De Villo Sloan was an undergraduate student at S.U.N.Y. at Potsdam when he wrote "A Portrait of the Day." The primary technique he used was prolepsis, the expansion of a general statement, particularizing it and giving further information regarding it. This is how the poet began his portrait:
Morning, afternoon, and evening
A portrait of the day should be simple.
Simple, like the opening statement. The reader has too little information yet, on the typographical level, to know whether this is going to be a prose mode or verse mode poem — what appears on the page, however, looks like a couplet; moreover, it seems to scan loosely. The second strophe helps to a degree:
Green morning, brown afternoon, and black evening
A portrait of the day should be simple.
Sloan's method begins to come clear — he has added a few adjectives to modify the nouns in his initial sequence. He is going to modify and amplify. It is also possible to begin to see this will not be a metrical poem. Some might call it "free verse" at this stage, but as ought by now to be apparent, free verse is merely a mask-term for prose, though in strophe three it still appears that Sloan is using a couplet unit:
With morning's green, afternoon's brown, and evening's black,
a portrait of the day should be very simple.
But Sloan has dropped the conventional capital A of his second line now, and what the reader has is clearly prose:
With morning's green painted on the edges of the day, afternoon's brown set in the foreground, and evening's black dispersed across the colors, a portrait of the day, with a suitable frame, should be very simple.
Another technique Sloan used was incremental repetition; that is, changing a repeating unit slightly each time it appears: grammatically, each strophe was one sentence. There was line-phrasing in the first three stanzas, but the reader was not confused when it was dropped because at this point the poem was so frankly a prose poem, and the phrases were so long, that there was no sense of a premise abandoned, especially since the poem's rhythms did not derive from phrasing, but from repetitions and parallel structures:
With morning's green painted around the edges of the day, creating the impression of sunlight through curtained windows and clothes on hardwood floors, afternoon's brown set in the foreground, intermixing on the edges with green, turning the morning face to brownsad afternoon, and evening's black dispersed across the colors, reminding the observer that the absence of light will prevail, a portrait of the day, with a suitable frame to complement its wild design, should be very simple.
This poem is a clear example of the premise that subject and form cannot be divorced from one another, nor can one be ignored except at the expense of the other. The two things are one thing — language is the poem, and Sloan evidently learned the lesson young. Here is the last stanza of "A Portrait of the Day":
With morning's green painted around the edges of the day, creating an impression of sunlight through curtained windows and clothes on hardwood floors, that digresses into hues of minutes and hours, through lacquered halls and coffee, through artbooks and palettes searching for colors and symbols, afternoon's brown set in the foreground, intermixing on the edges with green, turning the morning face to brownsad afternoon, trying to find the spot where green ends and brown begins, following in the footsteps of one who went before, through tea and conversation, throwing flowers at a singer's feet, beginning to see that this job is not so easy, and evening's black dispersed across the colors reminding the observer that the absence of light will prevail, that sees the day changing in degrees like the colors of the spectrum from radiating green to blackdeath, a portrait of the day, with a suitable frame, carved in a way that would complement such a wild piece, that would firmly transfix the images of a day upon the wall for all to see, should be very simple.
Successful prose poems like this one derive their cadences from grammatical structures — line-by-line phrasing, such as Sloan began with; sentences in parallel construction, as throughout this poem; strophic paragraphs, and so on. "A Portrait of the Day" is uniquely structured; Sloan invented his own grammatical prosody, but that prosodic structure is clear. So is the poem; therefore, it is dense and rich.
The critic can merely quibble with "A Portrait of the Day." Only here and there, in single words and an occasional phrase that slips from one level of diction to another, can one point to flaws. For instance, the clause in strophe 6, "this job is not so easy," and the word wild in "such a wild piece," are not in keeping with the sophisticated level of diction of the rest of the poem. The same might be said of the epithetic compound "blackdeath," which seems too theatrical for the meditative air of this work.
[This message has been edited by Lewis Turco (edited April 11, 2008).]
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