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):
Quote:
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.
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KEB
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