The last decades have seen an explosion of the prose poem. More and more writers are turning to this peculiarly rich and flexible form; it defines Claudia Rankine's Citizen, one of the most talked-about books of recent years, and many others, such as Sarah Howe's Loop of Jade and Vahni Capildeo's Measures of Expatriation, make extensive use of it. Yet this fertile mode which in its time has drawn the likes of Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein and Seamus Heaney remains, for many contemporary readers, something of a mystery.
The history of the prose poem is a long and fascinating one. Here, Jeremy Noel-Tod reconstructs it for us by selecting the essential pieces of writing - by turns luminous, brooding, lamentatory and comic - which have defined and developed the form at each stage, from its beginnings in nineteenth-century France, through the twentieth-century traditions of Britain and America and beyond the English language, to the great wealth of material written internationally since 2000. Comprehensively told, it yields one of the most original and genre-changing anthologies to be published for some years, and offers readers the chance to discover a diverse range of new poets and new kinds of poem, while also meeting famous names in an unfamiliar guise.
I have read more books in the year 2019 than in any other year of my entire life. I don't know why this should have been the case. But my 'book of the year' happens to be the very last one I read in this year, namely The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem. I picked it up without any great expectations. And let's be clear: not every piece in this volume is excellent or even good. Far from it! There is a lot of pretentious nonsense here, word salad gibberish, virtue signalling gurning, and pseudo-avant-garde fakery, and some of the best-known writers represented in these pages are responsible for some of the worst contributions. But there is enough brilliance to elevate the entire collection, and in fact I have even come to the conclusion that the gems are set off to better effect because of the presence of these duds.
One of the things about this volume that works surprisingly well is that all the prose poems are presented in reverse chronological order, from our contemporary age right back to the 1840s when the prose poem first became a viable mode of artistic expression. I found this reverse order very affecting, I am not sure why. It was exhilarating to journey backwards into my youth and then into ages before I was born via the visions, imagery, words and conceits of a host of writers from many different cultures. There are writers here who I am familiar with, but this book also introduced me to the work of a great many names wholly unknown to me that I now wish to learn more about.
Some of the best prose poems here are rather like flash fictions, but more intense and condensed than the standard flash fiction. A Penguin Book of Flash Fiction would be a very good idea for a future anthology. I hope that some editors at Penguin have the same idea :-)
Добрим делом дражесна књига која уме да предозира меланхолијом и натера ме да пожелим да је загрлим, али како је у питању pdf, само ћу обујмити лаптоп и телефон (пластику фантастику) [за разлику од збирке Српске прозаиде којој сам хтео да одрубим главу због бљувотина које су писали Нисифора Серулић и њој слични].
Љубитељи прозаида пронаћи ће овде прегршт варијација и тема, лирских титраја и извитоперења, гипке алатке – асонанцу, алитерацију и паралелизме, ток свести и загонетности, жалостиве реминисценције, игриве снове, посрнућа и поскакивања маште, брчкање у речима…
Читање захтева концентрацију и одговарајући амбијент, а у мом случају се само дружење са првих сто страна тако згодило. Остало? Срећа у несрећи било је имати овај клесани жамор у шкрипи и хуци одоцнелих возова, и још понегде. Отиснула ми се и једна цртица, да ли лептир или мољац из кокона: Новоградња. Неко покушава да узнемири моја сећања. Ушушкан у облаку, испадам из његове љуљашке и не хватам воз. Ту где сам пао, пуштам плитко и крто корење. Стижу оштри ветрови да исполирају моје зубе.
Омиљени Георг Тракл представљен је у књизи следећом песмом у прози коју преносим у преводу на српски јер ми се енглеска верзија не допада:
The problem with titling an anthology ‘The Something Book of Whatever’ - where “something” equals internationally renowned publishing house and “whatever” equals the subject in question - is the implication that the volume is therefore definitive. ‘The PB of the PP’ is certainly exhaustive and Noel-Tod’s introduction manages a balancing act between academic and readable. I’m not entirely sure, though, that everything that’s crammed into its 400 pages is in fact a prose poem. Some are definably poems that are using the longer line, some read more like sketches or articles and there are even entries which clearly works of short fiction. It’s an uneven anthology, then, and not definitive, but there are gems to be found in you sift finely enough.
I think that prose poetry might just be my favorite mode of literature (as oil painting and charcoal are my favorite media of visual art). I found my way to this anthology after reading two books by Anne Carson, which would be labeled under the genre of prose poetry. I never had reading experiences quite like those before; Carson's writing has the same pitch of emotional intensity -- and power of sparking the imagination to snatch upon diverse places of memory at one go, to fill in the meaning of a particular scene portrayed -- as poetry has. And yet her writing also can absorb the reader and get the pages to readily turn, as any gripping prose novel can. I was very sad after finishing her work, for I tried to find more like hers, but couldn't for a while.
This anthology offers many reading experiences of similar quality to Anne Carson's work. It includes an extremely diverse collection of prose poems, ranging from the late 19th century to the most recent decade. It's startling to see poems of very different styles, tones, and subject matters placed back-to-back (the poems are arranged chronologically). One poem might mention popular TV shows and brands of snack foods, and another will be about the sky and death. One poem might be written humorously, and another in somber seriousness. While this meant that a good portion of the poems I found aesthetically unappealing (I found almost all of the poems written after 2000, aside from Carson's, pretty drab, but there were a good proportion of poems from the many years before than that were wonderful), this more importantly enabled an unusually illuminating, expectation-overturning literary experience. One can see all the different reasons why an artist make make the work they do. One can see all the different modes of expression artists may take. Perhaps any anthology whose pieces range over time and culture will have this effect; but I haven't read anything quite like this before, where the pieces literally have nothing in common aside from their being readily characterizable as prose poetry. So while there's whiplash regarding quality and subject matter, it's this whiplash that also can awaken one to a very special appreciation of the role of literature and creation in life.
I want to understand why I love the prose poem so dearly as a mode of literature. How does prose poetry differ from poetry? It seems that in poetry, every single word is highly significant. Every word of a poem is as weighty as a character is to a novel. Often, there is rhythm and rhyme, which puts additional constraining force upon word use. If a novel takes the reader's imagination by the hand, and walks them through every step, for envisaging every detail and change in the story-world, poetry refuses to hold any hands. I've found that I can only read poetry when my mind is unusually still, so my full attention can be devoted to a poem; if there's even a bit of worry or excitement towards real life on my mind, this is often enough to pull me out from giving the imaginative work that is necessary for my accessing the essence of poetry.
Prose poetry nicely differs from this. I find there's a forgiving and stimulating balance between the author's giving you enough words, effectively taking your hand and guiding your imagination -- but the writing is minimal enough, and the word use is skillfully abnormal enough, for your imagination to be active, to create for its own. This lets the distinctive kind of intimacy and otherwordliness of poetry to arise, which cannot be found in the reading experience of any novel. Moreover, I can imagine that because the authors of prose poems do not have to focus as much on the exact qualities of every single word, as poets must, they have more 'bandwidth' to dedicate their creativity to the narratives, parables, and metaphors that they fashion -- these are often more complex, detailed, and alarming than those found in poetry. Since these authors are not constrained by the bare-bonedness of poetry forms, they have freedom to elaborate on these images, adding ever more levels of detail, which comprises the hand-holding that I like.
How does prose poetry differ from prose? It's relatively easier to see the difference here. The use of words is far too abnormal and expectation-defying to be prose; and you can immediately feel that what the author wants to say is precisely not what is literally portrayed on the page. That is atypical of prose, but is typical of poetry. Of course, prose can be metaphoric or parable-like. But when it is, usually there are just one or two non-literal narratives or ideas that are straightforwardly indicated by what is literally said; and moreover, that narrative or idea is usually well-defined or determinate. In contrast, that which is expressed via what's literally said, in these prose poems, does not feel definite; it is always open-ended. There are always many possible narratives and ideas evoked, which constitute what the author is implicitly saying, and these are indeterminate and amorphous, spurring the reader's imagination to continue unfolding, deepening the experience.
It's difficult to quote from these prose poems, since they are lengthier than poems and are unities, so single lines won't do. I'll try quoting, nevertheless (I liked so many of them, and equally so; I just reread these three most recently):
"The sea has frozen to a stop. Ice stretches to the horizon... a fleeting image of air in a furtive coupling of wind and spray.... repeated to infinite, an infinity of vibrations and still-born interferences.... until I sink, slowly, to the bottom. From up there, you won't hear me... and at night - I stay for the night - that crash and creak of ice, grinding and rumbling as it plays with the cables of ships, in a violent effort - to keep things moving?" - Andrezjeg Sosnowski (1994)
"But the four points of the compass are qual on the lawn of the excluded middle where full maturity of meaning takes time the way you eat a fish, morsel by morsel, off the bone. Something that can be held in the mouth, deeply, like darkness by someone blind or the empty space I place at the center of each poem to allow penetration" - Rosmarie Waldrop (1993)
"The mirror is a marvellous witness, changing all the time. It gives evidence calmly and with power, but when it has finished speaking you can see that it has been caught out again over everything... The walls cover themselves with pictures... Green is almost uniformly spread over the plants, the wind follows the birds, no one risks seeing the stones die... When you are no longer there, your perfume is there to search for me. I come only to get back the oracle of your weakness. My hand in your hand is so little like your hand in mine" - André Breton (1930)
I think this anthology will be of more use and, perhaps, inspiration for the practicing poet. The editor makes sure to include a lot of contemporary prose poems and therein lies its strength. But it is also its weakness, as the quality of the poems provided range from high to low. You're going to come across enchantment, you're also going to come across some pretty low grade navel gazing.
It's certainly not a text geared towards an academic setting. It's also puzzling in how little room is given to some of the real pioneers of the form (Reverdy and Jacob, for instance). To be fair the book does not present itself as some sort of authoritative text on prose poems but, nevertheless, I came away feeling like the book had just been thrown together.
Lesson to be learned? Don't judge a book by its cover! Or title to be more specific. I should have looked at the contents before snapping it up.
Bloody hell, this is glorious. You'll lose yourself. Voices from every corner of the planet, people you've never heard of and plenty of famous poets and writers doing something unexpected - allowing their verse to flow on and across line endings and page boundaries in fascinating and gripping ways. Inspiring, beautifully collected.
Divided into three sections - The Prose Poem Now; The Post-Modern Prose Poem; and The Modern Prose Poem - I chose to read this collection back to front, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, and travelling through the roaring twenties and post-war eras, to end my journey in 2017. Given the considerable debate over the knuckles and bones of a prose poem, I wanted an idea of its evolution.
Although it has an origin in the seventeenth century Japanese haibun, and has found expression in the likes of James Macpherson’s translation of Ossian, the first western prose poetry I remember reading was Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations. Indeed, French (based) writers like Baudelaire, Mallarme, Bertrand and Stein can certainly be credited with its early development. What exactly defines a prose poem is no doubt open to debate, but what it most definitely is not, is chopped up verse or pretty prose.
This collection showcases the coming of age of the western prose poem, from its inception in a period of intense social and technological change, towards the new millennium and the digital revolution. As society was made and remade, poets needed a flexible form that allowed them to move with the times. The prose poem subverts both of the logic of prose, and the restraints of conventional verse. It is an oxymoron that suits the anomalies of modern life, with all its conveniences, dislocation and disillusionments: a world in which, alongside religion and myth, we have the atheist and the agnostic:
‘I hadn’t meant to go grave robbing with Richard Dawkins, but he can be very persuasive.’ (The Experience, Simon Armitage).
‘No sooner had the notion of the Flood regained its composure, than […] Blood flowed in Bluebeard’s house, – in the slaughterhouses, – in the amphitheatres […]’ (After the Flood, Arthur Rimbaud).
‘… the prophets were supposed to stick to their own streets […] We each took one of Isaiah’s arms and hustled him in for a haircut. He offered only token resistance. I think secretly he was quite happy.’ (Hosea: A Commentary, Charles Boyle).
‘When I have explained, he says he will not accept foreign coins. He mentions a three-figure sum, and demands a cheque, made in sterling. And it turns out he doesn’t even go all the way to the underworld.’ (Inflation, Carol Rumens).
Although there is no reason not to write prose poems about nature - Jen Hadfield's 'The Wren' and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's 'from Fairies' being good examples, it strikes me as a principally urban form, ideally suited to the blockiness of city life, with all its over-emphasis on commercialisation:
‘The Moon! […] Look at it between those two tall buildings […] No… is it the moon or just an advertisement of the moon?’ (Juan Ramon Jimenez, The Moon).
‘I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy.’ (Meditations in an Emergency, Frank O’Hara).
‘I am tired of work; I am tired of building up somebody else’s civilisation.’ (Fenton Johnson, Tired).
‘I look out over the colourful clean tables and the pretty food posters and I like people again.’ (from Letters to Wendy’s by Joe Wenderoth).
There is a pervasive loneliness about this line, a sad reminder that material objects and brands are the closest thing some people have to natural human affection; and after you read 'Letters to Wendy's' you will never look at a Frosty in the same way again! Similarly, ‘The Skull Ring’ by Chelsey Minnis, which assumes the form of a thank you note, could just as easily be a letter to the manufacturer.
T S Eliot famously detested the prose poem, so it is perhaps with humour that he is included in this anthology. Inevitably, there is much coy meta-referencing within the poems. Note the line breaks in the haiku contained in Peter Reading’s haibun, 'from C':
Verse is for healthy arty farties. The dying and surgeons use prose
Yet the prose poem undeniably demonstrates its versatility. It can be linear, epistolary, and lyrical. It can be a numbered list. A dialogue. Imagist. Even molded into a sestina. It is perhaps the least constraining of forms in how much room the poet has to play. It stands at the boundary between genres: I have encountered Carolyn Forche’s ‘The Colonel’ in short story and poetry anthologies.
To take a Brecht prose poem out of context, language is no longer the great champion of order (Bertolt Brecht, The God of War). The prose poet sets out ‘to crack, to claw, to quarter, the verbs that move with giant steps against us’ (The Clerk’s Vision, Octavio Paz). In ‘Going Nowhere, Getting Somewhere’ (Vahni Capildeo) the poem’s narrator describes losing the words for wall and floor: ‘There seemed no need to conceive of a division… Room became segment. Line yearned till it popped into curve.’ He concludes that thought is not bound by ‘one particular language.’ Could the prose poem be saying something similar about poetry: that the purpose of all this deconstruction is to arrive at some kind of shared perception?
And so I end at the beginning:
‘No one uttered a word. The dots and signs with which we ended our lines leapt towards the words scattered about them, and all meanings changed (The End of Days, Golan Haji).
The prose poem is a form ideally suited to this change: artist and surgeon rolled into one.
My plucky book club fell into reading chronologically after wading through Paradise Lost, Dante and La Morte D'Artur out of order. We watched Russian lit unfold from courtly French forms, to the stream of consciousness it invents, to the polemic that stalled it... This has the same pleasure in reverse: begin with Heaney and Carson, privileging what is recent in a modern form. End on Baudelaire, and Turgenev.
“Merry Christmas from Hegel", Anne Carson (2016)
It was the year my brother died, I lived up north and had few friends or they all went away. Christmas Day I was sitting in my armchair, reading something about Hegel. You will forgive me if you are someone who knows a lot of Hegel or understands it, I do not and will paraphrase badly, but I understood him to be saying he was fed up with popular criticism of his terrible prose and claiming that conventional grammar, with its clumsy dichotomy of subject and verb, was in conflict with what he called ‘speculation’. Speculation being the proper business of philosophy. Speculation being the effort to grasp reality in its interactive entirety. The function of a sentence like ‘Reason is Spirit’ was not to assert a fact (he said) but to lay Reason side by side with Spirit and allow their meanings to tenderly mingle in speculation. I was overjoyed by this notion of a philosophic space where words drift in gentle mutual redefinition of one another but, at the same time, wretchedly lonely with all my family dead and here it was Christmas Day, so I put on big boots and coat and across the snow with a vibration of other shadows moving crosswise on them, shadow on shadow, in precise velocities. It is very cold, then that, too, begins to subtract itself, the body chills on its surface but the core is hot and it is possible to disconnect the surface, withdraw to the core, where a ravishing peace flows in, so ravishing I am unembarrassed to use the word ravishing, and it is not a peace of separation from the senses but the washing-through peace of looking, listening, feeling, at the very core of snow, at the very core of the care of snow. It has nothing to do with Hegel and he would not admire the clumsily conventional sentences in which I have tried to tell about it but I suspect, if I hadn’t been trying on the mood of Hegel’s particular grammatical indignation that Christmas Day, I would never have gone out to stand in the snow, or stayed to speculate with it, or had the patience to sit down and make a record of speculation for myself as if it were a worthy way to spend an afternoon, a plausible way to change the icy horror of holiday into a sort of homecoming. Merry Christmas from Hegel.”
The man in the room next to mine has the same complaint as I. When I wake in the night I hear him turning. And then he coughs. And I cough. And after a silence I cough. And he coughs again. This goes on for a long time. Until I feel we are like two roosters calling to each other at false dawn. From far-away hidden farms.
Om een (uitgebreide) bloemlezing een aantal sterren te geven, voelt altijd een beetje gek dus dat ga ik dan ook niet doen. Maar ik vond het heel fijn dat de teksten van nieuw naar oud terugliepen, in plaats van te beginnen bij de oudste teksten (zoals veel andere chronologische bloemlezingen wel doen). Ook vond ik er genoeg afwisseling in de vorm binnen het prozagedicht zitten, ik denk dat dit een goed beeld geeft van alles wat een prozagedicht kan en mag zijn. En de editor heeft zich voor mijn gevoel goed verantwoord in het voorwoord, over zijn keuze voor de prozagedichten en zijn definitie van het prozagedicht, en laat daarnaast zien dat hij zich bewust is van de blik waarmee hij deze selectie heeft gemaakt en dat er ook een hele hoop andere mogelijkheden zouden zijn geweest.
(Verder totaal (nog) niet met cijfers of onderzoeken onderbouwd, maar: ik vind het ook altijd wel interessant/leuk/opvallend dat er toch best wat queer auteurs te vinden zijn die prozagedichten schrijven, alsof ze zich ook niet thuisvoelen in andere traditionele of strakkere vormen, wat ik zelf ook heel erg voel. Ik heb in ieder geval toch altijd het idee gehad dat prozagedichten en andere afwijkende, fragmentarische poëtische tussenvormen bij uitstek een plek zijn voor queer schrijvers, en dat voelt heel fijn dat er daar dat gevoel van vrijheid en die ruimte is gecreëerd waar we ons zo in kunnen thuisvoelen.)
A brilliant collection. This book has been a very strange companion over the last year, to the extent that reading the introduction just over a year ago feels like a lifetime.
When I bought it, shortly after the first national lockdown had lifted, I opened it at random to a poem called 'Pulmonary Tuberculosis' by Katherine Mansfield. Which was ever so slightly ominous:
"The man in the room next to me has the same complaint as I. When I wake in the night I hear him turning. And then he coughs. And I cough. And after a silence I cough. And he coughs again. This goes on for a long time. Until I feel we are tlike two roosters calling to each other at false dawn. From far-away hidden farms."
"The warmth from the stoves inside has melted some of the snow on the roofs. As for the rest, when a whirlwind springs up under a clear sky, it flies up wildly, glittering in the sunlight like thick mist around a flame, revolving and rising till it fills the sky, and the whole sky glitters as it whirls and rises. On the boundless wilderness, under heaven's chilly vault, this glittering, spiralling wraith is the ghost of rain...Yes, it is lonely slow, dead rain, the ghost of rain." -Lu Xun, "Snow"
This little anthology, for me, took prose poems from obscurity to among the highest and most complete expressions of our shared experience. Many poems left me with the simple thought: “I want to write like that.” Standouts include “Rape Joke,” “Goodtime Jesus,” and the passages from it by Inger Christensen. Also, the works by Mark Strand and Baudelaire.
I am a fan of this genre but with this book, I felt like I was back in a lecture theatre learning about 'the canon', its history, when for me the pleasure of this genre is its hybrid, fluid nature and recent revival. Having said that, the publication of this text is a positive in itself, signalling a renewed recognition of the genre and its appeal. I would have liked to see a wider range of contemporary examples to inspire writers and a readers and less of 'an evolution.'
reading the poems were so refreshing and felt as if getting to experience history in my hands, skipping through modern prose all the way to older collections. I also really enjoyed the text explaining the prose poem, very informative and well written.
My main attraction to this book was the form of the prose poem itself. I'd been shown a few and come across some in the past, but I felt like I needed to come to grips with what they are and how they work when they're working best. This book was definitely a help in that search.
The introduction doesn't give any clear definitions, but I think that was helpful in some respects - it just gave me the push to get into it, read through them and find my own definition.
The simplest definition of a prose poem I can find is 'a poem where there are no line breaks or stanzas - paragraphs take their place.' When coming across one of the poems in this book that was really working, its layout and form seemed incidental; they took the backseat while the language did the work.
There were definitely some poems in here that were tough to get through. Some were boring, monotonous, totally uninspiring (some missing the mark of the poetic so far that they made it into the territory of 'bad prose') but I don't mind that, since they were outshined by some true gems. I feel like that's the case with any anthology, and you just have to move through and find what works best for you in that moment.
Some of my favourites were -
'The End of Days' by Golan Haji 'The Mysterious Arrival of an Unusual Letter' by Mark Strand 'Kuchh Vakya' by Udayan Vajpeyi 'Hammer and Nail' by Naomi Shihab Nye 'The Dogs' by Yves Bonnefoy 'Cloistered' by Seamus Heaney 'it' by Inger Christensen 'Clock' by Pierre Riverdy 'Around the Star's Throne' by Hans Arp 'The Pleasures of the Door' by Francis Ponge 'In Praise of Glass' by Gabriela Mistral 'Winter Night' by Georg Trakl and 'From the Waters of Babylon' by Emma Lazarus
I'd also highly recommend the Rimbaud, Turgenev, Baudelaire and Bertrand selections that close the book.
(I found it funny that most of my favourites were translations. I'll definitely be checking out some of those authors.)
All in all, I feel that this is a good book on the whole. There's plenty that I don't love in it, which is OK, but there are some real treasures in here that truly make up for it.
This anthology is so precious! Truly a joy to read & I know I will revisit it all the time.
Some of my favs:
- Some Fears, Emily Berry - Other Things, Alvin Pang (!!!!!!!) - The Poet, Eileen Myles - from Shooting Script, Adrienne Rich - For John Clare, John Ashbery - from Letters to James Alexander, Jack Spicer - from Vigils, John Lehmann - A Day, Rabindranath Tagore - Roastbeef., Gertrude Stein
Wonderful book. I've read it once and now keep it in a prominent place, dip into it regularly, and plan to enjoy re-reading randomly-opened pages forever!
I've now read this anthology twice and can't recommend it enough for the range of prose poems it includes and what that shows about the form's capacities.
I can’t remember ever finishing a book with so much satisfaction, that I started off detesting so thoroughly. I had a fixation on the prose poem in my youth. (A youth spent, as you might guess, spent accumulating loans on which I later defaulted.) I’m reasonably certain I’ve read every anthology in English. This is a marvelous gathering of poems, a really worthwhile book -- but I sure didn’t think so in the first 100 pages.
The poems are presented strictly chronologically, beginning with the present and marching back in time. Not everything gets better with age, not the prose poem, at least not this century. At the start of the book, the poems seem to me assembled by A Committee for Acceptable Academic Poetry. I got so frustrated I gave up on “Now” (not for the first time) and jumped to “Postmodern”. Things looked up at once and by the time I got to the middle of the book I was enthralled.
The selection is inspired and all over the map, diverse not only in writers but in translators. For example, we don’t get only get 3 wonderful poems by Francis Ponge, we get 3 translators. Ashbery is NOT the translator of every innovative French poet, but all the Rimbaud translations are his -- to me, that’s just as it should be. On the back cover I began to make a list of writers I adored: Harjo, Rummens, Momaday, Ashbery, Tonks, Szymborska, Spicer, Herbert, Loynaz, Ponge, Michaux, Jacob, Jordan.
As I said, I’ve read obsessively in the prose poem. I am happy to report there are some poems so fantastic I couldn’t believe I’d never seen them before. Oh, Christopher Middleton, forgive me for thinking of you only as Robert Walser’s translator. And Gabriela Mistral! How can this poem not be so ubiquitous that we all know it by heart? There are also important “restorations”, work by writers who deserve to be seen as central, Amy Lowell in particular, as well as excellent selections from mad geniuses I revere and always fear will be excluded -- Cernuda, Michaux, Spicer.
To me, it is worth reading a whole book of poems, to read even one poem that makes me want to stand up, out of sheer respect to it, and this book had at least a handful. I’m very grateful.
In defense of the section titled “Now”: when I finished the book I circled back and read those poems again. I hated them significantly less, while still preferring every other part of the book. (Please don’t want to take my snark too far: there are a very few brilliant poems in that section. And some heralded persons really ARE all they’re cracked up to be, Claudia Rankine, for example.)
If you are interested in the prose poem, this book deserves to be in your library. If you find it arid or frustrating -- try another century!
I'm so damn happy this book exists, I love the scope of the book even though, on the whole, I had mixed feelings about its contents.
There were the gems, the highlights, such as: - Anne Carson's "Merry Christmas from Hegel" and excerpts from "Short Talks" - "Fairies" (Mei-mei Berssenbrugge) - "Some Fears" (Emily Berry) - "Homeless Heart" (John Ashbery) - "Neglected Knives" (Kristin Ómarsdóttir) - "The Word-Gulag" (Abdellatif Laâbi) - "Portrait of A. E. (An Artful Fairy Tale)" (Elke Erb) - "Ape" (Russel Edson) - "it" (Inger Christensen) - "Love Letter to King Tutankhamun" (Dulce Maria Loynaz) - "Street Cries" (Luis Cernuda)
And then there were the stinkers, and many of them: those who are overdone, pompous, self-conscious, hokey, bland or plain unreadable gibberish. Poems that I didn't get on with, for various reasons, include: Vahni Capildeo's "Going Nowhere, Getting Somewhere", Matthew Welton's "Virtual Airport", Tim Atkins's "Folklore", Jeff Hilson's "Bird bird", Rod Smith's "Ted's Head", Lisa Robertson's "The Weather", Lyn Hejinian's "My Life" and Bernadette Mayer's - that queen of nonsense - "Gay Full Story".
One pattern I did notice that might account for this - many of the pieces that didn't work for me tended to be excerpts from larger works, and I wonder if something got lost in the process, as the fragments included just didn't function well as standalones.
"Enfettered, these sentences repress free speech. The text deletes selected letters. We see the revered exegete reject metred verse: the sestet, the tercet – even les scènes élevées en grec. He rebels. He sets new precedents. He lets cleverness exceed decent levels. He eschews the esteemed genres, the expected themes – even les belles lettres en vers. He prefers the perverse French esthetes: Verne, Péret, Genet, Perec – hence, he pens fervent screeds, then enters the street, where he sells these letterpress newsletters, three cents per sheet. He engenders perfect newness wherever we need fresh terms.
Relentless, the rebel peddles these theses, even when vexed peers deem the new precepts ‘mere dreck’. The plebes resent newer verse; nevertheless, the rebel perseveres, never deterred, never dejected, heedless, even when hecklers heckle the vehement speeches. We feel perplexed whenever we see these excerpted sentences. We sneer when we detect the clever scheme – the emergent repetend: the letter E. We jeer; we jest. We express resentment. We detest these depthless pretenses – these present-tense verbs, expressed pell-mell. We prefer genteel speech, where sense redeems senselessness."
I suppose any anthology is bound to be something of a mixed bag, and that’s certainly true of the new Penguin Book of the Prose Poem. Despite my reservations about the content and the book’s usefulness for the reader wanting to learn and discover more about this unique form, credit should be given to Penguin for taking the brave commercial decision to commission and publish this survey of prose poetry. My reluctance to award more than three stars arises from two concerns: first, the broad range of prose poems covered by the book (in reverse order from the present day back to Aloysius Bertrand in 1842, widely considered to be the originator of the modern prose poem) demonstrates that, while the form can produce remarkable and powerful work, it can also result in rambling, self-indulgent, impenetrable pieces; secondly, the book suffers from a lack of any biographical or bibliographical information about the writers whose work it showcases - I found myself having to resort to online sources again and again to discover more about individual poets and suggestions for further reading. This seems like a missed opportunity for a landmark survey of a literary form like this.
Favorites: "A Woman Shopping" by Anne Boyer, "Notes Towards a Race Riot Scene" by Bhanu Kapil, "Rape Joke" by Patricia Lockwood, "Birthweights" by Chris McCabe, "Other Things" by Alvin Pang, "Conversations About Home (a the Deportation Centre)" by Warsan Shire, "Via Negativa" by Jane Monson, "Edith" by Sophie Robinson, "Blue Dog" by Luke Kennard, "Neglected Knives" by Kristin Omarsdottier, "Christopher Robin" by Czeslaw Milosz, "Return to Harmony 3" by Agha Shahid Ali, "In Love with Raymond Chandler" by Margaret Atwood, "Chekhov: A Sestina" by Mark Strand, "reading" by joanne burns, "Honey" by James Wright, "The Colonel" by Carolyn Forche, "Goodtime Jesus" by James Tate, "A Caterpillar" by Robert Bly, "The Wild Rose" by Ken Smith, "A Case" by Gael Turnbull, "Strayed Crab" by Elizabeth Bishop, "Letters to James Alexander" by Jack Spicer, "Where the Tennis Court Was" by Eugenio Montale, "Love Letter to King Tutankhamun" by Dulce Maria Loynaz, "Snow" by Lu Xun, "A Day" by Rabindranath Tagore, "Tired" by Fenton Johnson, "London Notes" by Jessie Dismorr, "The Disciple" by Oscar Wilde, "The Master" by Oscar Wilde, "Windows" by Charles Baudelaire
This was, without a doubt, the worst book I have attempted to read this year. In the opening comments that introduced this terrible piece of literature the editor could not even define what a prose poem is. The trouble with academic experts deciding what is good and not good, what it is and what it isn't, is that for the most part none of them could write a decent poem of any kind even if their lives depended on it. I was hoping for more from the house of Penguin Books. Sadly I submit that I abandoned this book at the 65% mark and actually never read one complete poem throughout my woeful misery. So many inferior lines of prose, let alone calling them prose poetry. What happened to lyricism? How about some delightful incestual relations with syllables, phonemes, morphemes, and all the other possibilities existing in our wonderful language? Books like this one further the commoner's hatred for poetry of any kind. Only a person of this ilk could admit to enjoying the verbose examples of drivel produced and represented in this book.
I read this book the same time as I read "Short - An international Anthology of Five Centuries..." and they both are pretty much the same in my estimation. If I were to compare it would not be like judging coke against pepsi, but coke against a slightly different recipe of coke.
There are about 5-10 really great ones in each.
There are a lot of big names Baudelaire, Borges, Stein, Wilde. I don't know if I would recommend you buying both books like I did because maybe 10 stories are in both compilations, these are usually the ones from the famous writers.
There's ups and downs, good stuff in both of them. Also a fair bit of well written but boring to me stuff, as you would expect in this kind of compilation.
Very informative deep dive into the prose poem. Includes a wide variety of this type of poem from a huge selection of poets. This is an excellent must read for the poetry writer as well as a terrific read for poetry readers especially someone who enjoys reading this type of poem. Selections range from the classic poets to modern day poets to somewhat in between. It’s an awesome educational resource as well for those studying and/or teaching poetry. It’s convenient too because all of this is compiled into one usable and effective offering. Its layout makes the poems easily detestable as well.