folio : (further) short takes on the prose poem
Prose Poem on the Prose Poem
Dear
Martha,
I'm made of pure light and I'm wondering how does time work in the prose poem?
I mean, my arms are amber and you know how content unfolds in a way that's
different than poetry? Oh yeah. Glorious. And my arms are filled with sunsets.
I sit here on the beaches of the English language and consider how does tone
work in the prose poem? How does prose poetry refer to poetry or to fiction or
other prose? At the time of the occurrence it was noticed that both parties
were deceased. They'd snuffed it. Martha, we're dead. Gone. And then, this guy
comes up to me and says, "Genre mixing? There was an Irishman, a Frenchman
and once upon a time there was a large fridge and we are mixing jokes, fables,
stories and so on. You better believe it. Let's play with what we think is
going on, my sweet rose, my sandpaper, my oatmeal cerebellum, O charlie bravo claptrap,
42 plus 11 minus 40 and though we are no longer, we dance on the surf of hope
and possibility, mudpuppies and chloroform. Sweet Jesus, I'm on fire. I’m able
to use the resources of the poem and of prose, sometimes one, sometimes the
other, sometimes a point in between—oh! expectations, how we like to play with
expectorations. Yeah, there are linebreaks in the prose poem! The reader is
always kinda expecting them, but they’re deferred, perhaps forever. No, there is only one linebreak and it is at
the end of an infinite line (or maybe Zeno-paradox-like, the linebreak—i.e.
time, story, plot, form—is that place between beginning and end that is always
halfway, then halfway between that, and halfway between that and…) Maybe the
prose poem will break into poetry, or maybe story. It’s a cryptid or a chimera
form. And in the meantime there are rhythms, rhythththmthms, the rhythms of anticipation,
the future, tradition, possibility, a kind of eschatological meter, not
tetrameter, or hexameter but always (n+1)meter. The force that through the
green poem drives the prose. And what red story drives the poem which is
and isn’t there, a ghost hovering in or above or behind the prose, always in
that betweenworld of neverrest, hauntological.
Yours sincerely,
Gary Barwin is a writer, performer and multimedia artist based in Hamilton, Ontario. His latest books are Imagining Imagining: Essays on Language, Identity and Infinity (Wolsak & Wynn, forthcoming Nov 2023) and Portal, a collection visual poems (Potential Books UK, forthcoming Sept 2023.) His novel Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy is this year’s Hamilton Reads choice. garybarwin.com