Lydia Unsworth : short takes on the prose poem

 folio : short takes on the prose poem

 

 

 

 

I once told someone that maybe the prose-poem was more ‘working class’ than regular delineated poetry. I am not sure anymore if that is right, but I do know that I always felt you can just start a prose-poem without worrying too much about what it is. When I was a teenager I was writing ‘lyrics’, when I was an artist I was making ‘text-art’. You are your framework more than anything else. Back in the visual beginning, I was writing little ‘Becketts’: automatic typewritered blocks of text on the backs of used envelopes whose language looped and refrained and that carried on until the image seemed wild enough to warrant ending it. One loud consciousness flapping in the wind. A seed trying to grip the ground. A mosquito landing to eat. I generally aim to write a prose-poem like I’m running down a shallow hill; I don’t want to break my ankle, but that light bruising was always supposed to be part of the thing. I don’t want a thought to be too neat. It’s more about the way one thought stumbles into another, those surprise interactions. The associations that let you into a bit of open-wound-gape about what life means. A quick frame flashing past, a rug lifted and the dust beneath, the view from a train window, that sign, did it say---? I want the dream spill. Six languages at the same time, six frames of reference, six pots boiling, six text-based conversations interrupting each other. I make sense in this way. I don’t look for a slow narrative, but rather the narrative that rises from clutter of replenshing debris. A torrent of boulders between me and a friend. But I see them waving. I saw them waving. And I write down what that glimpse did to me. There’s a panic to my kind of prose-poem. I don’t expect to pause for breath. I want to be buried in it. A wave rising over. The water transparent over my refracted body. And then I’m out again. Alive again. What a thrill.

 

 

 

 

Community

Where you build a home does not necessarily correlate to where that home should be. It can happen quite by chance. Drop a brick here. Like getting your head stuck in a gate. Two people playing with a finger trap. Breaking into a waterpark is sometimes a mistake. Migrate, migrate. We gatecrash other people’s gardens and hope to be asked to stay. Our T-shirts wet from so much falling in the lake. We follow the smell of burning food that leads to the party. A long table with a patterned cloth. Plastic cups. Fizzy water. Vodka round a grave. Arms guide our shoulders. I am so tall here. We let people take us anywhere. I only want to be inside the homes of others. In limestone caves. Whatever you have. The stick that accumulates the calcium. Proof of travel. All my friends line up and I show them off one by one; one aspect of this life boasting to the other. All I have gathered. Stay with me now. Stay close. I’ll lie at the bottom and you all climb on. A blanket of meat. Kindness. My pack animals. Grass edging limbs, a streak of green. Flipflop straps. Anything. One finger circles another finger. A barn dance. Two rows of people waiting to belong. Five spoons are tied with an elastic band. Birds in flight. Up the cliff and beyond. A body, a parachute. All that air. Spinning jenny, sycamore tree. A kite. My coat above my head in wind. Puffins. Rain on a tent. Smother me.

 

 

 

School of Dance

I sit on the floor on a spot two metres from another spot and that spot from another spot so on and so forth all along the corridor. She’s enjoying it, beyond the door.

Dancers Only, the sign says, and I told her that she, at four, was a dancer, and that I (how to explain a nightclub, a soft pink morning on a bell-curve field somewhere?) was not. In she went: trial class.

Face-shield assistant manager talks to me about the show she could be in, the costumes they might try on, the country I am not living in. I haven’t told her that my daughter won’t be staying, that I’m leading them all on. That this tryout month cannot be any more than that. She’s doing really well, she says, she seems to really be enjoying it. Am I far enough away? she asks.

 

 

 

Hunter

the yellow flyswatter is extendable / I elongate it absentmindedly / poised / the child wanted yellow / she’s all over yellow lately / the nonslip handle has little grooves for each of my fingers / a slender stem / delicate

thing / I was surprised to get it first time / grey green / my herringbone curtain / self-possessed / always hate to see a thing in pain / that desperate speed / upturned / a wind-up toy fallen from the surface / as consciousness

tries to detach from the body / my baby crawls to the flyswatter / puts it in his mouth

 

 

 

 

Lydia Unsworth’s latest collections are Some Murmur (Beir Bua Press) and Mortar (Osmosis). Her most recent pamphlets are YIELD (KFS) and cement, terraces (Red Ceilings). Work can be found in places like Ambit, Banshee, Bath Magg, Blackbox Manifold, Shearsman, Tentacular, and The Interpreter’s House. A new pamphlet, Residue, appeared in Feb 2022 from above/ground press.