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I would have placed emphasis on the subversive character of prose poetry. For me, it is a kind of writing determined to prove that there’s poetry beyond verse and its rules. Most often it has an informal, playful air, like the rapid, unfinished caricatures left behind on café napkins. Prose poetry depends on a collision of two impulses, those for poetry and those for prose, and it can either have a quiet meditative air or feel like a performance in a three-ring circus. It is savvy about the poetry of the past, but it thumbs its nose at verse that is too willed and too self-consciously significant. It mocks poetry by calling attention to the foolishness of its earnestness. Here in the United States, where poets speak with reverence of authentic experience and write poems about their dads taking them fishing when they were little, telling the reader even the name of the river and the kind of car they drove that day to make it sound more believable, one longs for poems in which imagination runs free and where tragedy and comedy can be shuffled as if they belonged in the same pack of cards.
The hardest thing for poets is to free themselves from their own habitual way of seeing the world and find ways to surprise themselves. That’s what I liked about these pieces. They seemed effortless and, like all prose poems, came, as James Tate once said, in “deceptively simple packaging: the paragraph”. They were unpremeditated, and yet they could stand alone and even had a crazy logic of their own.
I was having fun, of course. All poets do magic tricks. In prose poetry, pulling rabbits out of a hat is one of the primary impulses. This has to be done with spontaneity and nonchalance, concealing art and giving the impression that one writes without effort and almost without thinking − what Castiglione in his sixteenth-century Book of the Courtier called sprezzatura. As such, prose poetry can be regarded as a remedy for every bane of affectation.
In the 2009 anthology An Introduction to the Prose Poem published in the United States, the editors Brian Clements and Jamey Dunham attempt to classify the various kinds of prose poems in existence. Some of the twenty-four types they discuss and give examples of are more persuasive than others. Certainly, the use of anecdote, fable, autobiography, extended metaphor, parable, description of inanimate objects, journal entries, lists and dialogue have been frequently noted, but as Michel Delville has pointed out, often a poem may suggest a genre at the outset only to shed its guise and become something entirely different by its end. He also wonders whether there may be as many kinds of prose poems as there are practitioners. I agree. How do you describe a genre that declares total verbal freedom and about which every generalization one makes tends to be contradicted by a poem that has none of the properties one has just spelled out? As Russell Edson has written, “If the finished prose poem is considerate a piece of literature, this is quite incidental to the writing.” What makes us so fond of it, he says elsewhere, is its clumsiness, its lack of expectation or ambition.
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I knew a number of my contemporaries who wrote prose poems and I liked what they wrote, but, for me, the writing of poetry was always about form and the struggle to fit words inside a line or a stanza. My notebooks are full of passages of verse endlessly revised and often crossed out. They also contained, in the years preceding the publication of that book, other kinds of writing that looked like narrative fragments, along with ideas for poems consisting of isolated phrases and images strung together.
Prose poetry has been around for almost two centuries and still no one has managed to explain properly what it is. The customary definitions merely state that it is poetry written in prose and leave it at that. For many readers, such a concept is not just absurd but a blasphemy against everything they love about poetry. Free verse, of course, still has its opponents, but no one in their right mind would maintain that all genuine poetry must adhere to rhyme schemes or regular meters. It’s an entirely different matter when it comes to prose poetry. When a book of mine consisting entirely of poems in prose received the Pulitzer Prize in 1990, there was considerable protest from some of our more conservative literary critics, who demanded to know how a prize meant to honor poetry could be given to something that by definition is not poetry. I didn’t bother to defend myself from my detractors, but if I had, and had told them the true story of how the poems in The World Doesn’t End got written, they would have been even more outraged. Here then, finally, is my confession: I never once in my life sat down to write a prose poem. In other words, everything in that book came to me as if by accident.
The old Russian avant-garde storyteller and playwright, Daniil Kharms, most likely didn’t regard this piece of his as a poem. Naturally, one of the main impulses for writing such a piece is to escape all labels. David Lehman, the editor of Great American Prose Poems (2003), even argues that some of the works he includes in the anthology may be both poetry and short fiction. Still, the question remains: what makes it poetry? Or more to the point, what made me believe that the fragments I found in my notebooks might indeed be poems?
While light poetry is sometimes condemned as , or thought of as poetry composed casually, humor often makes a serious point in a subtle or subversive way. Many of the most renowned "serious" poets have also excelled at light verse. Notable writers of light poetry include , , , , , and .
Essay XIII: The School of Poetry and a Modest Proposal
What are the characteristics of a poetry-subculture publication? First, the one subject it addresses is current American literature (supplemented perhaps by a few translations of poets who have already been widely translated). Second, if it prints anything other than poetry, that is usually short fiction. Third, if it runs discursive prose, the essays and reviews are overwhelmingly positive. If it publishes an interview, the tone will be unabashedly reverent toward the author. For these journals critical prose exists not to provide a disinterested perspective on new books but to publicize them. Quite often there are manifest personal connections between the reviewers and the authors they discuss. If occasionally a negative review is published, it will be openly sectarian, rejecting an aesthetic that the magazine has already condemned. The unspoken editorial rule seems to be, Never surprise or annoy the readers; they are, after all, mainly our friends and colleagues.
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We have an odd situation: although more bad poetry is being published now than ever before in American history, most of the reviews are positive. Critics say, “I never attack what is bad, all that will take care of itself,” . . . but the country is full of young poets and readers who are confused by seeing mediocre poetry praised, or never attacked, and who end up doubting their own critical perceptions.
Q. Mr. Williams, can you tell me, simply, what poetry is?
Until about thirty years ago most poetry appeared in magazines that addressed a nonspecialist audience on a range of subjects. Poetry vied for the reader’s interest along with politics, humor, fiction, and reviews—a competition that proved healthy for all the genres. A poem that didn’t command the reader’s attention wasn’t considered much of a poem. Editors chose verse that they felt would appeal to their particular audiences, and the diversity of magazines assured that a variety of poetry appeared. The early Kenyon Review published Robert Lowell’s poems next to critical essays and literary reviews. The old New Yorker celebrated Ogden Nash between cartoons and short stories.