folio : short takes on the prose poem
I spent my twenties and into my thirties engaged in poems that relied on the visual and breath pause and stagger of the line-break, as my compositional unit evolved from and through the single poem to the chapbook to the full-length manuscript. My poems gathered into suites and sequences, one piece building directly upon another. I engaged with the form of the serial/long poem, centred at first on more Canadian traditions, extending my reading and research backwards through TISH to Black Mountain, and the San Francisco Renaissance. Form is a moving target, after all, and eventually, moving through my thirties and into my forties, I became interested in the prose poem sentence and how it flows; just as much through breath as through water.
My attentions around my sense of the prose poem originally gathered around the work of poets such as Robert Kroetsch and Nicole Markotić, Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje, Sylvia Legris and Lisa Roberson, Margaret Christakos and George Bowering. I studied Andrew Suknaski’s “loping, coyote lines” and rode them off the ends of John Newlove’s horizon. I fell deep into every other Anne Carson collection. I listened to the rhythms of Robert Creeley, and his single threads built out of staggered, staccato fragments. I waded through William Carlos Williams, but found clearer reception via Jack Spicer. I revelled in Richard Brautigan’s trout streams. Utilizing a loose framework of form, my own sense of the lyric weaves together threads of domestic, literature, politics, social media, family interactions and simply whatever elements might strike my attention into something that blends into a particular kind of straight line; my poems explore a lyric kind of poem-essay, a “beautiful thinking” propelled by the examples of poets such as Phil Hall, Erín Moure and Barry McKinnon. It is through the form of the poem that I work to figure out how this (gesticulates wildly) all works.
Around the spring or early summer of 2010, Toronto poets Stephen Cain and Sharon Harris gifted me a copy of Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (Burning Deck, 2000), an anthology edited and translated by American poet Norma Cole. This was a book that would, in fact, become not only a particular revelation, but one that fueled an enormous shift. Suspecting that my work had begun to lean too hard on the line break, the rhythm and breath of those visual staggers, I considered the prose poem: what might happen if I were to work a full manuscript without a single line break? Through this, my attentions drifted towards American poets such as Rosmarie Waldrop and Anna Gurton-Wachter, Cole Swensen and Pattie McCarthy, Julie Carr and Lorine Niedecker, Amelia Martens and Sawako Nakayasu, the latter two who, through the examples of their published work, directly prompted the original composition of what became the poetry collection the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022). Waldrop has since emerged as one of my most important poets, and I’ve always at least two or three of her titles in arm’s reach of my desk.
I’ve somehow managed to exclusively work within the frame of the sentence, if not necessarily through the exclusive prose block, since. The follow-up to the book of smaller (a collection composed across the length and breadth of 2017) was “Book of Magazine Verse,” a manuscript which led, immediately and directly, into “the book of sentences,” a collection I put the final touches upon around Christmas, before it might leave the bounds of our house. Concurrent to “Book of Magazine Verse,” thanks to a prompt via Anna Gurton-Wachter’s work, I spent six week composing the chapbook-length prose sequence snow day (above/ground press, 2018), a poem that became the anchor of an eventual full-length manuscript of the same name. As Michael Ondaatje paraphrased Jack Spicer: The poems can no better live on their own as can we.
More recently, I’ve been reading and rereading Etel Adnan, Valzhyna Mort and Caroline Knox. I’ve discovered the work of Johannes Göransson and Benjamin Niespodziany. While the poems below emerge from the manuscript “the book of sentences,” I’ve been, since January, feeling out poems in a manuscript so-far titled “Autobiography,” furthering a thread from that original prose poem turn. Or is that a tether?
Autobiography
Cataracts
are not grammatically correct. We took the surgeon’s rewrites
into Stittsville, up the valley. Pembroke, shores. My vistas
mosaics of the dead and half-remembered.
To say: I could not see. A blur, of too much light; the light was brown.
Rosmarie Waldrop: The flesh of a bird.
Surgeon, cool gel coats my eye. The order of sleep and the occasion
of the bright light. Creates a hole in space.
The facts of walking, talking. Should have brought a book.
This is an oversimplification. Preoccupations, bargain. What I could
not find in the dark.
With two hands: mature cataracts, filtered perceptions
amplified. Heart rate challenged every sentence written.
The nurse, a headscarf tartan, Clan MacLeod. How did you know?
The blood will bring forth flowers, stately in-fills. It carried
the motion. My surgeon’s edits, a break in linearity. Temperament.
Post-op
cookie, juice. Further cookies for the road.
My usual fumbling way. The circulation system
of a streetscape I can see. Highway 17
does not believe in eloquence. Little chapters. A roadside Noah’s Ark.
We kept on driving. There were other bearings that required us.
Autobiography
Neither a short talk nor a short walk. Once upon a time.
This poem might take one hundred years.
The plain language of the earth. Our youngest monologues
the long grass, anticipating mowers. In lockdown,
the world
is through this window.
A period, begins. This point of exclamation.
I said, come out. To help determine rhythm. A jogger, passes.
To the subject of the phrase. Did Heisenberg compliment
each morning
with a dab of milk or cream, or neither? Tea or
coffee? This blend
of molecules and dust. I take my coffee, black.
Outside, slippers hold grammatical function. Gain a
perfect edge.
With minimal cars, a sweeter music. The syntactic ambiguity
of
the madman in the yard.
I let the line breaks, break. A hesitation, fragments.
Morning meditations on poetics. Our panorama of apple
blossoms,
cherry-coloured. Soon they’ll stain the windshield.
No wonder I can’t sleep.
