NaPoWriMo Day 26: Prose Poetry

Did a friend forward you this email? Join our mailing list!

Table of Contents

• Freewrite

• Poem: “Information” by David Ignatow

• Divinations

  • Excerpt from Prompt Book

• Prompt

Freewrite

With this freewrite, as well as all freewrites, do not put any pressure on yourself to be good. You are simply getting thoughts on the page. You can write in poetry or in prose, but feel free to write poorly, sloppily, redundantly, and with cliches. Now is the time for ideas—we will eventually sculpt those ideas into art.

Freewrite for 8-10 minutes about something you can’t stop thinking about. Is it a question? An encounter? Something that happened to you recently, or a long time ago? Explore that incessant thought or idea.

Poem: “Information” by David Ignatow

This tree has two million and seventy-five thousand leaves. Perhaps I missed a leaf or two but I do feel triumphant at having persisted in counting by hand branch by branch and marked down on paper with pencil each total. Adding them up was a pleasure I could understand; I did something on my own that was not dependent on others, and to count leaves is not less meaningful than to count the stars, as astronomers are always doing. They want the facts to be sure they have them all. It would help them to know whether the world is finite. I discovered one tree that is finite. I must try counting the hairs on my head, and you too. We could swap information.

Divinations

This is a prose poem, or a poem written in prose. If that seems like a paradox to you, it is, in a way—but a prose poem is simply a poem written without regard to the constraint of line breaks. In lieu of those, a prose poem relies more heavily on its own language and use of literary devices. In my opinion, the best prose poems tap into something unconscious, and typically involve some form of epiphany.

You can see those qualities at play in this brief poem, aspects of which are unsettling or estranging. What is this voice that is so obsessed with something mundane? The poem seems strung along by a tension that’s not easy to identify, perhaps simply a tension of the speaker’s own mind.

And yet the poem draws itself forward by moments of epiphany: the pleasure of counting things; the arbitrariness of information; the intimacy of the mundane. This poem doesn’t make me feel how poems usually make me feel—which is awed or inspired—but it does lead me to question the natural order of things, and that’s an epiphany in its own right.

Much has been said about the prose poem, whose very nature is paradoxical, whose essence is hard to grasp. The form was championed by Baudelaire, and since then, many experiments of language have come from it.

Up until now, these prompts have been asking you to write lineated poems. So when you try to write a prose poem, you might find yourself paying attention to language differently. Here are a few definitions of the prose poem, which come out of Barbara Henning’s Prompt Book:

Excerpt from Prompt Book

If you start searching around in literary dictionaries, you will find a variety of definitions, such as:

(1) Martin Gray writes, “Short work of POETIC PROSE, resembling a poem because of its ornate language and imagery, because it stands on its own, and lacks narrative: like a LYRIC poem but is not subjected to the patterning of METRE.”

(2) An entry in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry And Poetics: “A composition able to have any or all features of the lyric except that it is put on the page—though not conceived of—as prose. It differs from poetic prose in that it is short and compact, from free verse in that it has no line breaks, from a short prose passage in that it has, usually, more pronounced rhythm, sonorous effects, imagery, and density of expression. It may contain even inner rhyme and metral runs. Its length, generally, is from half a page (one or two paragraphs) to three or four pages, i.e., that of the average lyrical poem.

If it is any longer, the tensions and impact are forfeited, and it becomes—more or less poetic prose. The term “prose poem” has been applied irresponsibly to anything from the Bible to a novel by Faulkner, but should be used only to designate a highly conscious (sometimes even self-conscious) art form.” (John Simon)

(3) In one of the early prose poem anthologies, Michael Benedkt writes, “It is a genre of poetry, self consciously written in prose, and characterized by the intense use of virtually all the devices of poetry.. . . The sole exception . . . we would say, the line break.”

(4) A contemporary critic Stephen Fredman—who has written extensively about language poetry—calls it “poet’s prose.” He objects to the above definitions of the prose poem because they rely too heavily on Baudelaire’s description of a prose poem. The language poets were often critical of lyrical narrative-oriented poems. Fredman quotes David Antin:

Novels may be written in ‘prose’; but in the beginning no books were written in prose, they were printed in prose, because ‘prose’ conveys an illusion of a common-sensical logical order.

Without writing, we had the sound of our words and poetic language to help us remember; then we had lines perhaps to help us hear the rhythm of our spoken voice. All aids to memory. Sentences and paragraphs are borders for organizing thoughts and pauses between thoughts.

I think of a prose poem as simply a poem written in sentences and paragraphs, rather than lines. It can be narrative. It can be dramatic. It can be lyrical. It can be scientific. It can be experimental. It can be so many things, but if the language and structure stand out, rather than the information, description, dialogue, plot, then I think of it as a poem. “Poetic prose” might be a little closer to language that explains or elaborates, unless it is fracturing and experimenting with the language of explanation. But, of course, this can be endlessly debated.

If you want to read a long thoughtful exploration on the definition of a prose poem, I suggest reading Michael Deville’s book, The American Prose Poem.

Prompt

Write a prose poem! Lean into your unconscious connections, and let yourself discover something—bring the reader with you into a moment of epiphany.