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