folio : (further) short takes on the prose poem
My Take on the Prose Poem
In the final paragraph of Charles Simic’s short essay ‘The Poetry of Village Idiots’ he says the following about the prose poem:
1/ “I regard the comic spirit as its true muse.”
2/ “Playful and irreverent treatment of every subject is usually the custom.”
3/ “In order to free poetry of its mannerisms and tics, the prose poem must not take itself too seriously.”
4/ “Impossible to write, illegitimate in the eyes of so many poets and critics, it must remain a pariah and an object of ridicule to survive.”
These are all reasons I love the prose poem so much. It’s the perfect playpen for impertinence. It knows full well that life is ridiculous. That we are ridiculous. This is why it lends itself so well to absurdism —to mocking the rituals we hold dear, mocking life, mocking death, mocking the self—and why it is the ultimate form for the surreal and absurd. The prose poem is doing what absurdity does, but in form. It is a mocking form. It mocks poetry, of which it is part of. The prose poem feeds on ridicule, its where it gets its power from. By mocking itself first, it takes back the power from the oppressor. Whoever or whatever that may be. The prose poem is a space to joyfully refuse to be oppressed or dictated to. It is a place to flip the bad stuff, and let it serve as entertainment instead.
To make us laugh and give us a release. To give to us, what Thomas Hobbes called, the “sudden glory” of laughter, that we so desperately need.
The Faux Omission of a Danish Physician
A lemming is eaten by an artic fox. I for one am not sure what to do with that information. Or indeed what to do with any of the information I have encountered today. Perhaps I should put it in my pipe and smoke it. But what if I don’t want to smoke it? What if I would rather snort it and use the pipe for something else entirely. Perhaps for a spin-the-bottle type game at a party. Spin-the-pipe has a ring to it. I for one would like to be at that party. Of course, I am lying. I would much rather be at the party where the pipe is used as a prize in pass-the-parcel, or one in which a giant pipe is used as for beating a piñata. This would not be utilising the pipe’s finest qualities, though. So, I can’t help but think I am doing it a great disservice. This all came from me googling ‘lemming’, by the way. For no other reason than today I was drawn to lemmings. Was it because Zeigler of Strasbourg in the 1530s proposed the theory that the creatures fell from the sky during stormy weather and then died suddenly when the grass grows in Spring? Was it the common misconception that lemmings are driven to commit mass suicide when they migrate by jumping off cliffs? No. But for some reason all this does add to the charm and allure of the lemming. Artic foxes are eaten by golden eagles, wolverines and grizzly bears, should you be wondering. But enough Wikipedia for one day, let us finish with a thought for all the pipes that won’t be smoked due to their decline in popularity, and for the geographer Zeigler of Strasbourg, who doesn’t have his own Wikipedia page, despite starting this whole lemmings-out-of-the-sky thing, or for Ole Worm, the Danish physician who does have his own Wikipedia page, but, due to the fact his theory was only slightly different to Zeigler, claiming the rodents were merely carried on the breeze, I decided to omit entirely from this lemming (and pipe-based) prose poem.
Vik Shirley is a poet, writer, and editor from Bristol, England now living in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her collection, The Continued Closure of the Blue Door (HVTN), her pamphlets, Corpses (Sublunary Editions), Grotesquerie for the Apocalypse (Beir Bua) and Poets (The Red Ceilings Press), and her book of photo-poetry Disrupted Blue and other poems on Polaroid (Hesterglock) were all published 2020-2022. Her chthonic sequel to Corpses, Notes from the Underworld (Sublunary Editions), will be published in Autumn, as will Strangers Wave: Joy Division Photo Poems (zimZalla). Vik’s work has appeared in such places as Poetry London, The Rialto, Magma, 3am Magazine, Shearsman and Tears in the Fence, in America: Gone Lawn, Rejection Letters, The Indianapolis Review and Tiny Molecules. Vik’s work has featured in many anthologies, most recently in Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, edited by Peter Johnson and Cassandra Atherton. Vik has a PhD in Dark Humour and the Surreal in Poetry from the University of Birmingham. She is Associate Editor of Sublunary Editions and Co-Editor of Surreal-Absurd for Mercurius magazine.