in
France in the 1800s, around the 1840s,
right around the rise of the Industrial
Revolution,
and it carried itself through
(15:16):
modernism and the rise of free verse poetry
into modes that we see today.
I also like to think of
the modern moment, the contemporary moment
of the prose poem that we're having right now,
and I think the rise of this
prose poem that we see today
Even though there's no one prose poem, I
say this prose poem, but I mean
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the use, the ubiquitousness where prose
poems are popping up everywhere these days.
I think that all began in the 1990s, right
after Charles Simic won the Pulitzer Prize
for his collection of prose poems called
The World Doesn't End.
I think that was a watershed moment that sort of
where we began to see a lot more prose
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poems showing up everywhere.
You're almost hard pressed these days to
find a collection with
out a prose poem in it.
In looking at Ocean Huang's book, Time is a
Mother, and looking at Chen Chen's new
book, Your Emergency Contact Has
Experienced an Emergency,
both of these poets are innovating and
using prose poems quite a bit.
I'm very excited to see that
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because I think that means that the trend
of prose poetry is just going to continue
to grow.
So get on that trend, poets.
So there's two more ideas that I want to
cover in this episode on prose poetry.
One is how we're using the sentence as our
unit of measure in the poem.
And the next is some of the secret powers
(16:40):
of the prose poem, some of the things it's
best equipped to create for us in our work.
So looking at the sentence.
By removing the constraint of line breaks,
poets are able to emphasize the power of
each sentence, capturing the essence of a
moment or idea with precision.
This is a return to the basics that reminds
us of the inherent beauty and impact of a
(17:01):
well-crafted sentence.
And I like to think of all the options we have.
We may not have the innovation of the line
break and all the different ways we can use
the line, indent the line, use white space
with the line, punctuation with the line,
fragment the line,
have it march across the page, whatever we
choose to do with our line.
It feels like those options are limitless,
(17:22):
and I think
the options with a sentence are also
almost
list, just like with the line.
So don't be afraid of it.
Be excited about it.
Something I have poets in my classes study
are the four types of sentences:
declarative, imperative, interrogative, and
exclamatory sentences.
There's so many different
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moods that we can convey, so many different
techniques we can use when we explore
different kinds of sentences within our
prose poem.
So we can use a declarative sentence to
give facts and information.
an interrogative sentence, to ask a
question.
We can use
an imperative sentence, to make a plea or
give a command.
We can use an exclamatory sentence, the
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statement that shows emotion at the end
with an exclamation point.
I always love an implied exclamation or an
implied question that doesn't actually
offer that
punctuation mark at the end because that's
fun for me, I guess because I'm just a
little bit of a brat.
Even though I mentioned at the beginning
that I don't believe prose poetry is
(18:26):
creative nonfiction, that doesn't mean that
creative nonfiction writers can't write
prose poetry or fiction writers can't write it.
No, of course, of course you can.
That's not what I meant when I said that.
And when we look at the sentence,
this is where you have the advantage, prose
writers, because we are fully in your
wheelhouse.
The one disadvantage that you're going to
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face is that you do know these rules really
well, and a prose poem is walking the
razor's edge of those rules, and it's a
great place to break them.
So if you have a hard time breaking the
rules of the sentence, if you know
all about phrases and conjunctions and all
of that good grammar stuff that we learned
so early on that it's hard for me to even
(19:08):
remember now,
maybe I became a poet because I could exist
outside of all of those rules because I had
a learning disorder when I was little, and
it was really hard for me to learn them,
but I digress.
The challenge is going to be deciding when
to follow the rules and when to break the rules.
But bringing in this aspect of prose and
prose writing into the poetry journey is
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actually really fun, and it's going to open
you up to so many possibilities.
These are some of the things I've noticed
about prose poems.
Grief.
Prose poems offer an extraordinary pool
with which to soak in your sadness.
They offer a density and a closeness, which
I think makes them great containers for grief.
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We can feel comforted by the community of words.
A prose poem at a vigil, a prose poem on
the beach, sending flowers into the waves,
watching the water digest them.
Something about the composition of the
prose poem.
being a sturdy block
with which to
hold yourself up.
It's like a prop.
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I think this makes that kind of poem a
really good container for grief.
Another secret power of the prose poem is
anxiety.
I know that sounds weird, but hear me out
on this one.
Your page is crammed with words.
Your page is on the verge of madness.
It's okay to feel your feelings.
The words are here and they can't get away
(20:34):
from you.
I think if you have anxiety and you
understand the nature of a panic attack and
you understand the importance of breath and
space and getting air in that moment,
a prose poem is a challenge because
it almost is like a little anxiety attack
on the page, the way all the words are
crammed together
and there is no breath and there is no space.
(20:56):
And then you could code switch or switch
content
really quickly on your reader, but it's all
connected because it's all in one block
together.
So a prose poem, for those of you who have
anxiety, is a chance to turn
towards your weakness, embrace it, and make
it your strength.
Postcards are another secret power of the
prose poem.
You can capture a brief moment of time that
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is tied to a place,
rooted in the ground.
Send a letter from that past to the future,
or from the future to the past.
to yourself on the other side of a
decision.
My favorite postcard is by Cecilia Wallach.
It's the middle of our lives and night,
and we walk toward everything, is how it ends.
(21:39):
Amazing.
I love postcard poems.
Another thing that post poems can deliver
really well to your reader are facts.
I call poems that have science in them or
facts in them sort of littered throughout
factoid poems because they're delivering
facts that are
true,
but they're doing it
And compiling them in a way that's trying
to get at an emotional truth, not
(22:01):
necessarily just a factual truth, not a
scientific truth,
but something else that the poet is
feeling.
And it's a great way to
perform mashups.
pulling in outside sourced information and
interspersing it with that emotional truth.
Prose poems are a great place to navigate
that territory of going between the
emotional, the factual, the outside world,
(22:23):
and the interior world.
They are great containers for that as well.
A few other cool things that prose poems
can do is you can also model a prose poem
off of a word problem.
Word problems are amazing to me because
they're
this heightened combination of English
learning, right? Learning how to speak in
(22:43):
our language, and then using the language
to apply it to a math problem,
and how like ephemeral and weird they can be.
There's an element of gibberish in them,
and that language is still recognizable to
us because we experienced as children.
It started with, How many apples does Susie
have? and it ended with trains in
Kalamazoo, but somehow it made sense.
(23:05):
Prose poems as word problems are
particularly wonderful because the math in
them never adds up mathematically, but
again, it will add up
emotionally.
It's really fun to give yourself the
permission
to
write a math problem that doesn't actually
math, right? When the math isn't math-ing.
To work on a poem that has these scientific
(23:27):
facts in it, but it's not about the facts
facting, it's about the emotions of it all.
In this way,
a prose poem is a box.
It's a box with a bunch of ephemera from
childhood
with your favorite verbs and vowels.
It's a box where you get to store all of
the cool shit that's floating around in
(23:48):
your brain, in your brain trust,
that comes out in a poem.
And what's really cool about prose poems is
that all of that content is linked by the
nature of the fact that it's
linked into a chunk of text.
It's all stuck together in one sticky block
of text,
or it's all combined together in a bowl
where the soup of language is mixing
(24:10):
throughout.
You don't have the chance to separate it
because it's stuck together.
And in that way, we know that these things
that seem like they're discordant things
are actually connected.
The nature of the
blocky boxiness,
It helps us know that they are connected,
and in that way it heightens paradox,
because a prose poem is a strange likeness.
(24:33):
It looks like other literary forms, and yet
it is different from them all.
It tends to be characterized by various
sorts of serious and not so serious
playfulness.
Ali Smith observes that it retains its odor
of paradox, its faculty for narrative play,
and for play with language register,
unhierarchical patterns and unemphasized
(24:55):
possibilities.
Its openness to unpoetic language and
language from a range of registers are
prospects that the form offers.
So this episode was a fun one for me
because I got to really dig into my passion
for the prose poem and go off a bit.
But in some ways it felt like it wasn't so
(25:15):
practical.
And I love things that are practical and
that gives us steps that are actionable.
So because of that, I have some extra
things for you here.
One is that I've created a little guide
to the first four books of prose poetry I
think you should start with.
I have two craft books and I have two
(25:37):
anthologies that I really think are some of
the best places to begin
when you're starting your prose poetry
journey.
I've put them all together with
descriptions of what they're about so you
can really choose which one you want to
start with,
and I've put it into a little PDF guide
that will be available on the show notes
page for this episode.
So, you go to thepoetrylab.com/podcast
(26:01):
and search for this episode on prose poems there.
It'll just be on the list of episodes.
Click on it and that's where you'll find
the guide
with which prose poem anthologies and craft
books you should start with.
Now, when we talk about individual
collections,
I could definitely tell you to go back
and read Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud
and read Paris Spleen by Charles
(26:22):
Baudelaire.
But you'll get some of those poems in the
anthologies that I've recommended to you.
So there's a few other whole collections
that I really love by more contemporary poets
that I would direct your attention to.
Short Talks by Anne Carson,
The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers by
Bhanu Kapil,
(26:42):
Magnolia by Evan Jordan,
The Nine Senses by Melissa Kwesney,
Fjords, Volume One
by Zachary Schomburg.
There's also volume two that came out a few
years ago by Zachary Schomburg.
Citizen by Claudia Rankine.
Why God is a Woman by Nin Andrews, which
our book club is reading in the month of
(27:05):
September, just want to say that.
Why God is a Woman by Nin Andrews.
Sleeping with the Dictionary by Harriet
Mullen.
That's not a full collection
of prose poems, it's mixed,
but it's definitely worth checking out.
Quarles by Eve Joseph.
And then Under the Music, the collected
prose poems of Maxine Chernoff.
(27:27):
I highly, highly recommend that.
And more recently, Obit by Victoria Chang.
Those are prose poems as well.
Some more mixed collections that I
recommend:
Space in Chains by Laura Kashishk.
Pretty much anything Danez Smith has ever
written.
Don't Call Us Dead, insert boy,
(27:47):
and Homie all have prose poems in them.
One of my favorite
mixed books in that
it has some prose poems and then delineated
poems in it,
is Digest by Gregory Pardlow.
Gregory Pardlow's prose poems are some of
the most
interesting, difficult, exciting,
scientific, science-y prose poems ever.
(28:10):
I love his work.
Field by Joss Charles,
A Cruelty Special to Our Species by Emily
Yong Min Yoon,
Brute by Emily Skaja,
Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky,
and Cool Auditor by Ray Gonzalez.
A flyby of some prose poetry books that I
really love.
I've been so thrilled to share my love of
(28:32):
prose poems with you all today.
Thank you for giving me the space to do that.
If you liked this episode, please give us a
like and a follow and help us spread the
word about our podcast by texting the link
to a few creative friends.
You can also find us at
thepoetrylab.com/podcast.
It's where that list of books I just
(28:52):
mentioned will be, and also the guide to
the four prose poetry books I think you
should get started with.
That's all for now.
I hope to see you soon at the Poetry Lab.
(00:00):
I'm Danielle Mitchell, and this is the
Poetry Lab Podcast.
I started the Poetry Lab 10 years ago
to help struggling, self-taught writers like me
find a place in their community to write,
read,
(00:20):
learn, and collaborate.
As an intersectional feminist, writer, and
teaching artist,
I help writers tap into their craft with
radical self-compassion,
unlike anything they've ever seen in the
creative writing classroom before.
If you're a creative person trying to
establish a writing practice in the real world,
this podcast is designed to help you carve
(00:42):
out the time,
the courage,
and the inspiration to keep writing your
new shit.
Are you ready, poet?
Let's get into it.
Hello, my friends, and welcome to the
Poetry Lab Podcast.
I am really hyped for today's episode
(01:03):
because I get to talk about one of my most
favorite things to write in the whole world.
If you know my work at all, you know that I
am primarily a prose poet,
and that is a topic of today's episode.
We are going to do a really quick deep dive
into the prose poem.
The prose poem is a very special invention.
(01:24):
like a chair that flies or a small dish
that produces food for 40 people?
In turning to it, the poet seems to put
aside the discreet or flamboyant costume of
poetic identity,
and in a swift and unpredictable gesture,
raid the other world, the world of prose.
(01:45):
Those lines are from David Young's
anthology, Models of the Universe, which
was published in 1995.
But I think that Jung makes an excellent
case for why we should all be writing prose poems.
Who wouldn't want to be set up to raid the
other world in your creative work?
I think prose poems really connect us to
the cosmic.
(02:06):
We go beyond the limits of our own
understanding.
Today, I wanna talk about why we do this.
I really wanna talk about how we do this in
our prose poems.
So
are you ready, poet?
Let's get into it.
Okay, deep breath for all of you poets who
love your line breaks, because today I want
(02:28):
to introduce you to something new,
an idea maybe you haven't considered
before.
As we begin to talk about the prose poem,
there's always one question at the top of
everyone's mind.
Sometimes in essays, you see essayists
labor over this question.
Critics are always trying to pin it down.
And that question is very basic and almost
(02:49):
primal in a way.
What is a prose poem though?
Is it a paragraph?
Is it a block of text? Is a prose poem
creative nonfiction or is it poetry for
goodness sake?
I'm not here to tell you everything that a
prose poem can and will be,
but I do have some loose guidelines to
(03:10):
offer you that will help you begin to shape
your thoughts when you
approach prose poetry.
It's very important to me
that as I give you this definition, you
recognize that it's something that you
are meant to
move beyond, right? It's like a Yoda moment
where he laughs at Luke Skywalker and says,
We are what they grow beyond.
(03:32):
That's what I want this definition to be
for you.
I want it to be a starting place
that you grow beyond.
The poet Howard Nemerov once wrote,
To define something was to put an end to it.
I do not want to define prose poetry for
you and by end
prose poetry and what prose poetry can be
for you.
But I do have some guidelines.
(03:53):
Sometimes I like to offer my students
the idea
of
poetry rules being more guidelines than
steadfast rules, kind of like a pirate's
code situation.
It's more guidelines.
And so I want you to really embrace that
idea as we go forward talking about the
prose poem today.
But I'll start with a heavy hitter of a
thought, which is that
(04:13):
There are some folks out there,
specifically there's a literary journal
that I'm thinking of, that defines prose
poetry exclusively
as creative nonfiction.
And my
argument, I guess,
the hill that I'm really willing to die on,
is to say that,
no,
prose poetry is not creative nonfiction.
(04:35):
It might be
something beyond categorization.
It might need its own new genre,
category.
Sure, I will
accept that.
But to say that it's creative nonfiction
means that we would approach the writing of
it as if we're writing nonfiction.
And that is where I fundamentally disagree.
(04:56):
Because when you approach the writing of a
prose poem,
I really believe that you are still writing
poetry.
The biggest difference you're going to
encounter, which is probably very obvious to you,
is that you're working in the
unit of the sentence and not in the unit of
the line.
So let me go back.
What is a prose poem, though?
(05:17):
This is the short little definition I like
to use in my classes.
A prose poem
is a block of text
that retains the qualities of poetry.
I'll say that again.
A prose poem is a block of text
that retains the qualities of poetry.
(05:38):
Now, what do we mean by qualities of
poetry?
Those are the elements of craft that go
into building a poem that we all have
become familiar with.
Aside from line breaks,
we're dealing with
diction choices, syntax choices.
We're dealing with
momentum, with building rhythm,
(05:59):
pacing, punctuation,
Building image, figurative language, all of
that metaphor, simile, all of those things
are still going on in a prose poem.
You could still have dialogue in a prose poem.
You could still use parataxis in a prose poem.
You could still have objective correlative
in a prose poem.
There's lots of things that could go into
(06:20):
your prose poem that are still those
elements of poetry craft.
This is that fundamental reason why I
push back against calling it creative
nonfiction.
Because
not all of these elements of craft are
going to really be inherent in creative
nonfiction like they are in poetry.
I have created a guide with all of these
(06:41):
elements of craft discussed for my feedback
circle workshop.
where we build a baseline of what all of
these terms mean, and then how to ask
questions about them when we're revising
our work. But
that's also a good place to start when
we're just looking at what
all of these, quote,
qualities of poetry could be, because
there's tons of things there.
(07:02):
You don't have the line to work with in a
prose poem,
but there's still some of the logic of the line
that you could retain in your poem.
So you are still very much dealing with
poetics when you approach a prose poem.
One of the things I really love about prose
poetry, and I try to impart this to
the poets that I work with in my class
(07:24):
Brickbox Paradox,
the prose poem is
permissive.
what I mean by that is that it grants us
permission
to explore, to collaborate, to cut up, to
break up, to
burst out, to build upon.
There's so many things we can do with the
prose poem
(07:45):
that by writing that form, we are both
rebelling and innovating at the same time.
The poet Ariel Goldberg writes,
Prose poems, for me, are the best of many
worlds.
They are solid blocks of text, but
dependable, accessible-looking little bricks
in which I am set free to be as fanciful as
(08:06):
I like.
My prose poems tend to be the ones that
most heavily rely on folklore and dream
imagery.
They give me permission to be narrative or
autobiographical,
non-narrative and inventive.
They let me make poems that look like
traditional prose, and they let me make
poems with weird margins and blanks and
other assorted surface oddities.
(08:28):
They allow me to tell lies, to be abrupt,
to be glib,
to be wholly sincere.
That is what I want for you in a writing
experience when you approach a prose poem.
Literally
all of those things.
And I absolutely agree with Goldberg here
when she says that prose poems are
permissive.
They are, they grant us permission to do
(08:50):
all of the things, to contradict ourselves.
But I want you to focus on one of the
things that she says there,
accessible looking little bricks.
One of the distinctive features of a prose
poem is its thick,
brick-like structure.
This is why my
my poetry class is called brick box
paradox. Brick.
(09:10):
Because when you look at a block of text,
especially when it's got that
nice, straight,
full justification
on
it, it does look like a brick.
It's sturdy.
Unlike lineated poems that rely on ample
white space, the prose poem embraces a
compact and dense composition.
It demands our dedication to be in it, to
(09:33):
be in the world of that poem, almost
trapped inside of it.
Or
think of it like the Three Little Pigs, and
one builds a house with
sticks, and one builds a house with bricks,
and one builds a house with straw.
Is that the other one, straw? I think I
went in the wrong order,
but you get what I'm saying.
It's the brick house that is the sturdiest
house that doesn't get knocked over.
(09:54):
I also named my class Brick Box Paradox
because for me, a brick is the start of it all.
When I think of the brick aspect of prose poems,
it takes me to its rebellious roots.
So let's go back and do a mini history
lesson here on the origins of the prose poem.
The origin of the modern prose poem is
(10:16):
credited to the French.
a group of late-stage Romantic era poets in
the late 1800s.
These men are historical contemporaries,
but not necessarily besties.
In other words, they are all kind of
credited with the birth of the prose poem,
but they may not have in fact known each
other in real life.
(10:37):
Romanticism was an era defined by its turn
towards nature
and the interior world of feelings.
What these poets were beginning to
discover, however,
was that the feelings of a bourgeois
writing class reflecting on flowers didn't
really represent the world around them.
This was the rise of the Industrial
(10:58):
Revolution.
Cities and urban centers were forming
around factories instead of farms,
and this created a new working class.
So let's name some names,
Aloysius Bertrand, he lived from 1807 to 1841.
And then Charles Baudelaire, who you've
probably heard of
1821 to 1867.
(11:20):
We also have Stephen Mellermay and we have
Arthur Rimbaud.
He was the latest of them all, and he only
lived for about 25 years,
but he was the last to come along.
He died in 1891.
I like to call all of these dudes
Baudelaire and company.
They are said to have wanted to break free
from strict formulaic metered poetry.
(11:42):
Specifically at that time, and in French,
it was the Alexandrine line,
which was a 12 syllable line
with stresses on each 6 syllable.
The push towards a new sound, a new
utterance,
was one that brought us away from,
like I said, the bourgeois looking at
flowers and into
(12:03):
an utterance that valued the mundane, the
working class, and reflected on a move away
from country life.
Baudelaire lived in Paris, and Paris was
changing.
The first prose poem collection is written
by Charles Baudelaire in the 1840s and
published in 1869.
I call it Paris Spleen, but of course it's
said most lovely in French, which I do not
(12:26):
like to attempt.
Paris Spleen, Charles Baudelaire, is often
credited as one of the first books of prose
poetry.
Now, there was an earlier book by Bertrand
called Treasurer of the Night, published in 1842,
that is said to have influenced or heavily
influenced Baudelaire,
but it wasn't exactly prose poems yet.
But it's worth mentioning that somewhere
(12:46):
around this time, in the 1840s, the modern
prose poem
about.
And it did so as an act of rebellion,
working against
the modes of the time,
the metered Alexandrian line, which was
that everyone was writing in,
and these writers decided to do something
totally different.
That's why we say it's an act of rebellion.
(13:06):
It's also really interesting to me that the
roots of the prose poem lie in the idea of
the working class.
Something I think is really important to
note here.
No women or people of color are credited at
the birth of this form.
Not because women and other people of color
and other countries weren't writing prose
poems, but because no one was publishing
(13:28):
the prose poems that they wrote.
This tradition carries on into American
prose, poetry and poetics at large, where
you find so many people, women and people
of color left out of the Canon.
At the turn of the century, around 1900,
modernism begins in the United States.
And because we are who we are, a lot of our
scholarship then turns to focus on the
(13:50):
American poets of that time, and not so
much on what continued to unfold for the
French.
So if we're going to look at modernist poets,
we have to maybe establish a timeline for
ourselves in that thinking.
Pre-modernists are poets like Walt Whitman,
Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, right,
that whole gang.
Modernist poets Marianne Moore, William
(14:12):
Carlos Williams, T.S.
Eliot H.D.,
and of course led by Ezra Pound.
But Pound was following the footsteps of
the French and breaking out of literary
traditionalism.
And there we have free verse poetry.
This is always a fun thing for me to note
as a prose poet, which is that the prose
poem predates the birth of free verse
(14:33):
poetry.
And some scholars have argued that it even
influenced that shift away from the formal mode.
Something that's really key in noting about
free verse poetry and in prose poetry
is that when we shifted away from rhyme and
from metered verse,
we also move towards natural speech in poems.
That's something that prose poems
(14:55):
definitely traverse today
is
diction and syntactical choice in the
length of the sentence that you're using in
the prose poem.
To recap what we just talked about, the
history of the prose poem, it started in
France in the 1800s, around the 1840s,
right around the rise of the Industrial
Revolution,
and it carried itself through
(15:16):
modernism and the rise of free verse poetry
into modes that we see today.
I also like to think of
the modern moment, the contemporary moment
of the prose poem that we're having right now,
and I think the rise of this
prose poem that we see today
Even though there's no one prose poem, I
say this prose poem, but I mean
(15:37):
the use, the ubiquitousness where prose
poems are popping up everywhere these days.
I think that all began in the 1990s, right
after Charles Simic won the Pulitzer Prize
for his collection of prose poems called
The World Doesn't End.
I think that was a watershed moment that sort of
where we began to see a lot more prose
(15:57):
poems showing up everywhere.
You're almost hard pressed these days to
find a collection with
out a prose poem in it.
In looking at Ocean Huang's book, Time is a
Mother, and looking at Chen Chen's new
book, Your Emergency Contact Has
Experienced an Emergency,
both of these poets are innovating and
using prose poems quite a bit.
I'm very excited to see that
(16:17):
because I think that means that the trend
of prose poetry is just going to continue
to grow.
So get on that trend, poets.
So there's two more ideas that I want to
cover in this episode on prose poetry.
One is how we're using the sentence as our
unit of measure in the poem.
And the next is some of the secret powers
(16:40):
of the prose poem, some of the things it's
best equipped to create for us in our work.
So looking at the sentence.
By removing the constraint of line breaks,
poets are able to emphasize the power of
each sentence, capturing the essence of a
moment or idea with precision.
This is a return to the basics that reminds
us of the inherent beauty and impact of a
(17:01):
well-crafted sentence.
And I like to think of all the options we have.
We may not have the innovation of the line
break and all the different ways we can use
the line, indent the line, use white space
with the line, punctuation with the line,
fragment the line,
have it march across the page, whatever we
choose to do with our line.
It feels like those options are limitless,
(17:22):
and I think
the options with a sentence are also
almost
list, just like with the line.
So don't be afraid of it.
Be excited about it.
Something I have poets in my classes study
are the four types of sentences:
declarative, imperative, interrogative, and
exclamatory sentences.
There's so many different
(17:43):
moods that we can convey, so many different
techniques we can use when we explore
different kinds of sentences within our
prose poem.
So we can use a declarative sentence to
give facts and information.
an interrogative sentence, to ask a
question.
We can use
an imperative sentence, to make a plea or
give a command.
We can use an exclamatory sentence, the
(18:05):
statement that shows emotion at the end
with an exclamation point.
I always love an implied exclamation or an
implied question that doesn't actually
offer that
punctuation mark at the end because that's
fun for me, I guess because I'm just a
little bit of a brat.
Even though I mentioned at the beginning
that I don't believe prose poetry is
(18:26):
creative nonfiction, that doesn't mean that
creative nonfiction writers can't write
prose poetry or fiction writers can't write it.
No, of course, of course you can.
That's not what I meant when I said that.
And when we look at the sentence,
this is where you have the advantage, prose
writers, because we are fully in your
wheelhouse.
The one disadvantage that you're going to
(18:47):
face is that you do know these rules really
well, and a prose poem is walking the
razor's edge of those rules, and it's a
great place to break them.
So if you have a hard time breaking the
rules of the sentence, if you know
all about phrases and conjunctions and all
of that good grammar stuff that we learned
so early on that it's hard for me to even
(19:08):
remember now,
maybe I became a poet because I could exist
outside of all of those rules because I had
a learning disorder when I was little, and
it was really hard for me to learn them,
but I digress.
The challenge is going to be deciding when
to follow the rules and when to break the rules.
But bringing in this aspect of prose and
prose writing into the poetry journey is
(19:30):
actually really fun, and it's going to open
you up to so many possibilities.
These are some of the things I've noticed
about prose poems.
Grief.
Prose poems offer an extraordinary pool
with which to soak in your sadness.
They offer a density and a closeness, which
I think makes them great containers for grief.
(19:52):
We can feel comforted by the community of words.
A prose poem at a vigil, a prose poem on
the beach, sending flowers into the waves,
watching the water digest them.
Something about the composition of the
prose poem.
being a sturdy block
with which to
hold yourself up.
It's like a prop.
(20:13):
I think this makes that kind of poem a
really good container for grief.
Another secret power of the prose poem is
anxiety.
I know that sounds weird, but hear me out
on this one.
Your page is crammed with words.
Your page is on the verge of madness.
It's okay to feel your feelings.
The words are here and they can't get away
(20:34):
from you.
I think if you have anxiety and you
understand the nature of a panic attack and
you understand the importance of breath and
space and getting air in that moment,
a prose poem is a challenge because
it almost is like a little anxiety attack
on the page, the way all the words are
crammed together
and there is no breath and there is no space.
(20:56):
And then you could code switch or switch
content
really quickly on your reader, but it's all
connected because it's all in one block
together.
So a prose poem, for those of you who have
anxiety, is a chance to turn
towards your weakness, embrace it, and make
it your strength.
Postcards are another secret power of the
prose poem.
You can capture a brief moment of time that
(21:19):
is tied to a place,
rooted in the ground.
Send a letter from that past to the future,
or from the future to the past.
to yourself on the other side of a
decision.
My favorite postcard is by Cecilia Wallach.
It's the middle of our lives and night,
and we walk toward everything, is how it ends.
(21:39):
Amazing.
I love postcard poems.
Another thing that post poems can deliver
really well to your reader are facts.
I call poems that have science in them or
facts in them sort of littered throughout
factoid poems because they're delivering
facts that are
true,
but they're doing it
And compiling them in a way that's trying
to get at an emotional truth, not
(22:01):
necessarily just a factual truth, not a
scientific truth,
but something else that the poet is
feeling.
And it's a great way to
perform mashups.
pulling in outside sourced information and
interspersing it with that emotional truth.
Prose poems are a great place to navigate
that territory of going between the
emotional, the factual, the outside world,
(22:23):
and the interior world.
They are great containers for that as well.
A few other cool things that prose poems
can do is you can also model a prose poem
off of a word problem.
Word problems are amazing to me because
they're
this heightened combination of English
learning, right? Learning how to speak in
(22:43):
our language, and then using the language
to apply it to a math problem,
and how like ephemeral and weird they can be.
There's an element of gibberish in them,
and that language is still recognizable to
us because we experienced as children.
It started with, How many apples does Susie
have? and it ended with trains in
Kalamazoo, but somehow it made sense.
(23:05):
Prose poems as word problems are
particularly wonderful because the math in
them never adds up mathematically, but
again, it will add up
emotionally.
It's really fun to give yourself the
permission
to
write a math problem that doesn't actually
math, right? When the math isn't math-ing.
To work on a poem that has these scientific
(23:27):
facts in it, but it's not about the facts
facting, it's about the emotions of it all.
In this way,
a prose poem is a box.
It's a box with a bunch of ephemera from
childhood
with your favorite verbs and vowels.
It's a box where you get to store all of
the cool shit that's floating around in
(23:48):
your brain, in your brain trust,
that comes out in a poem.
And what's really cool about prose poems is
that all of that content is linked by the
nature of the fact that it's
linked into a chunk of text.
It's all stuck together in one sticky block
of text,
or it's all combined together in a bowl
where the soup of language is mixing
(24:10):
throughout.
You don't have the chance to separate it
because it's stuck together.
And in that way, we know that these things
that seem like they're discordant things
are actually connected.
The nature of the
blocky boxiness,
It helps us know that they are connected,
and in that way it heightens paradox,
because a prose poem is a strange likeness.
(24:33):
It looks like other literary forms, and yet
it is different from them all.
It tends to be characterized by various
sorts of serious and not so serious
playfulness.
Ali Smith observes that it retains its odor
of paradox, its faculty for narrative play,
and for play with language register,
unhierarchical patterns and unemphasized
(24:55):
possibilities.
Its openness to unpoetic language and
language from a range of registers are
prospects that the form offers.
So this episode was a fun one for me
because I got to really dig into my passion
for the prose poem and go off a bit.
But in some ways it felt like it wasn't so
(25:15):
practical.
And I love things that are practical and
that gives us steps that are actionable.
So because of that, I have some extra
things for you here.
One is that I've created a little guide
to the first four books of prose poetry I
think you should start with.
I have two craft books and I have two
(25:37):
anthologies that I really think are some of
the best places to begin
when you're starting your prose poetry
journey.
I've put them all together with
descriptions of what they're about so you
can really choose which one you want to
start with,
and I've put it into a little PDF guide
that will be available on the show notes
page for this episode.
So, you go to thepoetrylab.com/podcast
(26:01):
and search for this episode on prose poems there.
It'll just be on the list of episodes.
Click on it and that's where you'll find
the guide
with which prose poem anthologies and craft
books you should start with.
Now, when we talk about individual
collections,
I could definitely tell you to go back
and read Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud
and read Paris Spleen by Charles
(26:22):
Baudelaire.
But you'll get some of those poems in the
anthologies that I've recommended to you.
So there's a few other whole collections
that I really love by more contemporary poets
that I would direct your attention to.
Short Talks by Anne Carson,
The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers by
Bhanu Kapil,
(26:42):
Magnolia by Evan Jordan,
The Nine Senses by Melissa Kwesney,
Fjords, Volume One
by Zachary Schomburg.
There's also volume two that came out a few
years ago by Zachary Schomburg.
Citizen by Claudia Rankine.
Why God is a Woman by Nin Andrews, which
our book club is reading in the month of
(27:05):
September, just want to say that.
Why God is a Woman by Nin Andrews.
Sleeping with the Dictionary by Harriet
Mullen.
That's not a full collection
of prose poems, it's mixed,
but it's definitely worth checking out.
Quarles by Eve Joseph.
And then Under the Music, the collected
prose poems of Maxine Chernoff.
(27:27):
I highly, highly recommend that.
And more recently, Obit by Victoria Chang.
Those are prose poems as well.
Some more mixed collections that I
recommend:
Space in Chains by Laura Kashishk.
Pretty much anything Danez Smith has ever
written.
Don't Call Us Dead, insert boy,
(27:47):
and Homie all have prose poems in them.
One of my favorite
mixed books in that
it has some prose poems and then delineated
poems in it,
is Digest by Gregory Pardlow.
Gregory Pardlow's prose poems are some of
the most
interesting, difficult, exciting,
scientific, science-y prose poems ever.
(28:10):
I love his work.
Field by Joss Charles,
A Cruelty Special to Our Species by Emily
Yong Min Yoon,
Brute by Emily Skaja,
Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky,
and Cool Auditor by Ray Gonzalez.
A flyby of some prose poetry books that I
really love.
I've been so thrilled to share my love of
(28:32):
prose poems with you all today.
Thank you for giving me the space to do that.
If you liked this episode, please give us a
like and a follow and help us spread the
word about our podcast by texting the link
to a few creative friends.
You can also find us at
thepoetrylab.com/podcast.
It's where that list of books I just
(28:52):
mentioned will be, and also the guide to
the four prose poetry books I think you
should get started with.
That's all for now.
I hope to see you soon at the Poetry Lab.
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If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
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Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.