folio : short takes on the prose poem
This discussion has been revised to draw out the ideas. The original audio discussion is available at www.strangerfiction.ca.
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Jonathan Ball
ryan, can you explain, to people who aren’t familiar, what prose poetry really is?
ryan fitzpatrick
What it really is? Yeah, finally exposing the secrets of prose poetry.
To give you a pocket definition of what prose poetry is, I think most people, when they think about poetry, they think, “Oh, it’s got lines, and it’s got stanzas. Maybe it rhymes, maybe it has metre, or maybe it doesn’t.” Lines and stanzas are pretty central, I think, to the popular understanding of poetry.
Prose poetry scrambles that by changing the basic unit of composition. So rather than focusing on lines and stanzas, prose poetry uses the sentence and the paragraph as units of thinking. That’s literally all prose poetry is.
Jonathan Ball
Now that everyone knows the basics, maybe we’ll slide into a bit more of the academia highfalutin’ discussion of it.
I like to think about it on the craft level, because I feel like that’s the least changeable level. Future, the rapper, is still using anaphora. Just like Mesopotamian poets were using anaphora. They have very different purposes. Very different political spheres that they’re operating in. But it’s the same technique.
And so, I usually try to just focus on the technique as a starting point for everything. Before we get into the more socio-political sphere of it all. The way I like to think about poetry, as a baseline, to distinguish literary writing from non-literary writing, in a simple pragmatic way is the same way Viktor Shklovsky distinguishes it, where a defamiliarization effect is in play.
To have literary language, the bare-minimum level: you grab found text, pull it from one context to the other, and you get a defamiliarization effect. Now we’re in the literary world of language. Once we’ve had that happen, I separate poetry off as a type of literary language that is just more overtly interested in defamiliarization, and is displaying, more commonly, its defamiliarization effects.
A lot of the time in fiction or prose — not always, but often — the techniques that the writer is using are masking defamiliarization effects. They don’t want you to kick out of the plot and notice how the novel is being written. Now that changes, of course, some writers will draw more attention to their style.
ryan fitzpatrick
But they still don’t want you to be so defamiliarized that you throw their book in the trash.
Jonathan Ball
Generally speaking, right? But then poets, I think, tend to go the other way. You’ve got some poets who are trying to approximate a breath line or something, or approximate the way people talk in more straightforward language. And they’re not as interested. They’re trying to hide the artifice. But for the most part, poets are displaying their artifice, in a brazen manner. A lot of poetry is really self-involved with that idea.
I think the most prominent example is Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 130,” where he’s just talking about how other poets are bad compared to him. He’s sort of praising his mistress on the one level, but really, he’s making fun of other writers for not being as adept. He can insult his mistress and still praise her better than they try to praise their mistresses.
I feel like prose poetry, on a simpler level, and a more obvious level, is approximating that prose form, as you say, but I think it still has all the same goals of verse in terms of the defamiliarization effect. I would even say that a lot of experimental novels I would class under prose poetry. In that way, for me, it’s not a clearly defined thing.
Poetry that is utilizing prose form, as you say, but I think it often also has this effect, this goal of defamiliarization and displaying defamiliarization. It also tends to be unmoored from narrative, for that reason.
ryan fitzpatrick
Well, let’s talk narrative, because I think narrative is one of the components I definitely come back to when I’m grappling with prose poetry. But, here’s a question: what are the benefits of turning to the sentence rather than using the line?
I know one of the things that people get critiqued for sometimes — I think this is a silly critique, but I’ll repeat it anyway — is that their poems are just prose with line breaks. Just prose that’s been broken up somehow. And so, the question is: why not just write this as a prose paragraph?
In poetry, what do you think the advantage of using a sentence instead of the line might be?
Jonathan Ball
I’ve thought about that a fair amount, because I’ve done mostly prose poetry — if you look at my published work in poetry, it is primarily prose poetry, or at least the best of it is prose poetry. The stuff that’s certainly gotten the most attention is prose poetry. And I’ve often wondered what draws me to it because, personally, when I’m reading a book of poetry, and I turn the page and see a prose poem, I’m like, “Ah, crap.”
I don’t even like to read prose poetry, broadly speaking — there’s people I really love, which we’ll get into, but broadly speaking I don’t like to read it that much, because it usually isn’t doing the thing that I like about it as a writer. I’ve tried to even just kind of get more of a handle on that and think about it. And I think, you know, in many ways, for me, what I like about prose poetry is I kind of get to have it both ways.
One thing I don’t like about poetry is the speaker. It’s not a problem with poetry, it’s a problem with the cultural way that we perceive poetry, which is that you always have the reader conflating the speaker with the poet. And it doesn’t matter what you’re writing a poem about, you could be writing a poem about how your eyeballs were eaten by spiders, you know, they’ll still think it’s somehow about how you’re feeling that day.
You can even write a line like, “this isn’t a metaphor,” and they won’t read it like a narrative voice, they’ll read it like as the speaker is hiding something or coding something. I think that’s useful sometimes. But I find it’s a real problem for me in poetry because I don’t have the interest, broadly speaking, there are exceptions to this rule for me, but I don’t have a whole lot of interest in expressing my particular emotions or opinions in direct fashion in poetry.
I like to code or hide things, or draw attention to it in a really specific way. But what I really like is narrative voice. The more I think about my own writing, I like strange narrative voice. And so, what I don’t like about poetry is you get the audience pulling away from reading the speaker as a narrative voice, it’s just not coded that way. You have to work to code it that way. Whereas a novel, it’s all immediately coded as narrative voice, but you almost get a different problem, which is they want to pay too much attention to the narrative now.
So, what I like about prose poetry is it kind of lets me have a narrative voice, but I don’t really have to have a narrative
ryan fitzpatrick
But it’s also tied to the way people perceive lined poetry versus prose. And again, you’re writing prose poetry, which gives you this kind of psychical in-between space.
Jonathan Ball
Yeah, and we’re living in a liminal space as the audience. It just it kind of puts the audience in a strange liminal space in terms of the receptivity of it. I like those in-between places.
If people know my work, they know I like to do things like write a prose poem essay about a film. Then couch that inside of a sequence that is itself a narrative. I like to really play in those weird, liminal spaces like that.
ryan fitzpatrick
I find that interesting, because it’s really different than the value that I would assign to prose poetry, which for me has to do with measure, a poetic measure, and the things that the sentence can allow you to do that the line can’t.
If you were to extend the line out, eventually it just
wraps around the edge of the page, right? And then you have to deal with prose.
So, at a certain point, I like short lines. Short lines make sense to me as a
form of measure, whether it’s a phrasal unit, or a breath line, or something
else, something arbitrary. But as soon as you kind of drop that form of
measure, you have to deal with the insides of the sentence, with punctuation
and with what ends up being, I think, a variable line length, where you don’t
have to worry about consistency of line lengths.
Suddenly, you can have a sentence that runs 100 words, followed by a sentence that runs three words. It’s up to you as a poet to make sure that those two sentences make sense together, but it frees up measure or it gives you a different way to measure the rhythm or the flow of the writing. So, for me, it has nothing to do with the perception between lined poetry and prose.
There is this different set of possibilities that open up as soon as you switch from one to the other. And different poets take up that challenge differently. Some will focus on the phrase and just kind of chain phrases with commas between them. Some will write huge run-on sentences that don’t end. Some will be really proper as if they were writing an essay or a piece of flash fiction. I think that there’s a lot of options available within the prose poem that are not lesser than those offered by lined poetry, but they’re different.
Jonathan Ball
I think that’s an interesting point, and it’s interesting that you frame it that way, because although I hadn’t really thought about it before, that is, in many ways, one of my other attractions to prose poetry.
I feel like there’s more pacing possibilities in the prose poem, because you’re playing with the grammar of the sentence, versus how the lines stack up or stanzas stack against one another, and so on. I really like when I write lined poetry to have uniform line lengths or uniform stanzas. I don’t always have a real metre necessarily. I often will, but I like to be really uniform with it. At least the stuff that I feel is my best work. And that I have collected into books. But when I move into prose poetry, I know it’s not really accurate, but I feel like there’s more of that pacing possibility.
And to kind of move—I’m always thinking of it from the point of view of “how do I move the reader” through the book or through the poem or through the sentence or through the paragraph or through the line, you know, through the stanza. I’m always thinking about it from that point of view, like I’m trying to kind of anticipate and manufacture certain levels of reaction, or at least create a particular space for a certain set of reactions.
To me, that kind of effect of being able to move in and out of certain pacing and metre and measure is really important to me. As you say, you said it differently, but I think in a in a bit more of a sensible manner. I’m kind of running on instinct more with it.
ryan fitzpatrick
Well, more utilitarian maybe? I don’t know.
Jonathan Ball
But I like what you’re saying, and it is very much I what I think I have unconsciously been thinking about it. When I pick one over the other, it sometimes will be for that effect. I have one poem sequence, “Psycho,” in The Politics of Knives, which is all about the Hitchcock movie. It has all those tricks you’re talking about.
In one of the poems, actually, if you put line breaks in, it actually is a perfectly properly metred poem with end rhymes, but I just put it into prose. And I wouldn’t normally do that, but I did in that one particular instance, because it weirdly, by having a lined poem shaped like prose, just kind of jolted everybody.
It kind of jolts the reader in the poem that happens right after the shower murder, and then it’s like what is happening next, you know? It’s all for really particular effects and I just feel like I have that play. I can even literally have metred, lined poetry inside the prose because you don’t expect it now.
ryan fitzpatrick
Yeah. I don’t have it handy, but that reminds me of Larissa Lai’s newest book, Iron Goddess of Mercy. That dynamic of metrically rhymed sections in a prose paragraph is one of the things that struck me about that book, at least once I realized I had to start reading it aloud.
It was doing what you’re identifying — in the middle of these prose bricks, there would be a section that was really kind of metered and rhymed out, almost like a spoken word piece, but within this other form, and it was really interesting that, once I started reading it aloud, I could hear the poem inside the poem. And the prose was not obscuring it, but also doing other things at the same time.
Jonathan Ball
I haven’t read it, but I’m going to have to pick it up now that I really know it exists. I missed that one. But yeah, just to kind of circle a little bit backwards, one of the poems that I always think about is this book by Jenny Boully, which actually purports to be a book of essays, called The Book of Beginnings and Endings. What it really is are conceptual prose poems, where what Boully has done is every two pages is sort of a different beginning page and ending page of an imaginary novel or essay collection that you aren’t reading.
So, you know, page three is like the first page of some imaginary book, page four is the last page of some imaginary book, and so on and so forth. And they they’re all different fonts. They’re all about different topics. They all are these little fragments of beginnings and endings. They’re novels or essays or just other books. And I feel like that is the kind of thing that you can really do in prose poetry that you can’t precisely do in other types of poetry especially, or even like, you know, in a novel form.
She can really work with a fragment, you can have a fragment of narrative or a fragment of an essay, you can have a fragment of a poem, and it can have a conceptual structuring, you know, you can have a book that has structure and always even has, in some ways, the pace of a novel or the pace and build of a collection or something, but yet, actually doesn’t have any of those things.
You can approximate things. I’m really interested in reading and writing things that approximate other things, but aren’t precisely them, for whatever reason. I like the idea that you can play around with narrative, you can play around with the essay, you can play with these different forms, but not really be doing them. You can kind of play around with the freedom of poetry, but inside of the really structured architecture of prose.
ryan fitzpatrick
The way you’re talking reminds me of that Cassandra Blanchard book, Fresh Pack of Smokes, which reads like a series of flash fictions, but because it’s filed under poetry it can play fast and loose with its narrative structures.
It’s fragmentary, maybe not on the level of the sentence, but the paragraphs don’t flow in any kind of necessary order. They’re all connected. But putting it under poetry instead of memoir loosens things up a bit.
Jonathan Ball
Yeah, exactly. I think that’s a great way to put it. It lets her play with that genre and the form of the memoir, but not really be locked into it, and not even necessarily having to structure it chronologically. Not having to even fully identify with it if the poet doesn’t want to.
ryan fitzpatrick
We could say the same thing about poetic research, which is a growing buzzword. Prose poetry is one of the forms that works really well for poetic research. I’ve got in front of me, as examples of this, two books that are very different, but are both prose poetry invested in research.
One is Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, which uses the essay form and prose poem together. There are longer essays in the book, but a lot of it is taken up with these smaller, paragraph-long essays about antiblack microaggression. And so, Rankine is able to use the prose poem as a venue, rather than making a really clear linear argument, to kind-of accrete these little moments and let the argument happen through the accretion of these prose poems.
The other one is Jordan Abel’s Un/inhabited, which is also a research piece, but it’s invested in creating and intervening in datasets around settler-colonial storytelling. Un/inhabited looks at a massive number of public-domain Western novels. Each poem is the result of a keyword search. He would look for words that are tied to settler colonialism in a certain way.
So, “territory,” or “extracted,” or “uninhabited.” And he would do a keyword search through all these novels, and he would pull the sentences and accrete them into a massive prose poem, and then ask the reader to sort through them as if they were just sorting through a stack of data.
So, I think, in those two ways, the prose poem becomes an interesting venue for poetic research where there doesn’t have to be a strict conclusion. It’s looser, maybe the same way we’re talking about Blanchard’s book, or Boully’s book in terms of getting rid of the middles of these pieces. But it can carry some of the weight of prose but like, loosen it up. Fragmented is the word I think you used.
Jonathan Ball
Well in some of the cases you’re talking about they’re literally working with fragments. And it’s not like in lined poetry you can’t work with fragments. In fact, often the line itself is its own little fragment. But I think that you hit on something, maybe without really realizing it, that kind of hearkens back to the earlier discussion a bit, which is that you have this audience anticipation in a lined poem that you’re going to provide a conclusion.
Whereas prose poems so often end mid-sentence, and there’s this way in which I think it has a different sort of receptivity. As if there’s just a different effect to ending mid-sentence or having a stream of fragments that don’t really have grammar, but are almost placeholding where grammar might be. I just feel like that accretion effect is one you can just physically see in a prose form more.
In The Politics of Knives, I concluded that book with a really long, blocky prose poem called “That Most Terrible of Dogs,” where I was doing a lot of that kind of accretion of certain types of language, which I’ve gotten from spam searches and things like this. And I started, you know, kind of treating it and doing different things. But then I just started compiling it as this weird blocky tower. It was inspired, formally speaking, by Robert Fitterman’s This Window Makes Me Feel, which is one of my favourite books of prose poetry.
ryan fitzpatrick
Isn’t it a collection of sentences? A response to 9/11?
Jonathan Ball
Yeah, it’s basically a 9/11 book. But, structurally speaking — for people haven’t seen that book, it is free online at https://www.ubu.com/ubu/fitterman_window.html, I don’t know if it’s really available otherwise — every sentence of This Window Makes Me Feel what he’s done basically is Google-searched for “makes me feel,” taken that phrase, and added “this window” in front of it.
What you get is weirdly all kind of talking around the sentiment of sadness and melancholy that, in a way, attaches itself to the terrorist event and aftermath. But what I really liked about it is that it’s physically structured like a big block or chain of text. There’s a way in which it just looks like a wall.
When it’s in prose like that, if you have no indentation and just go to the end of the line, it’s like a wall of text, page after page. You can have a wall of text, and there’s a real emotional effect, I think, in seeing that. You don’t get a break, in a certain way. It kind of becomes exhausting.
ryan fitzpatrick
Yeah, the book that I thought about in regards to that in prose poetry was Steve McCaffrey’s The Black Debt, which is a book that I think, if you’re serious poet, you should read — but at the same time, I have a hard time recommending it to anyone.
I really think it’s a book you should try to read in a single sitting even though that sitting will probably be like four or five hours, because it works intensively on a micro-level without that nice tidy frame that Fitterman gives us.
McCaffrey’s book is in two parts. And the first part is kind of just all these phrases and sentences that are just linked by commas. So, there’s no closure to the thinking. And then the second half is just a single run-on for almost 100 pages. It’s just a brick of text. It adds up but it doesn’t add up in in any kind of way that gives you thematic closure or anything like that.
You start spotting patterns in the language, and there’s a kind of satisfaction in that, especially if you read the whole thing in one sitting. But really it dodges meaning in a certain way unless the meaning is just like the sensation of staring at the chyron at the bottom of the CNN screen.
I remember when I was a kid driving around Calgary and there’d be the signs that would just be running text. And you would see it for like 30 seconds as you’re driving by and you’d get like, two and a half sentences worth of information. I think McCaffrey’s book gives you the sensation of just standing in front of this moving chyron of never-ending text. So weird, but really interesting.
Jonathan Ball
Yeah, it’s a weird thing to think about as literary value, but I think a certain type of prose poem, a long prose poem, can really become an endurance test. And it can be exhausting. And it can kind of do that in a way that poetry just often can’t, and maybe doesn’t want to, right?
But, you know, if you’re trying to get at that feeling, or that emotion, or even just put the reader through a wringer, in a manner of speaking, prose poetry has that opportunity to just start challenging your endurance in that manner.
ryan fitzpatrick
Let me let me ask you the opposite, then. If, on one side, we’ve got these prose poems that take length to the extreme, what do you make of prose poems that are more minimalist, like the short paragraph prose poem?
Because the other book that I thought of right away was Harryette Mullen’s Trimmings, which is a book that uses the language of fashion to think around the relationship between fashion and appearance and race. But all the lines, all the sentences in it, are composed of clipped phrases or words, often connected very gently with commas.
It’s almost the opposite of McCaffrey’s text. All the pages are these minimalist paragraphs.
Jonathan Ball
I kind of like both approaches. What I found for myself is I’ll tend to see myself combining them, I’ll do a sequence of shorter paragraph poems but they’ll drag out across a sequence, then I’ll try to vary the pacing of how long one is, and how short one is. I like to go in-between and take from both sides of it, personally.
But as a reader, I really, I really like a minimalist poem, in many respects. I can appreciate the kind of wall of text ones and some of my favourite books are like that, but they have to really work, you know? They have to really continually reward you on a really frequent basis, almost like when you’re playing a video game.
Whereas a shorter, more minimalist, tight prose poem I tend to appreciate a bit more easily. And I think I like variety across the book. So again, I like it best when I see it in sequence. I don’t tend to like short prose poems that are just standalone.
For me, it just has to do with how I value narrative voice so much and what I always am looking for, or trying to produce, is some sort of off-kilter narrative voice. I just find it’s something that, unless you have some length, you can’t really do a lot with the voice. Whereas a short snippet can work if it’s stacked and accreted with other ones.
ryan fitzpatrick
And if you’ve got 60 pages worth of them, they can build in a certain way.
Jonathan Ball
Exactly. So, ryan, what do you think ruins a prose poem?
ryan fitzpatrick
I think partly it depends on the reader and what the reader wants. I was trying to think, what do people regard as bad prose poetry? And I always go back to that ’80s/’90s moment where there were people just imitating theory.
Does that make a bad prose poem? Just pages and pages of abstraction in a prose brick? You asked before, what sets apart a good prose poem from the ones we dread? I’m not sure what the ones I dread are.
Jonathan Ball
I kind of dread them all. But I think the reason is because I so rarely see a prose poem I really, really, truly enjoy. Even though I love the form.
I kind of like how it fails to be prose and fails to be poem, precisely, I like that in-between space. But I find that, for me, the ones I don’t like are those that are too close to being prose, or too close to being poetry.
There was trend, as you note, where every one of them was filled with abstracted theory. To me, that was getting too close to being an essay. I like it when it’s kind of in-between being an essay and being a poem and being, you know, maybe a story. I don’t like when it moves too close to any one of those.
Because once it is a story, it’s not enough. It doesn’t have enough narrative drive anymore to be a really good story. It’s like lousy flash fiction, then. If it moves too close to being an essay, like you said, it becomes too abstracted, and there’s no imagery to cling on to, there’s nothing concrete there. It feels pretentious. I feel like the ideas aren’t actually glomming on to a metaphor, a concrete image that will actually increase their complexity. And so, it kind of starts to get into this weird pretension space.
And if it gets too close to being poetry, then I just start to feel like it’s shapeless, a little bit, like it doesn’t have the rigor of a strong verse poem, so to me like that in-between space is really cool, where the things are overlapping in their Venn diagram, or whatever. And we’re getting that weird little gap, where they’re sort of failing to be all these things and therefore kind of becoming their own thing, you know?
ryan fitzpatrick
Yeah. That makes sense. Because once you started talking, I was like, “oh, yeah, the ones I actually dread are the ones that when I read them, I end up asking, ‘well, why isn’t this just a novel? Why didn’t you just write a novel?’”
Jonathan Ball
They were too lazy to write a novel and they thought writing a prose poem would be easier. I don’t know if that’s true, ever. But it’s just how it feels to me.
ryan fitzpatrick
I’ve read a few books in the last few years that are kind of narrative long forms that feel like failed novels. And I won’t mention them because that feels a bit too “shots fired” for me. But I do think a writer might be working with narrative or maybe with argument, like argument or research, and prose poetry is good at those things. But it also needs to do something else.
Is defamiliarization that thing? Maybe the prose poem needs to defamiliarize the process of writing a story or presenting research? I’ve been talking to a few younger writers recently who are grappling with those genre lines and it’s tough to give them any concrete definitions or rubrics as to when their prose poems are “poetic enough,” because the history of the form is messy — productively messy, but messy nonetheless.
Jonathan Ball
I think what literary language does so well is defamiliarize language, but I think for a prose poem there’s a level where it’s defamiliarizing the actual form or the genre that it’s participating in a little bit too. When it works well, to me, it’s kind of almost standoffish in that sort way where you can’t pin down what’s happening at any point really well.
I like that kind of thing. I always wonder, is it just my taste that this thing is better than the other thing and it’s not really justifiable? Or am I on to something in the sense that I’ve got a reason to dislike this thing or to like it. I don’t know if it does boil down to just my taste maybe. But I feel that when I see the trends happening — you’ll see a trend in poetry or a trend in the novel or whatever — and insofar as I see trends in prose poetry, I find it’s like everybody will start doing one thing, and it’ll bring them closer to one form.
It will get closer to memoir, or it’ll get closer to an essay or get closer to just a poem or closer to flash fiction. Once we have those trends happening, it just starts to lose interest to me. Just gets less radical and exciting, because it’s not surprising me anymore.
ryan fitzpatrick
Yeah. The in-between is the strength of prose poetry is what you’re saying, right?
Jonathan Ball
Yeah, to me anyway. I think also if you just really just focus on the name “prose poetry,” I think the biggest problem I see is when it just doesn’t have actual poetic qualities. It really is just indistinguishable from prose.
ryan fitzpatrick
I think that bothers me less than it bothers you. I don’t mind it if it makes up for it in some other way. Like, if it’s really prosaic, but it’s short, right? It kind of takes advantage of the form in this other way by being fragmentary.
It’s just a vignette or something because otherwise, if it’s long, and it’s just prosaic, maybe it’s just an essay, or just a story, or just a — maybe I shouldn’t say “just,” but the piece might be a different genre completely.
Jonathan Ball
I just find when I’m flipping through a book (because I read a lot of poetry books), and it’s mostly verse poetry, then all of a sudden you turn the page and it’s a prose poem there… I just feel like, because they weren’t doing that for the last 30 pages in a 70-page book, it just feels like there’s no pattern that’s been established of doing it. Why are you doing it now?
And there can be a really good reason. And sometimes they surprise me. But I find so often it feels like it lacks effort and is a lazier construction, often. I am most known probably for writing poetry, but actually what I mostly do is write prose, and I think that I write prose in a way where I’d say my interest is a bit more stylistically motivated. I want to say I’m a bit of a stylist, in a sense. I can do different styles. Sometimes I’ll do a real ornate, baroque kind of style. And other times I’ll have a stripped-down minimalist style. But the point is that I know how to do those two styles. And so, when I see a piece of prose poetry, and I see where they could have tightened that sentence, or they could have had some interior rhyme there, if they really wanted, by just using this word or that, it feels a little underdeveloped.
Maybe that’s what it is. I want it to be in an in-between space, but I don’t want it to feel undeveloped or unbaked or whatever.
ryan fitzpatrick
I will say, in defense of prose poetry — with the example you gave of this prose poem being dropped into this middle of this hypothetical book — I think that’s less of a problem of the prose poem and more of a problem of the editorial process. I think a lot of times something that looks like a bad choice, if it’s done over time, if it’s repeated, it becomes a stylistic choice, right?
If they’re extra words, or if a sentence should have been clipped or trimmed or whatever in an isolated prose poem, if that’s an element of 10 prose poems, and it’s a quality of the writing, then it becomes a stylistic choice and you can agree or disagree with that choice, but it shifts the way we can read and understand it.
Jonathan Ball
You’re probably right. I’m probably just reacting more to isolated examples.
ryan fitzpatrick
Yeah, well, I ask these questions, too. I’ll read books and be like, “Oh, why suddenly is this here? Is this book a grab bag now?”
Jonathan Ball
Which maybe is unfair, but that’s often how I will feel. And then it probably biases me against a particular piece. Well, what else do you think? Any last words for prose poetry, in defense or in support of prose poetry? What haven’t you seen in prose poems that you want to see?
ryan fitzpatrick
What haven’t I seen in a prose poem? Who knows? What haven’t I seen in this interview? I’m shocked we never mentioned Gertrude Stein once.
Jonathan Ball
Should we? Now it’s too late.
ryan fitzpatrick
Maybe? I feel like I’ve seen a lot of different ways the prose poem can be used, from run-on sentences to like short clipped phrases to polemics and narrative. I think there’s still a lot of juice in the form, but I also think it’s been used in a lot of different ways.
Jonathan Ball
Yeah, that’s what I often find exciting, you know, this is one thing I really like about sequences or books or prose poetry, is it they start to capture a little bit of the strength and power of the novel. The defining quality of the novel was that it was a container that you could can put other artworks inside. But it itself wasn’t containable by other artworks. This was Bakhtin’s idea. You can put poetry into the novel and it remains a novel, you can put a photograph in a novel, you can put a drawing in the novel. You can put anything in the novel and it still remains a novel. It can kind of subsume different art forms into itself without losing its quality. Whereas, you can’t put a novel into a poem.
ryan fitzpatrick
When you talk about a sequence of prose poems, I think with the long or the sequential poem you can do some of that stuff. I feel I can put a lot into a long poem. Maybe not a whole novel, though maybe you’d be able to.
Jonathan Ball
If you can, all of a sudden, it’s a prose poem. Then you’ve got a poem inside of that. You can do things like that. So, it becomes kind of the reverse. You have a prose block in the middle of an otherwise-verse poem. I just find it’s less successful for whatever reason.
ryan fitzpatrick
Yeah. I think, for me, the examples would be books that absolutely straddle the line. In CanLit, the classic example maybe is Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. Is that a book of poetry? Or is it a novel?
And then there’s Dennis Cooley’s expansion/perversion/rip-off of Billy the Kid, Bloody Jack, which is five times longer and way weirder.
Jonathan Ball
Yeah. Cooley’s poetry is probably where I saw prose poems the first time too. I’m trying to think precisely because I haven’t read Bloody Jack for a while. But I want to say it features a prose poem or two, and that’s maybe where I would have encountered them first. Cooley was one of my big mentors and teachers when I started getting deep into poetry.
ryan fitzpatrick
Oh, yeah. Both of those are bouncing between lined poems and prose poems. So, maybe it’s in that space between the novel and the long poem, right? Where suddenly prose poetry can come in as one flavour of that, or someone like Nicole Brossard, who’s writing in-between those forms as well.
We could classify a lot of it as prose poetry, but it’s a fragmented novel at the same time. So, prose poetry is interesting, because it slides into these other genres sometimes, right? You can make the argument about a lot of avant-garde fiction that if it’s not prose poetry, it’s prose-poetry adjacent.
Jonathan Ball
If it’s not prose poetry, what is? Another big topic this ties to, that we maybe don’t have time to get into, is the joke. I feel like prose poetry in a weird way has that joke structure to it, like you’re kind of in a book of poems, and you suddenly come across something that’s not really a poem, but you’re being asked to receive it as one. That kind of mixed signal.
That’s a better way to put it probably, mixed signals. I like the mixed signal as an aesthetic value in a weird way. Well, final thoughts on prose poems, Ryan?
ryan fitzpatrick
They’re great. If you’re reading this right now, once you’re done, go read some prose poems.
