folio : short takes on the prose poem
My Love Affair with the Prose Poem
My love affair with the prose poem was like any other love affair: intense and life changing. I grew up with the line as the essential unit of poetry. If others were writing prose poems and I enjoyed reading them, that had nothing to do with me. Then I found myself stuck and so desperate that I began to take creative writing classes. A teacher told me to write a prose poem, and I managed to eke out a few stranded sentences, not even a paragraph. It was like having sex for the first time—soon I was writing nothing but prose poems. My friends told me that I was addicted to the prose poem, and that I needed to kick the habit. Because the form was new to me, I had no idea what I was doing—always the best predicament for writing poetry. The prose poem and I had an affair, not a marriage, but we’ve never entirely broken it off—we still get together from time to time when the occasion feels right. That’s why I’m thrilled to see poets dedicating themselves to the prose poem, and also thrilled to see poets writing prose poems along of the other options for poetry—because chaos and disorder are always more fertile than the quest for perfection.
Calluses
My grandmother was a gardener. I remember planting a bulb with her. I remember the whiteness of the bulb, the darkness of the earth, the heat of the sun. This is a real memory, not something I was told, and therefore it has no context, except that I must have been very young. Oddly, I don’t remember my grandmother’s hands. I was going to say that her palms were calloused from working in the earth. That can’t have been true—she was an elegant woman, in spite of her old country accent, and I’m sure she wore gloves. Of course my mother never worked in the garden. The calluses belonged to my father, along with the grease embedded in the whorls of his fingers, the tattoos of his trade.
The Right to Bear Arms
In the thriller the hunter measures powder into a shell, the first step in making a cartridge. I knew a man who made cartridges. My closest childhood friend. A friendship that persisted through adolescence and perhaps beyond, because no one knows when those bonds finally loosen and dissolve. I remember the call informing me of his death, from my ex-wife, who didn’t know who he was. My aunt had called because she knew that the loss would be significant for me. I felt that I had escaped. A cartridge maker. A hunter. I was from a hunting family, and we hunted together, in a large group, with my father and my uncles and their friends. August heat in September. Trudging the charred hills, the slopes slick with oak leaves. He loved what I hated. Hunting, rifles. A pool of blood on the garage floor, the skin stripped in a single piece and discarded. Hard now to think of his life—his father regressed from incompetence and inability to hold a job into diagnosed mental illness and an institution. Of course we never talked of those things. As I write these sentences I realize again that I escaped from something.
La primavera
For many months I haven’t touched or looked at these pages. What I remember of what I’ve written is jumbled and vague, and the rules of engagement preclude re-reading. What I’m most sure of is that I wrote far too much, and became completely lost in what I was writing. One way to experience the forest is to see nothing but trees: oak, ash, elm. I know that writing is a process in which history surrenders to language, and my characters—‘my mother,’ ‘my father,’ ‘I’—inhabit these pages, and ‘bear no resemblance’ etc. What remains is a process of severe subtraction. I wanted to make a work of art by erasure. I find myself sitting at a transparent table writing in a notebook with a pen on a spring afternoon. Not early spring, not late spring, not mid-spring. Deep spring. Above the city, an endless sky.
