Here is the article I published about the state of British prose poetry in Poetry Review, with page numbers from the original identified as the work proceeds.
"Poetry in the Prose: Getting to Know the Prose
Poem"
When
I arrived in England in 2001, I tended only to find prose poems in more
experimental journals such as Shearsman
and Tenth Muse. Now I regularly see
them in a wide range of literary magazines, and the first contemporary British
prose poetry anthology has been published, This
Line Is Not for Turning (ed. Jane Monson, Cinnamon Press, 2011), to
positive reviews. The palpable increase in interest from fellow poets and
students alike has been an exciting pleasure for me, as someone who began
writing and publishing poetry—including prose poetry—over twenty years
ago.
One
of the fruits of the proliferation of prose poetry should be a greater
pluralism. While Monson’s anthology tends toward the mainstream, it does have
unexpected bedfellows, placing the work of Richard Berengarten and Jeff Hilson
alongside that of Pascale Petit and George Szirtes. Similarly, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics’
special feature on British prose poetry brought together John Burnside, Rod
Mengham, Geraldine Monk, Peter Reading and Peter Redgrove, among others. In
fact, prose poetry seems to nourish styles that do not easily fall into the
usual distinctions of experimental or mainstream, as with Luke Kennard’s
surrealist narratives and Ágnes Lehóczky’s psychogeography, as in her compelling
poem, “Prelude,” gazing on a cathedral ceiling:
To
get to the core of the place they have been traveling to for so long to people
an empty city, a city with no
topography, the sky without impasses, cobbled cul-de-sacs, crowded catacombs, horizontal
reminiscences. They travel so they can be exactly where you are now. They travel to settle, you say. To illustrate the
biosphere around us. To illuminate the
darkness tonight. They arrive. To live among us. Slow rows of caravans, bright lanterns, departing on
the ridges of the vault. On the edges of the universe.
Unclear. The difference. Between departures and arrivals.
As
more collections include prose poetry, however, we face an important (69) problem.
Critical discussion of the form lags behind its publication, and consequently
prose poems, in books primarily consisting of lineated poetry, often go
unmentioned. When new volumes composed wholly of prose poetry appear, such as
Linda Black’s Root (Shearsman, 2011)
and Lehóczky’s Rememberer (Egg Box, 2011), they are less likely to be reviewed, and those
reviews that do appear are more likely to neglect discussion of the poet’s
particular techniques.
In
a moment of rare reviewing honesty, Paul Batchelor, at the end of his review of
Simon Armitage’s Seeing Stars (Faber,
2010), comments, “Are they poems, or prose poems, or flash fiction? I’m not
sure […].” While some poets and critics insist that we must resist defining
prose poetry for it to retain its subversive, genre-blurring character, I find
some basic distinctions crucial for its appreciation. While a lineated poem’s
development requires some sort of progression as it moves down the page, most
reductively a movement from point A to point B, a prose poem develops without
“going” anywhere—it simply wants to inhabit or circle A. If the prose poem
takes narrative form, that narrative operates to represent or suggest a single
idea or feeling; the story or plot is there at
the service of an idea. Otherwise the piece is a form of narrative prose,
such as a flash fiction or an anecdote, rather than a prose poem.
To
clarify this distinction between a narrative prose poem and a piece of
narrative prose, consider Anthony Rudolf’s piece, “Perfect Happiness,” from This Line Is Not for Turning. The work
begins with the announcement that the speaker is ten years old and has just arrived
at his grandparents’ house; he goes on to relate his activities over the course
of the day: wander about, look at comics, throw a tennis ball against a wall,
etc. The poem’s momentum derives from this succession of events. The point of
the poem, however, is not the story so much as the way these simple events add
up, either in retrospect and/or as they are experienced, to an overall sense of
“Perfect Happiness,” to that single idea or feeling. That quality distinguishes
the poem from anecdote or flash fiction.
More
than one regular reviewer of poetry has told me that s/he will sooner decline a
collection of prose poems than cover it; if faced with individual prose poems
amid lineated ones, s/he might address its content, but would feel wary of discussing
technique. Yet lineated and prose poems share much technical ground: use of
metaphor; repetition of sound (alliteration, consonance, assonance, partial
rhymes, etc.); imagery; and voice, just to start. The difference comes down to
the sentence (and it may not be a complete grammatical one at that) rather than
the line as the primary structural unit. (70)
This
means that instead of looking at a poem’s line and stanza lengths’ contribution
to structure, we consider sentence and paragraph lengths as well as sentence
types. For example, the succession of short, subject-verb sentences in Carolyn
Forché’s brilliant prose poem, “The Colonel,” enhances the dramatic tension
with its staccato effect on the rhythm. In the delightful “Hedge Sparrows,”
Richard Price conveys the bird’s incessant chatter through one long, long
sentence—of 180 words! While these are more pronounced examples, they give a
sense of the relationship between sentence length and structure and the poem’s
meaning, just as we would consider with a lineated poem’s use of the line.
The
more we nourish poetry’s possibilities, the more poetry as a whole benefits
from the exploration, and that nourishment means thoughtfully developing
critical approaches to each form that emerges: giving each new expression of
language the attention its eloquence has earned. (71)
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