folio : short takes on the prose poem
I believe—perhaps controversially—that all successful prose poems are lyric, that if there is a narrative, it serves a lyric idea, as in Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel” or Russell Edson’s “A Performance at Hog Theater”. The great prose poem coheres, has an integrity created by every word's essential contribution, as in Francis Ponge’s “Crate”, say, or Evie Shockley’s “my life as china”.
I don’t know where I was first exposed to the form, but I expect it was in the literary magazines of Illinois State University’s Milner Library, where at fifteen I accidentally stumbled on them; I remember attending the extracurricular Women Writing Women’s Lives class at ISU on the night of my sixteenth birthday and saying I’d had a poem, a prose poem, accepted for publication that day. This is not to say I was precocious—as a teenager, I wrote and published a lot of bad poetry. It’s just to say that my feel for the form was originally organic, intuitive, and years later, in teaching, I came to try to explain why one might write this poem in prose and this in lines. Perhaps so many years teaching these forms partly accounts for why I discriminate so decidedly between flash fiction and prose poetry: I persist in seeing them as apples and oranges. A flash fiction must prioritize plot, must have some conflict the protagonist faces, for there to be some sense of a story rather than a mere scene, while in prose poetry, the integrity is more subtle—the completeness of a single idea. That said, some of my favorite prose poetry manages, across a series or sequence of poems, to interweave distinct threads into a single tapestry, as in Rosmarie Waldrop’s White Is a Color. Now, though, I’m talking about how manuscripts operate rather than individual prose poems—another conversation for the near future.
Marry Me
Eighteen months after the wedding, we clear the loft of its second kitchen: the saucepans, spatulas, cutlery we boxed and stored when we—(no, we did not merge, I do not merge)—when I moved in. For a month, the box waits. For a month, I waver, consider taking the shadow kitchen back to the loft, cafetière by plate by corkscrew. The night we arrange a date to take the box to the charity shop, I plead—and I’m crying, I’m crying, Marry me, marry me, marry me.
.
If one can take a sentence for a walk, how does it work in a loop, the widely favoured form of peregrination: does the sentence end with the same word with which it began or somehow end just before it, so the first word can be touched with an outstretched hand? The loop goes down the road, up the slope, to the right past the green, along a further, flatter right through poplars and the occasional skitter of dogs, down further right into the turn, over a mud path that in summer is banked with blackberries and offers a view of sheep on the far hill. The sentence can cover a lot of ground. In the distance, looming, the wonderful If.
Heroin Song 3
At the wedding, she explained why everyone should forgive her. Ah, heroin, your sinuous logic in my sister’s small head. She arrived sunburnt (sunburnt may be figurative). While her daughter loitered away the time in a nearby town. My sister tells. She wants to tell. There’s no palpable apology I can take between my fingers. And if my fingers itch for it? Her eyes are still the blue of periwinkle.
“Marry Me” first appeared in Magma, the untitled in Shearsman, “Heroin Song 3” in Poetry Review.
