folio : short takes on the prose poem
Call of the Wild? A Few Thoughts on Prose Poems
I’ve heard and read a couple of interviews with Rosmarie Waldrop in which she has spoken of prose poems as distressing the sentence (versus the stress of regular meter that might be employed in a lineated poem). “Distressed” as akin to anxiety, the uncertainty she ascribes to the open form of the prose poem, not knowing where it’s going to take her.
The allure of the prose poem lies in the bewilderment of the form itself. Many of my prose poems have fully justified margins that impose a box-like border around the text. Visually, these poems appear controlled, the text contained, trapped if you will, and stable within the confines of the unbudgeable margins.
When I say the form bewilders, I mean bewilder in the etymological sense of being led into the wilds. The appeal of the prose poem is that it can simultaneously be a structure of both constraint and disruption. The constraint of four walls inside which is housed the sometimes volatile energy of the text.
The challenge for me is how to give the text definition, how to shape it sonically, how to let the lines stretch their legs in this confined space. Without line breaks doing some of the work to create tension, anticipation, or rhythm, I try to “work” the line itself, controlling pacing, movement, and modulation with a rigorous deployment of punctuation, and by choosing language that is as historically and musically “loaded” as possible. I imagine the line as being like a tug-of-war rope with which you can control the tension by how much or how little slack you give it; fastidious attention to phraseology and punctuation finetunes the tempo and music of the line. My one cheat, my concession to lineation, is that I will, as with “A Skull Sectioned,” sometimes break lines between stanzas…in the open wild of the prose poem, you also have to trust your instincts.
Studies of an Ox’s Heart, c.1511–13
(after Leonardo daVinci)
1
The long incision. The incipient voyage from aortic arch to thoracic inlet. Small-particled is the corpuscled city. (Bustling opuscula.) A city of animal electricity. A lowing cycling mass. Calm the cowed heart. Still the browbeating heart. Cool the controversial hearthstone. Let the blade intervene where the divine intersects bovinity.
2
Pour wax into the gate of an ox’s heart. Close the small doors of the heart via a template of hardened wax, a temple of vital gases, water with grass seed suspension, glass blown through a cast of calcined gypsum, plaster of Santo Spirito. Spiritous dissection, blood-sooty vapors, the dense dance of the Renaissance counts down a Galenic pulse. Musculo vivicare. Transit the venous. Bypass the arterial. Underscore the two-part cantus firmus in heat and motion.
(The fixed heart burns slow, spurns fervor.)
A Skull Sectioned, c.1489
(after Leonardo da Vinci)
Each frail luminous globe takes flight...
(Baudelaire)
Saw off the barbaric ice, the medieval glacial morbidity.
Nip the postmortem mid-whiff ’midst cold slab, metal, the drifting snow of discover and unearth. Midwinter the cut-time.
Da capo, da capo. From the head a deceptive cadence. Trip the tempo’d trepanum, the singing bone saw, the ink drawn fantastic
through ductus nasolacrimalis, through the paranasal sinuses, through a well-chosen cross-section of foramen mentale.
Then cut across the canalis mandibulae in the moments it takes to murmur a Miserere. Have mercy
on the little city. The merciful cadaver. The bony cittadella.
“A Skull Sectioned, c. 1489'” by Sylvia Legris, from THE HIDEOUS HIDDEN, copyright ©2016 by Sylvia Legris. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
'”Studies of an Ox’s Heart, c. 1511–13'” by Sylvia Legris, from THE HIDEOUS HIDDEN, copyright ©2016 by Sylvia Legris. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
