Eve Joseph : short takes on the prose poem

 folio : short takes on the prose poem

 

 

 

 

 

I love prose poetry. There is something about the shape of the form that encourages ranging thought at the same time it demands concise imagery. It is a loping wolf that places each paw precisely. I don’t remember when I first encountered the form. There was no aha moment; rather, my love of the prose poem grew gradually. The more I read, the more I was drawn to its energy and to the internal leaps that filled me with delight. I am drawn to how the prose poem lobbies against narrative – at least the prose poems I am most strongly attracted to – and asks instead for poems built on associations and resonances. With prose poetry it often feels as if I’m wrestling with myself, trying to break through the known into something strange and new. I have an ongoing battle with the form. On the one hand, I love how it insists that I play and let go of the rational; on the other, it can’t be nonsense. The poem has to reach for, and find, what is true and authentic. There is, for me, an element of magic in a successful prose poem having to do with language and the small detonations contained within.

 

 

intertidal zone

When I close my eyes a tide pool appears. A little trapped world swims behind my eyelids. All the creatures you’d expect to be there are there. Sea urchins, plankton, invertebrates. The things left stranded when the tide goes out. As a child I counted to one hundred while the others hid. Where are you? I called out. Nobody answered in the lengthening shadows. Have you not learned by now that you can’t force it? That what wants to stay hidden stays hidden? I am happiest with my eyes closed. Some floaters wave as they pass. One, that looks just like my brother, winks as it drifts by with the jerky movements of a seahorse.

 

 

hard evidence

In the days when proof of infidelity was needed to obtain a divorce, my father hired a call girl with scarlet lips to pose in bed with him. In 1958, this was evidence. My mother went before the magistrate with a wounded bird in her pocket and begged for an allowance to buy seed. It was not for herself, she said, but for the starving wrens and their babies. After my father left, she sold pampas grass to the local florist to make ends meet. If he’d had a cell phone on Mount Moriah, Abraham could have recorded God’s voice commanding him to sacrifice Isaac. A body cam would have been even better.  That would have stood up in court. That would have silenced the naysayers once and for all.

 

 

 

 

 

Eve Joseph lives and writes on the unceded traditional territories of the Lekwungen peoples. Her first two books of poetry The Startled Heart (Oolichan, 2004) and The Secret Signature of Things (Brick, 2010) were both nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Award. Her nonfiction book In the Slender Margin was published by HarperCollins in 2014 and won the Hubert Evans award for nonfiction. Her most recent book of poetry Quarrels (Anvil, 2018) was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Award and won the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize. 

 

Eve Joseph : Three prose poems

process

For ten years now I have written the same line, erased it and written it over again. In this way I have filled hundreds of notebooks. Each day I get closer to Giacometti’s fine filagree of nothing. The fretwork of the mind. My masterpiece will return music to the shuttered Symphony Centre. Descending from the evening sky it will break open into 150,000 birds, alighting like some great airborne beast, onto the outstretched arms of waiting trees. In the forest, flautists are warming up in soundproof huts. It is only a matter of hours now. The work went well this morning. As is often the case, sorrow entered with a flutter. A hand darkened the sun and I was left wondering who will feed the animals when the hunger arrives?

 

 

reflection

In the kitchen, the little piece of cheese in the mousetrap is hard and shiny as a diamond. There’s a round loaf of bread on the table and a newspaper on the floor. A nightgown is warming on the wrought iron vent in the bathroom. After my bath my mother stands me on the toilet seat and pats me down with talcum powder. In the medicine cabinet mirror I look like a butoh dancer. It doesn’t matter that the woman I am dancing with is dead. She moves my arms up and outwards in slow motion. I can’t tell if the child I was then is the same as the one I’m becoming now.

 

 

geriatric psych unit

My first patient, Tony, believed he was a fish. Lois, an alcoholic with schizoaffective disorder, insisted on giving me five dollars from the scuffed clutch bag she kept under her mattress. “Loneliness,” she said, “is a kind of poverty, too.” We didn’t need a building. On the boulevard, we sank into the velvet couch with a free sign on it. Tony looked for his relatives in the fish tank. Not everything is as it seems. I was happy knowing I could pick up a cheap copy of Cuckoo’s Nest from Harry O’Day’s Used Bookstore. I wanted to reread it. Particularly the bit where the Chief says, “It’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.”

 

 

 

 

 

Eve Joseph lives and writes on the unceded traditional territories of the Lekwungen peoples. Her first two books of poetry The Startled Heart (Oolichan, 2004) and The Secret Signature of Things (Brick, 2010) were both nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Award. Her nonfiction book In the Slender Margin was published by HarperCollins in 2014 and won the Hubert Evans award for nonfiction. Her most recent book of poetry Quarrels (Anvil, 2018) was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Award and won the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize.