I don’t know why I love prose poems but I do. Prose poems — with their solid blocks of text, unbroken lines, and not-quite-this, not-quite-that-ness — feel like good containers for my lifelong fascination with outsider art, the underdog, the ways in which humour and wordplay can be used as weapons against self-important structures seeking to inhibit, exploit or commercialize life.
Many of the pieces in Mutter sprang from a One Word Daily Prompt Club started by a group of friends during lockdown. They were using the daily prompt as a catalyst to create visual art, but after my first attempt crashed and burned, I pivoted to prose poetry. The club disbanded after a few months, but I carried on for a year. Every morning I sat down at an empty desk with a cup of coffee, a notebook, a pen, and the day’s randomly-generated word. A year later I had 365 pages of stuff — tangled thoughts, strangled dreams, garbled phonemes, lists, flash fictions, various hybrids, jokes in search of a punchline, punchlines in search of a set-up — all triggered by a single word. Inevitably, there were good days and off days, but showing up every morning meant I was there when something happened.
I scattered some of the individual poems across the digital landscape, littering various online journals, zines and mags (some of my faves: Unbroken, Sublunary Review, filling Station, The Mackinaw: a journal of prose poetry). I printed out others and laid them all out on the floor in an attempt to cull a chapbook-sized collection. I can’t say I was systematic. I shuffled them, looked for connections, hunches, concordances, rhythms. I scratched my head, despaired, closed my eyes and pointed, changed my mind, then changed my mind again. Some prose poems were pushy and insisted on being part of the book, others were shy, hanging back, waiting for me to re-read them and say, “Hey you, come on over here.” My intuitive approach was fuelled by chance and the strength of my morning’s cup of Kick Ass coffee, and aided by many friends, especially kevin mcpherson eckhoff, and my first reader and editor, my wife, Melody.
What themes there are only emerged after the fact. Many of the prose poems mourn the increasing difficulty of human contact; while others feature non-human characters, tricksters and clowns, and employ personification to celebrate non-species-ism. There are elephants on couches, polar bears at the kitchen table, cougars listening to Puccini. And hopefully as many surprises for anyone reading the prose poems in Mutter as there were for me writing them.
Peter Carl Anderson is an actor and writer, author of the chapbook Indistinct Chatter & Character Breakdown (our teeth imprint) and a finalist in the 2023 Raven Chapbook contest, as well as Mutter (above/ground press). He has written more than twenty plays, available on the Canadian Play Outlet, and is the recipient of multiple awards for his acting and playwriting. He lives in Vancouver with his wife, artist and playwright Melody Anderson.
