[John Whitworth]

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...

[Allen Tice]

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.

[Jayne Osborn]

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?????

[Orwn Acra]

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

[Mary Meriam]

Originally Posted by Allen Tice

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.

YEAH! Very well said, Allen.

[W.F. Lantry]

Originally Posted by Ed Shacklee

Exactly. What is its form? What elements must it contain? Are prose poems the same as flash fiction, except when they are not fictional?

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

[Jayne Osborn]

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

[Ed Shacklee]

Originally Posted by Jayne Osborn

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

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