folio : short takes on the prose poem
I.
Charles Baudelaire once compared the prose poem to a “serpent,” telling his friend Arsène Houssaye, “Take away one vertebra and the two ends of this tortuous fantasy come together again without pain. Chop it into numerous pieces and you will see that each one can get along alone.”[1]
An evocative comparison, no doubt. But after reading Paris Spleen (and, I admit, thinking about prose poetry through the lens of another “Charles,” whom I’ll get to in just a bit), I can’t help but think of architecture, rooms and furniture when it comes to the prose poem. Squat, blocky buildings along gorgeous, messy urban streets. Confined but interesting spaces. Dark rooms filled with old, elegant—or shabby—desks and chairs cluttered with books and papers. A window, with or without curtains…
Of course, Baudelaire does say, later on in the preface dedicated to Houssaye, “It was, above all, out of my exploration of huge cities, out of the medley of their innumerable interrelations, that this haunting ideal [i.e., the prose poem] was born.” But I prefer Charles Simic’s description of the prose poem as a structure, or at least as action happening in the limited space of a structure, in his essay “The Poetry of Village Idiots”:
Writing a prose poem is a bit like trying to catch a fly in a dark room. The fly probably isn’t even there, the fly is inside your head; still, you keep tripping over and bumping into things in hot pursuit. The prose poem is a burst of language following a collision with a large piece of furniture.[2]
“What,” Simic goes on to say, “is the attraction of such a seemingly idiotic undertaking?”
II.
What, indeed? Like Simic, Baudelaire felt there was something almost perverse about such a poetic form (though he nonetheless indulged in prosing about Paris). Simic would agree with this “tortuous fantasy” of constructing a poem without metered lines, using his own Baudelairean phrase to describe the prose poem as the “monster child of two incompatible strategies, the lyric and the narrative.”[3] One wishes to encircle an image (in the way that Gregory Orr describes)[4] but also to tell a story of some kind. The challenge, at least for Simic, is escaping the “prison” of his own restrictive notions of lyric/narrative. So the confines are formal as well as structural.
But, to stay with the fly-in-the-room analogy for a moment, the real perversity in the prose poem is the pursuit itself—like expending our energy constructing a room, only to discover our frantic wish to escape it. There are dark delights, but also dangers. The pain comes from bumping up against the obstruction of TIME. The prose poem is the expression of that pain.
If it’s so “idiotic,” so “impossible to write,”[5] how can we practically begin? Follow that crazy pursuit, Simic says. Look for the fly that’s probably not there. Follow an imaginary arc, like the dotted line on a pirate’s map that promises treasure (that’s probably not there… but you never know). “A quick, unpremeditated scribble and the cell door opens at times.”
III.
This seems to have been the strategy in Simic’s Night Sky.
The star map hanging down over the blackboard in my grade school classroom remains where it was forty-seven years ago. The trees are bare and it’s still raining. Everyone is bent over their work and I alone am daydreaming while watching a small insect crawl over the map on its way to the Dog Star.
He wants to be one of its fleas is what I think.[6]
What begins as a mundane scene of school life trails off into a surrealist realm. That quoted passage is the entirety of the poem, but it’s so packed with those ingredients Simic himself celebrates: “economy and surprise … lightness of touch … the comic spirit…”[7] The “insect” tries to get away from the ordinary. Though the mission is not a complete success—the insect (a flea posing as a fly?) remains trapped within the confines of the classroom—the journey is a delight. And it’s easy to read through the first paragraph and miss the fact that the “star map” is frozen in time (“where it was forty-seven years ago”).
The prose poem is for Simic a window into the past:
My mother was a
braid of black smoke.
She bore me swaddled over the burning cities.
The sky was a vast and windy place for
a child to play.
We met
many others who were just like us. They were trying to put on their
overcoats with
arms made of smoke.
The high heavens were full of shrunken
deaf ears instead of stars.[8]
The pursuit of the prose poem is like trying to capture time is like trying to clutch smoke. Here, in this piece from the remarkable prose-poem collection The World Doesn’t End, we don’t know whether we’re hearing a made-up story or some memory of life in World War II Belgrade (though the latter is a good possibility).[9] Either way, the snapshot is blurry. Or it’s a window smeared with grease or blood or smoke or a combination of all three.
IV.
Despite their urban sprawl and feverish attempt to record all the minutiae the city has to offer, the poems in Paris Spleen are constrained by the limits of Time, who comes knocking at the door of the poet’s room, which is filled with “stupid, dusty, dilapidated furniture… sad windows where rain has traced furrows through the dust...”[10] What a pathetic life described here! we might say—and then look around at our own dusty, dilapidated work spaces. Time shows up to stick it to us, to make us feel bad for being layabouts.
In another poem, the poet goes to a shooting gallery to kill Time.[11] In “The Bad Glazier,” the poet (or speaker or whichever mask we choose to place over Baudelaire) tries to cure his indolence by playing a practical joke on a glazier (a tradesperson who installs glass). Once he’s huffed it up six floors, the glazier is scorned and mocked for his aesthetically bland wares—“No colored glass, no pink, no red, no blue!”[12]—and then, when he’s huffed it all the way back down the six flights and out onto the street, the poet launches a flowerpot at the poor wretch, who falls down and breaks his glassware. The glazier is the random victim in the poet’s war against idleness.
In “Solitude,” the poet celebrates time well spent in quiet confinement. This is another middle finger directed at Time, or at least at those who cannot abide silence and mystery and use up their time blathering from “pulpit or rostrum.”[13] “Almost all our ills come from not staying in our own room,” Pascal once said.[14] Baudelaire quotes this passage to formulate a sort of mantra for those who shun the world of “Chattering humanity” and instead champion “self-communion.” In a similar vein, “Windows” celebrates the life behind the “closed window”: “In that black or luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers.”[15]
V.
The prose poem—angular, blocky; somber slab piled onto somber slab—is the ultimate expression of artistic solitude. But this doesn’t rule out mobility, having a little fun, going a little bananas—indeed, the mind (for Simic, for Baudelaire, for other prose-poem practitioners) is the engine that drives the poem in its circular course around an idea. A square wheel, perhaps, but a wheel nonetheless.
A rack, maybe? We seem to have strayed far from the fly-in-the-room, but not so far from Baudelaire’s “tortuous fantasy”: the prose poem pulls the writer in two directions. This seems to be the case in Arthur Rimbaud’s “Morning of Drunkenness,” which begins
O my good! O my beautiful! Atrocious fanfare where I won’t stumble! enchanted rack whereon I am stretched! Hurrah for the amazing work and the marvelous body, for the first time! It began amid the laughter of children, it will end with it.[16]
Rimbaud is making his own days (as the Sun would encourage Frank O’Hara to do in the next century), though time and space is limited. The “good” and the “beautiful” are his and his alone, though he’s “stretched” (and, later in the poem, poisoned). More so than Baudelaire, Rimbaud laughs in the face of Time’s (i.e., the prose poem’s) sadism. Though perhaps that laughter makes Rimbaud something of a sadomasochist.
Was Russell Edson thinking of Rimbaud’s motif in this darkly humorous piece?
Some students were stretching a professor on a medieval torture rack. He had offered himself to show them how an academic might be stretched beyond his wildest dreams like a piece of chewing gum.
And as they turned the wheel the professor was getting longer and longer.
Don’t make me too long, or I’ll look kind of goofy, sighed the professor as he grew longer and longer.
Suddenly something snaps.
What happened? sighs the professor from the rack.
We were just stretching an academic when suddenly something snapped; you may have heard it ...
Yes, I was there. Don’t you remember? sighs the professor.
And then we heard an academic sigh ...
Yes, I heard it, too, sighs the professor, it seemed to come from the rack where I was being stretched beyond my wildest dreams like a piece of chewing gum ...[17]
Here, the mask of the “persona” comes off. The poet acknowledges the sadomasochistic task (or “game”?) of working in a hybrid genre that will always end in pain… though it offers a bit of fun in the middle. Part of the fun is the exchange between “professor” and “students,” and part of it is in the absence of quotation marks designating speakers, so there’s a sleight-of-hand shift from the third person (“He had offered himself…”) to the first person (“I was being stretched…”). Another shift comes in the tense: we begin in the past and end in the present. This, for me, is the key: the narrative past battling with the lyrical present. The prose poem is a little like the turtle:[18] one minute you’re quietly reading by candlelight, the next minute you’re being lifted up into the air.
VI
Solitude is fine and all, but no matter who you are (though especially if you’re a prose poem), you’re forced into action at some point. This was Baudelaire’s argument in “The Bad Glazier.” And it seems to have been David McFadden’s in “Have a Nice Day,” which is a very slightly modernized translation of “The Glazier.”
I’ve told myself don’t do anything unless it’s absolutely necessary or unless it’ll bring in enough money to buy time to write more poetry. But sometimes I’ll shock myself by acting under some mysterious impulse with a quickness and certainty of which I thought myself incapable.[19]
The poet goes on to describe pulling the same prank on this modern-day glazier, whose panes of glass are ugly, too: “You don’t have any coloured glass? No rose, no blue, no red, no panes of transparent paradise?” As in the Baudelaire poem, the poet drops a pot down into the street, startling the glazier enough to make him fall and smash his sheets of glass “with a glittering crash that sounded like a crystal palace struck by lightning!” Perhaps (as readers, as poets) our own aesthetic sense is offended, though making the guy smash his glassware was just a bit cruel? (The poet confesses, “I was also a little shocked at my cruelty and felt some compassion for the poor bugger…”) No? Then we can sympathize with the artist, who wants to work with only the best material—“the kind of glass that would help to make our lives appear more beautiful?”
Besides, whether we’re poets or not, having a little time to write is a good thing. And maybe we’re the glaziers, and that prank is like a shock to our system: Get off your ass and write! More than that: Write a prose poem! Even if it’s painful. Even if you get lost in it, lose the thread of your original intention, so you’re left with “bloated, overblown sonnets.”[20] The fly is gone, but the poem is still there. Only: how to leave it again and enter the “real” world…
By Way of Conclusion
But this could all be just a product of my own pandemic experience. And my reading of Simic, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Edson, and McFadden has been filtered through nearly 730 days of self-isolation. (I’ve left the house sometimes, played in the snow, made a circuitous path from house to grocery store and back again; from house to snowy woods and back again. I even acquired some snowshoes… But the solitude has always been there when I got back.) Simic offered that felicitous phrase (one of ever so many), “Writing a prose poem is a bit like trying to catch a fly in a dark room,” and I felt like I was doing the same thing for 730 days—sometimes believing I’d caught the fly! Sometimes unable to sleep because I thought the fly was literally (literarily?) inside my head. Or staring down at me with its ommatidia from the ceiling, like in that Breaking Bad episode. So I imposed that analogy on those poor poets. And now on you, poor reader.
Truthfully, this essay has been a way for me to think through my own prose poem project, which I’m tentatively calling Collision with a Large Piece of Furniture. I felt like I should at least test the ground—the room, the furniture, the air quality—before getting myself into something from which I cannot escape.
But perhaps it’s too late.
And maybe that’s okay.
[1] Charles Baudelaire, “To Arsène Houssaye,” in Paris Spleen, trans. Louise Varèse (New Directions Books, 1970), p. ix.
[2] Charles Simic, “The Poetry of Village Idiots,” in The Life of Images: Selected Prose (HarperCollins, 2015), p. 107.
[3] Simic, “The Poetry of Village Idiots,” p. 108.
[4] See Gregory Orr, A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry (W. W. Norton, 2018), p. 82.
[5] Simic, “The Poetry of Village Idiots,” p. 108.
[6] Simic, “Night Sky,” The Life of Images, p. 116.
[7] Simic, “The Poetry of Village Idiots,” p. 108.
[8] Simic, The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems (Harcourt Brace & Co., 1989), p. 3.
[9] “On this Very Street in Belgrade” includes a similar description (though more realist than surrealist) of a child being carried “Out of the smoking ruins of a building.” This edition of the poem comes from the Poets.org “Poem-a-Day” series, April 8, 2013. Accessed March 3, 2022, https://poets.org/poem/very-street-belgrade.
[10] Baudelaire, “V: The Double Room,” in Paris Spleen, p. 6.
[11] Baudelaire, “XLIII: The Gallant Marksman,” p. 90. Turns out, he’s a bad shot (at least at killing time; he manages to “decapitate” a “doll” rather easily).
[12] Baudelaire, “The Bad Glazier,” p. 14.
[13] Baudelaire, “XXII: Solitude,” p. 46.
[14] Blaise Pascal, qtd. in Baudelaire, “XXII: Solitude,” p. 47.
[15] Baudelaire, “XXXV: Windows,” p. 77.
[16] Arthur Rimbaud, “Morning of Drunkenness,” trans. John Ashbery, Poetry, April 2011, Poetry Foundation. Accessed March 3, 2022, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/54558/morning-of-drunkenness.
[17] Russell Edson, “The Academic Sigh,” in The Tormented Mirror (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), Poetry Foundation. Accessed March 3, 2022, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50846/the-academic-sigh.
[18] As in Edson’s “The Adventures of a Turtle,” in The Reason Why the Closet-Man is Never Sad (Wesleyan University Press, 1977), Poetry Foundation. Accessed March 3, 2022, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50777/the-adventures-of-a-turtle.
[19] David McFadden, “70. Have a Nice Day,” in Gypsy Guitar: One Hundred Poems of Romance and Betrayal (Talon Books, 1987).
[20] McFadden’s self-deprecating description in the “Preface” to Gypsy Guitar.
