[Katy Evans-Bush]

One of the things that gets said on this website when someone has written a poem someone else doesn’t think is much good is, “that’s prose.” It’s an easy thing to say, but is it an easy distinction to make?

A couple of people have posted prose poems on non-Met recently and I thought this might be a good moment to explore the form a little. I admit I’m not usually in the habit of reading much prose poetry — that is, I don’t seek it out, and I’m profoundly unattracted to the whole genre of ‘microfiction’ which seems to be merging with ‘prose poetry’ in the contemporary market. But the form is growing almost hoary and venerable these days, and most serious poets have published a few.

Lately I’ve been reading some Geoffrey Hill, and as he’s the last poet one would associate with ‘experimental’ poetry — and since these prose poems seem very ‘traditional’ in their depth of lyricism — I thought I’d post them and let it roll from there. Below is a tiny extract from an interview.

Mercian Hymns

I

King of the perennial holly-groves, the riven sandstone: overlord of the M5: architect of the historic rampart and ditch, the citadel at Tamworth, the summer hermitage in Holy Cross: guardian of the Welsh Bridge and the Iron Bridge: contractor to the desirable new estates:
saltmaster: money-changer: commissioner for oaths: martyrologist: the friend of Charlemagne.

'I liked that,' said Offa, 'sing it again.'


VII

Gasholders, russet among fields. Milldams, marlpools that lay unstirring. Eel-swarms. Coagulations of frogs: once, with branches and half-bricks, he battered a ditchful; then sidled away from the stillness and silence.

Ceolred was his friend and remained so, even after the day of the lost fighter: a biplane, already obsolete and irreplaceable, two inches of heavy snub silver. Ceolred let it spin through a hole in the classroom-floorboards, softly, into the rat-droppings and coins.

After school he lured Ceolred, who was sniggering with fright, down to the old quarries, and flayed him. Then, leaving Ceolred, he journeyed for hours, calm and alone, in his private derelict sandlorry named Albion.


XVII

He drove at evening through the hushed Vosges. The car radio, glimmering, received broken utterance from the horizon of storms...

'God's honours — our bikes touched: he skidded and came off.' 'Liar.' Atimid father's protective bellow. Disfigurement of a village king. 'Just look at the bugger...'

His maroon GT chanted then overtook. He lavished on the high valleys its haleine.


XXV

Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak this in memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer's darg.

The nailshop stood back of the cottage, by the fold. It reeked stale mineral sweat. Sparks had furred its low roof. In dawn-light the troughed water floated a damson-bloom of dust —

not to be shaken by posthumous clamour. It is one thing to celebrate the 'quick forge', another to cradle a face hare-lipped by the searing wire.

Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak this in memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer's darg.


— Geoffrey Hill

Here’s a short extract from an interview with Hill by John Haffenden (Faber, 1981):

JH: Can you describe how and why you came to write Mercian Hymns, and why you chose to write the sequence in the form of prose poems?

GH: They're versets of rhythmical prose. The rhythm and cadence are far more of a pitched and tuned chant that I think one normally associates with the prose poem. I designed the appearance of the page in the form of versets. The reason they take the form they do is because at a very early stage the words and phrases begain to group themselves in this way. I did immediately see it as an extended sequence, and it did come quite quickly for me -- in three years, which is rapid by my standards. My second book, King Log, was nine years in the making.

KEB

[nyctom]

This is one of my all-time fave-raves, a piece I have loved since I first read it in high school. It is from the collection Two-Headed Poems.


*****

Marrying the Hangman
by Margaret Atwood

She has been condemned to death by hanging. A man
may escape this death by becoming the hangman, a
woman by marrying the hangman. But at the present
time there is no hangman; thus there is no escape.
There is only a death, indefinitely postponed. This is
not fantasy, it is history.

*

To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live
without mirrors is to live without the self. She is
living selflessly, she finds a hole in the stone wall and
on the other side of the wall, a voice. The voice
comes through darkness and has no face. This voice
becomes her mirror.

*

In order to avoid her death, her particular death, with
wrung neck and swollen tongue, she must marry the
hangman. But there is no hangman, first she must
create him, she must persuade this man at the end of
the voice, this voice she has never seen and which has
never seen her, this darkness, she must persuade him
to renounce his face, exchange it for the impersonal
mask of death, of official death which has eyes but
no mouth, this mask of a dark leper. She must
transform his hands so they will be willing to twist
the rope around throats that have been singled out
as hers was, throats other than hers. She must marry
the hangman or no one, but that is not so bad. Who
else is there to marry?

*

You wonder about her crime. She was condemned
to death for stealing clothes from her employer, from
the wife of her employer. She wished to make herself
more beautiful. This desire in servants was not legal.

*

She uses her voice like a hand, her voice reaches
through the wall, stroking and touching. What could
she possibly have said that would have convinced him?
He was not condemned to death, freedom awaited
him. What was the temptation, the one that worked?
Perhaps he wanted to live with a woman whose life
he had saved, who had seen down into the earth but
had nevertheless followed him back up to life. It was
his only chance to be a hero, to one person at least,
for if he became the hangman the others would
despise him. He was in prison for wounding another
man, on one finger of the right hand, with a sword.
This too is history.

*

My friends, who are both women, tell me their stories,
which cannot be believed and which are true. They
are horror stories and they have not happened to me,
they have not yet happened to me, they have
happened to me but we are detached, we watch our
unbelief with horror. Such things cannot happen to
us, it is afternoon and these things do not happen in
the afternoon. The trouble was, she said, I didn’t
have time to put my glasses on and without them I’m
blind as a bat, I couldn’t even see who it was. These
things happen and we sit at a table and tell stories
about them so we can finally believe. This is not
fantasy, it is history, there is more than one hangman
and because of this some of them are unemployed.

*

He said: the end of walls, the end of ropes, the opening
of doors, a field, the wind, a house, the sun, a table,
an apple.

She said: nipple, arms, lips, wine, belly, hair, bread,
thighs, eyes, eyes.

They both kept their promises.

*

The hangman is not such a bad fellow. Afterwards he
goes to the refrigerator and cleans up the leftovers,
though he does not wipe up what he accidentally
spills. He wants only the simple things: a chair,
someone to pull off his shoes, someone to watch him
while he talks, with admiration and fear, gratitude if
possible, someone in whom to plunge himself for rest
and renewal. These things can best be had by marrying
a woman who has been condemned to death by other
men for wishing to be beautiful. There is a wide
choice.

*

Everyone said he was a fool.
Everyone said she was a clever woman.
They used the word ensnare.

*

What did they say the first time they were alone
together in the same room? What did he say when
she had removed her veil and he could see that she
was not a voice but a body and therefore finite?
What did she say when she discovered that she had
left one locked room for another? They talked of
love, naturally, though that did not keep them
busy forever.

*

The fact is there are no stories I can tell my friends
that will make them feel better. History cannot be
erased, although we can soothe ourselves by
speculating about it. At that time there were no
female hangmen. Perhaps there have never been any,
and thus no man could save his life by marriage.
Though a woman could, according to the law.

*

He said: foot, boot, order, city, fist, roads, time,
knife.

She said: water, night, willow, rope hair, earth belly,
cave, meat, shroud, open, blood.

They both kept their promises.

***

NOTES: Jean Cololère, a drummer in the colonial troops at Québec, was imprisoned for duelling in 1751. In the cell next to his was Françoise Laurent, who had been sentenced to hang for stealing. Except for letters of pardon, the only way at the time for someone under sentence of death to escape hanging was, for a man, to become a hangman, or, for a woman, to marry one. Françoise persuaded Cololère to apply for the vacant (and undesirable) post of executioner, and also to marry her.

—Condensed from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Volume III, 1741-1770

[Lo]

That's a wonderful poem, Tom. Thank you for posting that. I'm so not a prose-poem lover and generally I find it distasteful enough that I don't even bother reading it. I'm glad you and Katie pointed these out to me and that I trust you both enough to read something I'm incredibly dead-set against. My fault for being silly and pigheaded and terminally biased, but still.....it's a bias that's weakening little by little and that's a good thing.

I also found one all by myself that I really enjoyed and admired. It's titled "Please Take Back the Sparrows" by Suzanne Buffam and it was posted on Verse Daily last week. Since I am unsure of the proper etiquette in posting other people's poems, I will simply add a link and suggest anyone reading this check it out for themselves.

http://www.versedaily.org/2006/takesparrows.shtml

Lo

[Katy Evans-Bush]

Lo, I love that! "Please take back the sparrows. They are bothersome and cute." I could apply that to lots of people I know.

Here's a link, if anyone's interested, to a great Baudelaire site with the complete Petits Poems En Prose (also known as Le Spleen de Paris) - but in French only.
http://hypo.ge-dip.etat-ge.ch/athena...pp_frame0.html

Baudelaire, of course, being the great-granddaddy of prose poetry, is more typical maybe than Geoffrey Hill, but that's why I posted Hill, in a way. Baudelaire's stated intention was to shock the hypocritical bourgeoisie (& I'm afraid that's largely us, to some extent).

And here you go: because I find the infant Hill's treatement ("flaying") of his friend "Coelred" rather shocking too... some of Baudelaire's scenarios are a bit coarse, that is they're intended to be shocking but what else?

KEB

[nyctom]

In hopes of making this potential discussion a bit heavier on the "musing" rather than the usual anthologizing of "mastery," I took down the heavyweight Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics to see what it had to say about pp. Some excerpts:

With its oxymoronic title and its form based on contradiction, the p.p. is suitable to an extraordinary range of perception and expression, from the ambivalent (in content as in form), to the mimetic and the narrative (or even anecdotal)....Its principal characteristics are those that would insure unity even in brevity and poetic quality even without the line breaks of free verse: high patterning, rhythmic and figural repetition, sustained intensity, and compactness.

In the p.p. a field of vision is represented, sometimes mimetically and often pictorally, only to be, on occasion, cut off abruptly; emotion is contracted under the force of ellipsis, so deepened and made dense; the rhapsodic mode and what Baudelaire called the "prickings of the unconscious" are, in the supreme examples, combined with the metaphoric and the ontological: the p.p. aims at knowing or finding out something not accessible under the more restrictive conventions of verse (Beaujour). It is frequently the manisfestation of a willfully self-sufficient form characterized above all by its brevity. it is often spacially interesting (D. Scott). For some critics, it is necessarily intertextual (Riffaterre), for others, politically oriented (Monroe). It is, in any case, not necessarily "poetic" in the traditional sense and can even indulge in an engaging wit.

And so on and so on (mostly on the historical development of the genre). The first thing that struck me when I read this was "the p.p. aims at knowing or finding out something not accessible under the more restrictive conventions of verse." With the development of free verse, and its overthrow of "the more restrictive conventions of verse," what makes the p.p. different, besides its dismissal of the line as the basic organizing unit, from poetry--or, if you prefer, free verse? Furthermore, intertextual with what other text(s), with the "text" of poetic conventions? Does a p.p. that doesn't use high patterning, rhythmic and figural repetition and the like simply prose--with pretensions?

[Katy Evans-Bush]

We-ell, Tom (& thanks for your help with this)... I was hoping to get us away from this "just prose" stance! I doubt Tolstoy would have much truck with that. I was however much taken with this little gem:

It [pp] is, in any case, not necessarily "poetic" in the traditional sense and can even indulge in an engaging wit.

Unlike verse! (THAT explains it!)

I too was struck by those lines you quote, but what struck me most was the complete absence of any mention of a need for narrative. So this merging or pp into "short-short" fiction or whatever is - as I thought - "wrong-wrong".

You talk about "high patterning, rhythmic and figural repetition and the like" as the signifiers of poetry, in the absence of line breaks, but is the key - if there is a key, which there can't be - something like "it works through image"? There is something about the way a poem operates on the brain, and it can definitely do this without line breaks. And if you do it in a novel or a short story the story is likely to fail (as such).

I don't know... Raymond Carver seems not to have written any prose poetry. That's interesting because his poems are quite often just like his short stories, lineated, so maybe he didn't feel the need for prose poetry. (This is a digression but something that just occurred to me.)

KEB

[nyctom]

Hmm, about images. I sometimes think--actually, I've been thinking this for a couple of years now, since I first started reading and writing in meter--that "The Image" increased in relative importance as the primacy of the metrical framework declined. Ya know? And the thing is, there are plenty of poems out there that don't rely on the primacy of The Image (and not just l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e poetry neither, though the poems I am thinking of, like "The Bob Hope Poem" by Campbell McGrath, are far more philosophical than lyrical).

And as for narrative, well that Atwood certainly has a narrative in abundance. So it may not be a matter of definition by checklist--which I find is often the case with hybrid art forms (think of performance art or assemblage, for instance). Hybrids tend to foster lots of gray areas, uhm by definition...

Well, for argument's sake, here is a short short story by one of my favorite short story writers, Amy Hempel. It's from a book I highly recommend, Reasons to Live:

The Man in Bogata

The police and emergency service people fail to make a dent. The voice of the pleading spouse does not have the hoped-for effect. The woman remains on the ledge—though not, she threatens, for long.

I imagine that I am the one who must talk the woman down. I see it, and it happens like this.

I tell the woman about a man in Bogata. He was a wealthy man, an industrialist who was kidnapped and held for ransom. It was not a TV drama; his wife could not call the bank and, in twenty-four hours, have one million dollars. It took months. The man had a heart condition, and the kidnappers had to keep the man alive.

Listen to this, I tell the woman on the ledge. His captors made him quit smoking. They changed his diet and made him exercise every day. They held him that way for three months.

When the ransom was paid and the man was released, his doctor looked him over. He found the man to be in excellent health. I tell the woman what the doctor said then—that the kidnap was the best thing to happen to that man.
____

Maybe this is not a come-down-from-the-ledge story. But I tell it with the thought that the woman on the ledge will ask herself a question, the question that occurred to that man in Bogata. He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn't good.


*****

So, then, what makes this prose and, say, the Atwood I posted earlier, prose poetry? And can we, by analyzing one comparison by example, begin to flesh out that rather academic definition provided by the Princeton Encyclopedia (must be the word "ontological" that makes me feel I must be back in one of those uncomfotable desk cum chairs in some dusty lecture hall).

[Marcia Karp]

Dear Katy,
Geoffrey Hill is one of the first poets I think of as experimental in relation to his continual creation of form and voice appropriate for each of his books. I don't know who to compare with him in this regard. Please tell me know who you think of as experimental, since this is one of many matters in which people have differing ideas.

I think it important to note that, while the right margin varies in the several editions of The Mercian Hymns/, the poems are published with an indentation that creates a shape that is not a block, as you have presented. (No break, either, after "new estates:".) Hill says, in your excerpt, that he designed the appearance of the page. Each hymn looks like this, with a varying number of indented lines, and a right-hand margin for the final line based on its length:

--------------------------
--------------------------
--------------------------
--------------------

Because the end-words are not consistent between editions, this shape seems to indicate that Hill is wrapping his lines, a la Whitman. I wonder if he isn't thinking, too, of ancient mss with lyrics written in this shape, as well as what he calls a verset..

Verset has been used in a variety of ways. Robert Alter uses it to emphasize parallels in biblical verse; each of two or three parallel elements in a line is a verset, so several versets comprise a line. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics identifies it as both the short lines of the Bible and the long lines of the French Symbolists. Those of you know know French better than I do, might look in Littré where both shape and function enter into the definition. Hill's use?

Best,
Marcia


[This message has been edited by Marcia Karp (edited April 06, 2006).]

[Katy Evans-Bush]

Marcia, thanks for that. I confess I've been reading these poems in other formats than book format - the book is SO o/p, and expensive when you do find a copy listed anywhere. I've found some typescripts and looked some up oin the web, and nowhere have I seen the - admittedly more beautiful - form you outline. Once I was aware that I wanted to use these to illustrate my idea about prose poetry, I did as much research as I could do without access to a copy of the book, and found nothing anywhere to indicate that there might be particular formatting - and believe me, I looked! Because I had suspected it.

So where does that leave us then.

Also when I described Hill as someone you wouldn't assoiciate with "experimental" poetry, I wasn't referring to a lack of innovation on his part. I realise he is someone who reinvents form for each poem. He's amazing that way. But for the purposes of my thread it seemed unlikely that Geoffrey Hill was looking like an "experimental poet" in the sense that most people associate with the term. A lot of people (for example) think he's quite stuffy (not my term or my opinion). so, alas, I was dealing in labels, and maybe that was my downfall.


KEB

[Marcia Karp]

Dear Katy,
I am horrified to hear that the poems are being misprinted; I wish there were web standards for displaying poems and for preventing the deformation of them by screeners (my nonce use). You can, though, find the Mercian Hymns inside Hill's collected volumes.

Your thread brings up many difficult maters. I just attended a conference (by the ALSC, the organization that publishes Literary Imagination) with a panel on experimental poetry. After 1.5 hours, there was no clear, or even confused, sense on how to think about what the experimental is.

As for prose poetry, there is that super-sweet (often French) stuff of the 19th century. Pastels in Prose is a perfect example. If you can get past the Great, David Lehman's 2003 Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present is a good survey of the sorts of things that are now called prose poetry.

I think your original impetus--the negative naming of something intended as poetry as prose-- is smartly approached by you in calling up prose poetry. It seems to be neither one nor the other and it requires thinking about the (overlapping) natures of both. Too difficult for me right now. I hope others are more stalwart.

Best,
Marcia