Mark Strand and Prose Poems
 

Those who love or hate prose poems might find this link of interest.

http://www.bostonreview.net/BR36.2/m...and_poetry.php

Me, I love prose poems (but not gewgaw imitations) and I've been a fan of Mark Strand since I saw his first poem in a poetry magazine, that would be sometime in the early seventies. I don't remember the poem, but I remember the moment.

Oh, I did so love "Clear in the September Light"! I've read and loved Strand before, but never his prose poems. Thanks for posting, Janice.

Strand read a fair number of prose poems at Sewanee last summer, which were fantastically good.

Agreed, Quincy. The "black fly" poem especially. Not sure where that one ended up published.

I must be missing something. I've read them all through twice and find them rather annoyingly whimsical and pointless. Like shaggy dog stories without punchlines.

And with all the jokes of the last few years about bankers, number four seems a very feeble contribution to the genre.

But probably I'm looking for the wrong things. Someone convince me, please. I went to a reading a couple of years ago by Mark Strand and was quite favourably impressed. But he certainly didn't read anything like these.

Despite my warm and long-standing admiration for Mark Strand, I am asking the same questions as Gregory. I'm sorry to say it, but this reminds me of the debate we had some time ago about the flarf issue of Poetry.

These resemble warming up exercises, the stuff you throw away when you shift into high gear. Everyone, even the best, writes mediocre to bad poems now and then, but not everyone can get them published. I rank Boston Review pretty highly, but I'm thinking they wouldn't accept these poems for publication and front them with commentary if they were signed "Mr. N. O. Tyetpu from Blished, Ohio. But the phrase Zen koan seems to pop up in front of my eyes often lately, so maybe there is something I don't know.

I love the absurd, I think of Russel Edson, Kelly Cherry.

The commentary ends, "That this can be both satisfying and bewildering is exactly the point." I'm in the bewildered camp.

The "man without a dog" poem comes closest, but the others leave me, uh, bewildered. The fault may lie with me.

When Mark was my tutor in 1970, I repaid his kindness by arrogantly asserting that he was wasting his time on free verse. He blew up, and we never spoke again. In fact, he has always written with a cleanliness of line and charge of language that "marked" him as a fine poet. But I don't see these little paragraphs as poems. Jewels of prose, yes.

I have read the pieces and for me they are neither elegant prose nor prose poems. Their themes are without wit or wisdom. I don't like them at all. As someone here pointed out by any other author they would have been rejected.

One definition of a poem that I rather like is that it ends on the same page as it starts. Another is that the line endings are funny. These score on the first, fail on the second. I quite like them, though not as much as those by that chap Russel Something. I am sure you know who I mean.

I don't know, I'm kinda fond of at least a couple. Certainly the banker one. And September light. Maybe the prince. I guess it all depends on what you're looking for. And what you call it. I'm not sure Christopher's setup is all it might be. Take this line:

"The tone differs, but the circularity of the poems that follow does not; like many of Strand’s poems, we seem to enter them by a given door, travel 360º, and exit by an entirely different one."

I struggle to make even approximate sense of that one... ;)

Thanks,

Bill

To me, there is something jarring about the term 'prose poem,' like 'scaled bird' and 'furry dinosaur.' Is it prose with poetic elements? In which case, isn't it just prose?

Ed


And how reliable can any truth be that is got
By observing oneself and just inserting a Not?

xxx-- W.H. Auden, from 'The Quest'

Here's an old thread on the subject, initiated (and mostly conducted) by Alicia. It's not very long but it is very interesting.

Thanks, Gregory. An interesting thread. 'Lyric paragraph' sounds like a real name; 'prose poem' sounds like an alias. I'll leave it at that.

Best,

Ed

Rimbaud wrote prose poems. That should be good enough for anyone, surely?

One definition of prose poetry
 

Ed:

I prefer the original definitions, if only because they are uncluttered:

Verse/meter involves quantification (e.g. of rhythms/feet, syllables, beats, tempos, alliterations, whatever).
Free verse involves [unquantified] rhythms.
Prose poetry involves neither.

Bottom line, slightly oversimplified: Verse (free or metrical) is rhythmic, prose poetry is not. Given the time it must have taken to develop rhythms (bearing in mind that the first languages were almost certainly unaccented) and meter, it seems logical to assume that the first poems were prose poetry. If so, we've come full circle: the vast majority of poetry being written today could, perhaps with considerable charity, be called "[lineated] prose poems".

In the good old days poets would lineate [rhythmic] free verse to (literally!) delineate it from [arhythmic] prose poetry. Obviously, that convention no longer applies.

Many conceptualize prose poetry as a cross between prose and poetry. Speaking for myself, I prefer to see it as containing all the things we see in verse (e.g. repetitions of sentences, phrases, syllables, phonemes, as well as grammatical, logical and rhetorical constructs) except rhythm and meter. Like the blind person compensating for the loss of one sense by utilizing others more, I expect the prose poet to use those other repetitions with greater frequency than prose writers and, yes, even versers.

That may be just me, though.

-o-

John,

Exactly. Oh, and someone else from back then. What was his name? Oh, yeah: Baudelaire... ;)

In our time: Simic, Merwin, Wright, Tate. That one by Carolyn may be the most famous contemporary American poem, in any form.

Surely people who are interested in forms must be interested in this particular form? Or am I missing something? Wouldn't be the first time.

Thanks,

Bill

I must admit I don't see any important difference between prose poems and free verse.

Exactly. What is its form? What elements must it contain? Are prose poems the same as flash fiction, except when they are not fictional? If not, how are they different, and how are they different from well-made vignettes?

I'm sorry, but I'm honestly puzzled by the wholesale acceptance of a term that seems amorphous at best. Free verse, for all its, well, freeness, has line breaks. What does a prose poem have that makes it instantly recognizable as such?

Best,

Ed


PS. I hope writers continue to come up with choice bits like this. It's the term that gives me a headache, not the content. If someone is kind enough to define 'prose poem,' I hope they will separate the dancer from the dance next, and then put the cat out before going home. Thanks.

John,

Do you mean Russel Edson, who is an excellent example of the difference between flash fiction and prose poetry.

That's the fellow. A rose by any other name, don't you know. I've never heard of flash fiction.

That's the fellow. A rose by any other name, don't you know. I've never heard of flash fiction. I found him in a book by a Californian about writing poetry so I sort of assumed...

Not to knock Strand too hard (too hard), but for years and years I've been thinking he wrote only prose, slightly disguised, and tightly packed with vacuum that travels the blankness further.

Forgive me for never having heard of Mark Strand until now, but I've just read these (here I'm tempted to use inverted commas, but I won't) - poems - which mostly start off sounding like a joke, of the 'Man walks into a bar...' type:

A man stands under a tree...
I was riding downtown in a cab...
A banker strutted into the brothel of blind women...

...except not one of them is funny, so they're clearly not meant as jokes. IMO not one of them is a poem, either. I don't know what they are but they leave me cold, sorry. I'm obviously missing something that his fans are getting.

Did I read this correctly? A banker strutted into the brothel of blind women...

WTF?????

.....................

YEAH! Very well said, Allen.

Dear Ed and John,

I hope you'll forgive me, in advance, both for speaking of things you already know, and for not truly answering your questions. And for a third sin as well, and this one far worse: for saying things I don't believe, in service of the expedient goal of clarity. Like a ladder we must use to climb up, only to kick away as soon as we reach the next level, I promise to disavow everything I'm about to say. I hope you have your salt shaker handy.

It is a convenient truism to say the form was developed in the early 19th century, in France, by one Aloysius Bertrand. It's at least a useful fiction, which can give us a basis for discussion. His Treasurer of the Night, a book of prose poems dedicated to Victor Hugo, of all people (Paris, 1845), is a pretty odd beast, but entertaining. Forgive me for not having time to translate it, I'm just going to put up an incredibly poor machine translation, which, with all its flaws, can give you a taste of Bertrand. If your French is good, you can find the actual text here.

THE MERCHANT OF TULIPS.

"The tulip is among the flowers what the peacock is among birds. One is unscented, the other is without voice, one is proud of her dress, the other of its tail." -The Garden of rare and curious flowers.

No sound except the rustle of sheets of vellum under the fingers of Dr. Huylten, who detached his eyes from his Bible strewn with Gothic illuminations to admire the purple and gold of two captive fish through the damp sidewalls of a jar.

The folding doors rolled down: in came a merchant of flowers, his arms loaded with several pots of tulips, apologizing for interrupting such a learned man.

- "Master," he said, here is the treasure of treasures, the wonder of wonders, an onion unlike any that has bloomed in a century in the harem of the Emperor of Constantinople!

-A tulip! exclaimed the angry old man, a tulip! this symbol of pride and lust that led to, in the unfortunate city of Wittenberg, the detestable heresy of Luther and Melanchthon! "

Master Huylten closed the clasp of his Bible, put away his glasses in their case, and drew the curtain of the window, which let sunlight illuminate a passionflower with its crown of thorns, a sponge, a whip, its nails and its the five wounds of Our Lord.

The merchant of tulips bowed respectfully and in silence, confused by the inquisitive look of the Duke of Alba, whose portrait, a Holbein masterpiece, was hung on the wall.

You will note, by comparing dates, that the book appeared after he died, and fell into immediate obscurity. But it may be the most influential book which no-one has ever heard of. Somehow it fell into the hands of Baudelaire many years later. Without it, we might not have his Spleen of Paris/ little poems in prose. Nor would we have Rimbaud's Illuminations. In turn, those influenced a number of others. Most cite Mallarme, Reverdy, Max Jacob. My personal favorite is Rene Char's Aromates Chasseurs (1976). His work, generally understood to be nearly untranslatable (people keep trying) is the purest of poetry, and about as far from verse as one can get. Reading it now as I type this is enough to make me wonder why we even bother with meter, almost convinces me meter has nothing to do with poetry. Almost.

Enough about history. Now for the truly heretical statements. I'm forced to succumb to heresy to answer your question about flash fiction, and how it's different from poetry. Many practitioners of flash are also poets. Some people say flash was invented, purely by accident, and without intention, by Don Barthelme. Certainly his short little snippets, in books like Snow White, pointed in that direction. Others say Jim Robison is responsible, and there's some evidence for that. Here's what he said last year:

"For years, decades, I tried to teach the students to do lightning strike stuff. Bang. Blinding light. Whiff of burnt earth. Then go away and do not worry about anything because you have not done the great damage of boring anybody. It was years of this. NOW many are doing it and NOW, 25, 30 years later, it's good that they are and I am happy to see such stuff and even that its name is FLASH fiction."

Of course, Jim was working with Don 25 years ago, so things get pretty tangled. And others point to different sources, find its birth in minimalism, or passages of magic realism. Some even cite Borges and Cortazar, but those seem a stretch.

I myself find it hard to draw a line between poetry and flash. Every distinguishing definition I've ever seen privileges one over the other, in a self-interested way. Note, for example, that those who define free verse as lineated prose have a sneer in their voice and an axe to grind. In the same way, people who say that in flash there's a plot, and especially a change in the character because of events in the piece, diminish the concept of poetry through their definition. Is there really no change in the 'persona' from line 1 to line 24? To assert that is to assert there's no discovery in poetry, no argument or progression, and we would likely all reject that idea.

Is there, then, some difference in the sentence structure? I haven't been able to find it. To say that flash syntax lacks rhythm is to insult some incredibly talented writers of flash, many of whom have devoted considerable artistic energies to the form. Can we at least say that in flash, there's dialogue? Not always, and there are certainly poems with dialogue in them. Is meaning constructed differently in the two forms? I'd be very hard pressed to say so. Are the figures (metaphor, simile, etc.) employed in a different manner, or with different ratios, in the two forms? To say so would be to privilege one over the other, and demean a whole set of honorable, even brilliant, writers. What about goals? Can there be some differences there? I haven't found any. And besides, try getting even a bunch of formalists to agree on what the goal of poetry is! La question se pose même pas.

So there you have it: an incredibly frustrating non-definition, an admittedly fabricated history. Can you see now why I apoligized in advance? ;)

Thanks,

Bill

Bill, you're not secretly a woman, are you? :rolleyes: You don't 'alf go on! :p You've exhausted me, and I haven't been up long ;) :D

Jayne, Bill would make a very poor woman, much to his discredit. Much to his credit, though, he's contracted it out brilliantly.

After reading your interesting (non)explanation, Bill, I still wonder: isn't it possible that Baudelaire was just having us on with a provocative paradox? If so, perhaps we are less like poets, and more like parrots, when we use the term.

Best,

Ed