folio : short takes on the
prose poem
This discussion has been
revised to draw out the ideas. The original audio discussion is available at www.strangerfiction.ca.
*
Jonathan Ball
ryan, can you explain, to people who aren’t familiar,
what prose poetry really is?
ryan fitzpatrick
What it really is? Yeah, finally exposing the secrets
of prose poetry.
To give you a pocket definition of what prose poetry
is, I think most people, when they think about poetry, they think, “Oh, it’s
got lines, and it’s got stanzas. Maybe it rhymes, maybe it has metre, or maybe
it doesn’t.” Lines and stanzas are pretty central, I think, to the popular
understanding of poetry.
Prose poetry scrambles that by changing the basic unit
of composition. So rather than focusing on lines and stanzas, prose poetry uses
the sentence and the paragraph as units of thinking. That’s literally all prose
poetry is.
Jonathan Ball
Now that everyone knows the basics, maybe we’ll slide
into a bit more of the academia highfalutin’ discussion of it.
I like to think about it on the craft level, because I
feel like that’s the least changeable level. Future, the rapper, is still using
anaphora. Just like Mesopotamian poets were using anaphora. They have very
different purposes. Very different political spheres that they’re operating in.
But it’s the same technique.
And so, I usually try to just focus on the technique
as a starting point for everything. Before we get into the more socio-political
sphere of it all. The way I like to think about poetry, as a baseline, to
distinguish literary writing from non-literary writing, in a simple pragmatic
way is the same way Viktor Shklovsky distinguishes it, where a defamiliarization
effect is in play.
To have literary language, the bare-minimum level: you
grab found text, pull it from one context to the other, and you get a
defamiliarization effect. Now we’re in the literary world of language. Once we’ve
had that happen, I separate poetry off as a type of literary language that is
just more overtly interested in defamiliarization, and is displaying, more
commonly, its defamiliarization effects.
A lot of the time in fiction or prose — not always,
but often — the techniques that the writer is using are masking
defamiliarization effects. They don’t want you to kick out of the plot and
notice how the novel is being written. Now that changes, of course, some
writers will draw more attention to their style.
ryan fitzpatrick
But they still don’t want you to be so defamiliarized that
you throw their book in the trash.
Jonathan Ball
Generally speaking, right? But then poets, I think,
tend to go the other way. You’ve got some poets who are trying to approximate a
breath line or something, or approximate the way people talk in more
straightforward language. And they’re not as interested. They’re trying to hide
the artifice. But for the most part, poets are displaying their artifice, in a
brazen manner. A lot of poetry is really self-involved with that idea.
I think the most prominent example is Shakespeare’s “Sonnet
130,” where he’s just talking about how other poets are bad compared to him. He’s
sort of praising his mistress on the one level, but really, he’s making fun of
other writers for not being as adept. He can insult his mistress and still
praise her better than they try to praise their mistresses.
I feel like prose poetry, on a simpler level, and a
more obvious level, is approximating that prose form, as you say, but I think
it still has all the same goals of verse in terms of the defamiliarization
effect. I would even say that a lot of experimental novels I would class under
prose poetry. In that way, for me, it’s not a clearly defined thing.
Poetry that is utilizing prose form, as you say, but I
think it often also has this effect, this goal of defamiliarization and
displaying defamiliarization. It also tends to be unmoored from narrative, for
that reason.
ryan fitzpatrick
Well, let’s talk narrative, because I think narrative
is one of the components I definitely come back to when I’m grappling with
prose poetry. But, here’s a question: what are the benefits of turning to the
sentence rather than using the line?
I know one of the things that people get critiqued for
sometimes — I think this is a silly critique, but I’ll repeat it anyway — is
that their poems are just prose with line breaks. Just prose that’s been broken
up somehow. And so, the question is: why not just write this as a prose
paragraph?
In poetry, what do you think the advantage of using a
sentence instead of the line might be?
Jonathan Ball
I’ve thought about that a fair amount, because I’ve
done mostly prose poetry — if you look at my published work in poetry, it is
primarily prose poetry, or at least the best of it is prose poetry. The stuff
that’s certainly gotten the most attention is prose poetry. And I’ve often
wondered what draws me to it because, personally, when I’m reading a book of
poetry, and I turn the page and see a prose poem, I’m like, “Ah, crap.”
I don’t even like to read prose poetry, broadly
speaking — there’s people I really love, which we’ll get into, but broadly
speaking I don’t like to read it that much, because it usually isn’t doing the
thing that I like about it as a writer. I’ve tried to even just kind of get
more of a handle on that and think about it. And I think, you know, in many
ways, for me, what I like about prose poetry is I kind of get to have it both
ways.
One thing I don’t like about poetry is the speaker. It’s
not a problem with poetry, it’s a problem with the cultural way that we
perceive poetry, which is that you always have the reader conflating the
speaker with the poet. And it doesn’t matter what you’re writing a poem about,
you could be writing a poem about how your eyeballs were eaten by spiders, you
know, they’ll still think it’s somehow about how you’re feeling that day.
You can even write a line like, “this isn’t a metaphor,”
and they won’t read it like a narrative voice, they’ll read it like as the
speaker is hiding something or coding something. I think that’s useful
sometimes. But I find it’s a real problem for me in poetry because I don’t have
the interest, broadly speaking, there are exceptions to this rule for me, but I
don’t have a whole lot of interest in expressing my particular emotions or
opinions in direct fashion in poetry.
I like to code or hide things, or draw attention to it
in a really specific way. But what I really like is narrative voice. The more I
think about my own writing, I like strange narrative voice. And so, what I don’t
like about poetry is you get the audience pulling away from reading the speaker
as a narrative voice, it’s just not coded that way. You have to work to code it
that way. Whereas a novel, it’s all immediately coded as narrative voice, but you
almost get a different problem, which is they want to pay too much attention to
the narrative now.
So, what I like about prose poetry is it kind of lets
me have a narrative voice, but I don’t really have to have a narrative
ryan fitzpatrick
But it’s also tied to the way people perceive lined
poetry versus prose. And again, you’re writing prose poetry, which gives you
this kind of psychical in-between space.
Jonathan Ball
Yeah, and we’re living in a liminal space as the audience.
It just it kind of puts the audience in a strange liminal space in terms of the
receptivity of it. I like those in-between places.
If people know my work, they know I like to do things
like write a prose poem essay about a film. Then couch that inside of a
sequence that is itself a narrative. I like to really play in those weird,
liminal spaces like that.
ryan fitzpatrick
I find that interesting, because it’s really different
than the value that I would assign to prose poetry, which for me has to do with
measure, a poetic measure, and the things that the sentence can allow you to do
that the line can’t.
If you were to extend the line out, eventually it just
wraps around the edge of the page, right? And then you have to deal with prose.
So, at a certain point, I like short lines. Short lines make sense to me as a
form of measure, whether it’s a phrasal unit, or a breath line, or something
else, something arbitrary. But as soon as you kind of drop that form of
measure, you have to deal with the insides of the sentence, with punctuation
and with what ends up being, I think, a variable line length, where you don’t
have to worry about consistency of line lengths.
Suddenly, you can have a sentence that runs 100 words,
followed by a sentence that runs three words. It’s up to you as a poet to make
sure that those two sentences make sense together, but it frees up measure or
it gives you a different way to measure the rhythm or the flow of the writing.
So, for me, it has nothing to do with the perception between lined poetry and
prose.
There is this different set of possibilities that open
up as soon as you switch from one to the other. And different poets take up
that challenge differently. Some will focus on the phrase and just kind of
chain phrases with commas between them. Some will write huge run-on sentences
that don’t end. Some will be really proper as if they were writing an essay or
a piece of flash fiction. I think that there’s a lot of options available
within the prose poem that are not lesser than those offered by lined poetry,
but they’re different.
Jonathan Ball
I think that’s an interesting point, and it’s
interesting that you frame it that way, because although I hadn’t really
thought about it before, that is, in many ways, one of my other attractions to
prose poetry.
I feel like there’s more pacing possibilities in the
prose poem, because you’re playing with the grammar of the sentence, versus how
the lines stack up or stanzas stack against one another, and so on. I really
like when I write lined poetry to have uniform line lengths or uniform stanzas.
I don’t always have a real metre necessarily. I often will, but I like to be
really uniform with it. At least the stuff that I feel is my best work. And
that I have collected into books. But when I move into prose poetry, I know it’s
not really accurate, but I feel like there’s more of that pacing possibility.
And to kind of move—I’m always thinking of it from the
point of view of “how do I move the reader” through the book or through the
poem or through the sentence or through the paragraph or through the line, you
know, through the stanza. I’m always thinking about it from that point of view,
like I’m trying to kind of anticipate and manufacture certain levels of
reaction, or at least create a particular space for a certain set of reactions.
To me, that kind of effect of being able to move in
and out of certain pacing and metre and measure is really important to me. As
you say, you said it differently, but I think in a in a bit more of a sensible
manner. I’m kind of running on instinct more with it.
ryan fitzpatrick
Well, more utilitarian maybe? I don’t know.
Jonathan Ball
But I like what you’re saying, and it is very much I what
I think I have unconsciously been thinking about it. When I pick one over the
other, it sometimes will be for that effect. I have one poem sequence, “Psycho,”
in The Politics of Knives, which is all about the Hitchcock movie. It
has all those tricks you’re talking about.
In one of the poems, actually, if you put line breaks
in, it actually is a perfectly properly metred poem with end rhymes, but I just
put it into prose. And I wouldn’t normally do that, but I did in that one
particular instance, because it weirdly, by having a lined poem shaped like
prose, just kind of jolted everybody.
It kind of jolts the reader in the poem that happens
right after the shower murder, and then it’s like what is happening next, you
know? It’s all for really particular effects and I just feel like I have that
play. I can even literally have metred, lined poetry inside the prose because
you don’t expect it now.
ryan fitzpatrick
Yeah. I don’t have it handy, but that reminds me of
Larissa Lai’s newest book, Iron Goddess of Mercy. That dynamic of
metrically rhymed sections in a prose paragraph is one of the things that
struck me about that book, at least once I realized I had to start reading it
aloud.
It was doing what you’re identifying — in the middle
of these prose bricks, there would be a section that was really kind of metered
and rhymed out, almost like a spoken word piece, but within this other form,
and it was really interesting that, once I started reading it aloud, I could
hear the poem inside the poem. And the prose was not obscuring it, but also doing
other things at the same time.
Jonathan Ball
I haven’t read it, but I’m going to have to pick it up
now that I really know it exists. I missed that one. But yeah, just to kind of
circle a little bit backwards, one of the poems that I always think about is
this book by Jenny Boully, which actually purports to be a book of essays,
called The Book of Beginnings and Endings. What it really is are conceptual
prose poems, where what Boully has done is every two pages is sort of a
different beginning page and ending page of an imaginary novel or essay
collection that you aren’t reading.
So, you know, page three is like the first page of
some imaginary book, page four is the last page of some imaginary book, and so
on and so forth. And they they’re all different fonts. They’re all about
different topics. They all are these little fragments of beginnings and endings.
They’re novels or essays or just other books. And I feel like that is the kind
of thing that you can really do in prose poetry that you can’t precisely do in
other types of poetry especially, or even like, you know, in a novel form.
She can really work with a fragment, you can have a
fragment of narrative or a fragment of an essay, you can have a fragment of a
poem, and it can have a conceptual structuring, you know, you can have a book
that has structure and always even has, in some ways, the pace of a novel or
the pace and build of a collection or something, but yet, actually doesn’t have
any of those things.
You can approximate things. I’m really interested in
reading and writing things that approximate other things, but aren’t precisely
them, for whatever reason. I like the idea that you can play around with
narrative, you can play around with the essay, you can play with these
different forms, but not really be doing them. You can kind of play around with
the freedom of poetry, but inside of the really structured architecture of
prose.
ryan fitzpatrick
The way you’re talking reminds me of that Cassandra
Blanchard book, Fresh Pack of Smokes, which reads like a series of flash
fictions, but because it’s filed under poetry it can play fast and loose with
its narrative structures.
It’s fragmentary, maybe not on the level of the
sentence, but the paragraphs don’t flow in any kind of necessary order. They’re
all connected. But putting it under poetry instead of memoir loosens things up
a bit.
Jonathan Ball
Yeah, exactly. I think that’s a great way to put it.
It lets her play with that genre and the form of the memoir, but not really be
locked into it, and not even necessarily having to structure it chronologically.
Not having to even fully identify with it if the poet doesn’t want to.
ryan fitzpatrick
We could say the same thing about poetic research,
which is a growing buzzword. Prose poetry is one of the forms that works really
well for poetic research. I’ve got in front of me, as examples of this, two
books that are very different, but are both prose poetry invested in research.
One is Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, which uses
the essay form and prose poem together. There are longer essays in the book,
but a lot of it is taken up with these smaller, paragraph-long essays about antiblack
microaggression. And so, Rankine is able to use the prose poem as a venue,
rather than making a really clear linear argument, to kind-of accrete these
little moments and let the argument happen through the accretion of these prose
poems.
The other one is Jordan Abel’s Un/inhabited,
which is also a research piece, but it’s invested in creating and intervening
in datasets around settler-colonial storytelling. Un/inhabited looks at
a massive number of public-domain Western novels. Each poem is the result of a
keyword search. He would look for words that are tied to settler colonialism in
a certain way.
So, “territory,” or “extracted,” or “uninhabited.” And
he would do a keyword search through all these novels, and he would pull the
sentences and accrete them into a massive prose poem, and then ask the reader
to sort through them as if they were just sorting through a stack of data.
So, I think, in those two ways, the prose poem becomes
an interesting venue for poetic research where there doesn’t have to be a
strict conclusion. It’s looser, maybe the same way we’re talking about
Blanchard’s book, or Boully’s book in terms of getting rid of the middles of
these pieces. But it can carry some of the weight of prose but like, loosen it
up. Fragmented is the word I think you used.
Jonathan Ball
Well in some of the cases you’re talking about they’re
literally working with fragments. And it’s not like in lined poetry you can’t
work with fragments. In fact, often the line itself is its own little fragment.
But I think that you hit on something, maybe without really realizing it, that
kind of hearkens back to the earlier discussion a bit, which is that you have
this audience anticipation in a lined poem that you’re going to provide a
conclusion.
Whereas prose poems so often end mid-sentence, and
there’s this way in which I think it has a different sort of receptivity. As if
there’s just a different effect to ending mid-sentence or having a stream of fragments
that don’t really have grammar, but are almost placeholding where grammar might
be. I just feel like that accretion effect is one you can just physically see
in a prose form more.
In The Politics of Knives, I concluded that
book with a really long, blocky prose poem called “That Most Terrible of Dogs,”
where I was doing a lot of that kind of accretion of certain types of language,
which I’ve gotten from spam searches and things like this. And I started, you
know, kind of treating it and doing different things. But then I just started
compiling it as this weird blocky tower. It was inspired, formally speaking, by
Robert Fitterman’s This Window Makes Me Feel, which is one of my favourite
books of prose poetry.
ryan fitzpatrick
Isn’t it a collection of sentences? A response to 9/11?
Jonathan Ball
Yeah, it’s basically a 9/11 book. But, structurally
speaking — for people haven’t seen that book, it is free online at https://www.ubu.com/ubu/fitterman_window.html,
I don’t know if it’s really available otherwise — every sentence of This
Window Makes Me Feel what he’s done basically is Google-searched for “makes
me feel,” taken that phrase, and added “this window” in front of it.
What you get is weirdly all kind of talking around the
sentiment of sadness and melancholy that, in a way, attaches itself to the terrorist
event and aftermath. But what I really liked about it is that it’s physically
structured like a big block or chain of text. There’s a way in which it just
looks like a wall.
When it’s in prose like that, if you have no
indentation and just go to the end of the line, it’s like a wall of text, page
after page. You can have a wall of text, and there’s a real emotional effect, I
think, in seeing that. You don’t get a break, in a certain way. It kind of
becomes exhausting.
ryan fitzpatrick
Yeah, the book that I thought about in regards to that
in prose poetry was Steve McCaffrey’s The Black Debt, which is a book
that I think, if you’re serious poet, you should read — but at the same time, I
have a hard time recommending it to anyone.
I really think it’s a book you should try to read in a
single sitting even though that sitting will probably be like four or five
hours, because it works intensively on a micro-level without that nice tidy
frame that Fitterman gives us.
McCaffrey’s book is in two parts. And the first part is
kind of just all these phrases and sentences that are just linked by commas. So,
there’s no closure to the thinking. And then the second half is just a single
run-on for almost 100 pages. It’s just a brick of text. It adds up but it doesn’t
add up in in any kind of way that gives you thematic closure or anything like
that.
You start spotting patterns in the language, and there’s
a kind of satisfaction in that, especially if you read the whole thing in one
sitting. But really it dodges meaning in a certain way unless the meaning is
just like the sensation of staring at the chyron at the bottom of the CNN
screen.
I remember when I was a kid driving around Calgary and
there’d be the signs that would just be running text. And you would see it for
like 30 seconds as you’re driving by and you’d get like, two and a half
sentences worth of information. I think McCaffrey’s book gives you the
sensation of just standing in front of this moving chyron of never-ending text.
So weird, but really interesting.
Jonathan Ball
Yeah, it’s a weird thing to think about as literary
value, but I think a certain type of prose poem, a long prose poem, can really
become an endurance test. And it can be exhausting. And it can kind of do that
in a way that poetry just often can’t, and maybe doesn’t want to, right?
But, you know, if you’re trying to get at that
feeling, or that emotion, or even just put the reader through a wringer, in a
manner of speaking, prose poetry has that opportunity to just start challenging
your endurance in that manner.
ryan fitzpatrick
Let me let me ask you the opposite, then. If, on one
side, we’ve got these prose poems that take length to the extreme, what do you
make of prose poems that are more minimalist, like the short paragraph prose
poem?
Because the other book that I thought of right away
was Harryette Mullen’s Trimmings, which is a book that uses the language
of fashion to think around the relationship between fashion and appearance and race.
But all the lines, all the sentences in it, are composed of clipped phrases or
words, often connected very gently with commas.
It’s almost the opposite of McCaffrey’s text. All the
pages are these minimalist paragraphs.
Jonathan Ball
I kind of like both approaches. What I found for myself
is I’ll tend to see myself combining them, I’ll do a sequence of shorter
paragraph poems but they’ll drag out across a sequence, then I’ll try to vary
the pacing of how long one is, and how short one is. I like to go in-between
and take from both sides of it, personally.
But as a reader, I really, I really like a minimalist
poem, in many respects. I can appreciate the kind of wall of text ones and some
of my favourite books are like that, but they have to really work, you know? They
have to really continually reward you on a really frequent basis, almost like
when you’re playing a video game.
Whereas a shorter, more minimalist, tight prose poem I
tend to appreciate a bit more easily. And I think I like variety across the
book. So again, I like it best when I see it in sequence. I don’t tend to like
short prose poems that are just standalone.
For me, it just has to do with how I value narrative
voice so much and what I always am looking for, or trying to produce, is some
sort of off-kilter narrative voice. I just find it’s something that, unless you
have some length, you can’t really do a lot with the voice. Whereas a short
snippet can work if it’s stacked and accreted with other ones.
ryan fitzpatrick
And if you’ve got 60 pages worth of them, they can
build in a certain way.
Jonathan Ball
Exactly. So, ryan, what do you think ruins a prose
poem?
ryan fitzpatrick
I think partly it depends on the reader and what the
reader wants. I was trying to think, what do people regard as bad prose poetry?
And I always go back to that ’80s/’90s moment where there were people just
imitating theory.
Does that make a bad prose poem? Just pages and pages
of abstraction in a prose brick? You asked before, what sets apart a good prose
poem from the ones we dread? I’m not sure what the ones I dread are.
Jonathan Ball
I kind of dread them all. But I think the reason is
because I so rarely see a prose poem I really, really, truly enjoy. Even though
I love the form.
I kind of like how it fails to be prose and fails to
be poem, precisely, I like that in-between space. But I find that, for me, the
ones I don’t like are those that are too close to being prose, or too close to
being poetry.
There was trend, as you note, where every one of them
was filled with abstracted theory. To me, that was getting too close to being
an essay. I like it when it’s kind of in-between being an essay and being a
poem and being, you know, maybe a story. I don’t like when it moves too close
to any one of those.
Because once it is a story, it’s not enough. It doesn’t
have enough narrative drive anymore to be a really good story. It’s like lousy
flash fiction, then. If it moves too close to being an essay, like you said, it
becomes too abstracted, and there’s no imagery to cling on to, there’s nothing
concrete there. It feels pretentious. I feel like the ideas aren’t actually
glomming on to a metaphor, a concrete image that will actually increase their
complexity. And so, it kind of starts to get into this weird pretension space.
And if it gets too close to being poetry, then I just
start to feel like it’s shapeless, a little bit, like it doesn’t have the rigor
of a strong verse poem, so to me like that in-between space is really cool,
where the things are overlapping in their Venn diagram, or whatever. And we’re
getting that weird little gap, where they’re sort of failing to be all these
things and therefore kind of becoming their own thing, you know?
ryan fitzpatrick
Yeah. That makes sense. Because once you started
talking, I was like, “oh, yeah, the ones I actually dread are the ones that when
I read them, I end up asking, ‘well, why isn’t this just a novel? Why didn’t
you just write a novel?’”
Jonathan Ball
They were too lazy to write a novel and they thought writing
a prose poem would be easier. I don’t know if that’s true, ever. But it’s just
how it feels to me.
ryan fitzpatrick
I’ve read a few books in the last few years that are
kind of narrative long forms that feel like failed novels. And I won’t mention
them because that feels a bit too “shots fired” for me. But I do think a writer
might be working with narrative or maybe with argument, like argument or
research, and prose poetry is good at those things. But it also needs to do
something else.
Is defamiliarization that thing? Maybe the prose poem
needs to defamiliarize the process of writing a story or presenting research? I’ve
been talking to a few younger writers recently who are grappling with those
genre lines and it’s tough to give them any concrete definitions or rubrics as
to when their prose poems are “poetic enough,” because the history of the form
is messy — productively messy, but messy nonetheless.
Jonathan Ball
I think what literary language does so well is
defamiliarize language, but I think for a prose poem there’s a level where it’s
defamiliarizing the actual form or the genre that it’s participating in a
little bit too. When it works well, to me, it’s kind of almost standoffish in
that sort way where you can’t pin down what’s happening at any point really
well.
I like that kind of thing. I always wonder, is it just
my taste that this thing is better than the other thing and it’s not really
justifiable? Or am I on to something in the sense that I’ve got a reason to
dislike this thing or to like it. I don’t know if it does boil down to just my taste
maybe. But I feel that when I see the trends happening — you’ll see a trend in
poetry or a trend in the novel or whatever — and insofar as I see trends in
prose poetry, I find it’s like everybody will start doing one thing, and it’ll
bring them closer to one form.
It will get closer to memoir, or it’ll get closer to
an essay or get closer to just a poem or closer to flash fiction. Once we have
those trends happening, it just starts to lose interest to me. Just gets less
radical and exciting, because it’s not surprising me anymore.
ryan fitzpatrick
Yeah. The in-between is the strength of prose poetry
is what you’re saying, right?
Jonathan Ball
Yeah, to me anyway. I think also if you just really
just focus on the name “prose poetry,” I think the biggest problem I see is
when it just doesn’t have actual poetic qualities. It really is just
indistinguishable from prose.
ryan fitzpatrick
I think that bothers me less than it bothers you. I
don’t mind it if it makes up for it in some other way. Like, if it’s really
prosaic, but it’s short, right? It kind of takes advantage of the form in this
other way by being fragmentary.
It’s just a vignette or something because otherwise,
if it’s long, and it’s just prosaic, maybe it’s just an essay, or just a story,
or just a — maybe I shouldn’t say “just,” but the piece might be a different
genre completely.
Jonathan Ball
I just find when I’m flipping through a book (because
I read a lot of poetry books), and it’s mostly verse poetry, then all of a
sudden you turn the page and it’s a prose poem there… I just feel like, because
they weren’t doing that for the last 30 pages in a 70-page book, it just feels
like there’s no pattern that’s been established of doing it. Why are you doing
it now?
And there can be a really good reason. And sometimes
they surprise me. But I find so often it feels like it lacks effort and is a
lazier construction, often. I am most known probably for writing poetry, but
actually what I mostly do is write prose, and I think that I write prose in a
way where I’d say my interest is a bit more stylistically motivated. I want to
say I’m a bit of a stylist, in a sense. I can do different styles. Sometimes I’ll
do a real ornate, baroque kind of style. And other times I’ll have a stripped-down
minimalist style. But the point is that I know how to do those two styles. And so,
when I see a piece of prose poetry, and I see where they could have tightened
that sentence, or they could have had some interior rhyme there, if they really
wanted, by just using this word or that, it feels a little underdeveloped.
Maybe that’s what it is. I want it to be in an in-between
space, but I don’t want it to feel undeveloped or unbaked or whatever.
ryan fitzpatrick
I will say, in defense of prose poetry — with the
example you gave of this prose poem being dropped into this middle of this
hypothetical book — I think that’s less of a problem of the prose poem and more
of a problem of the editorial process. I think a lot of times something that
looks like a bad choice, if it’s done over time, if it’s repeated, it becomes a
stylistic choice, right?
If they’re extra words, or if a sentence should have
been clipped or trimmed or whatever in an isolated prose poem, if that’s an
element of 10 prose poems, and it’s a quality of the writing, then it becomes a
stylistic choice and you can agree or disagree with that choice, but it shifts the
way we can read and understand it.
Jonathan Ball
You’re probably right. I’m probably just reacting more
to isolated examples.
ryan fitzpatrick
Yeah, well, I ask these questions, too. I’ll read
books and be like, “Oh, why suddenly is this here? Is this book a grab bag now?”
Jonathan Ball
Which maybe is unfair, but that’s often how I will
feel. And then it probably biases me against a particular piece. Well, what
else do you think? Any last words for prose poetry, in defense or in support of
prose poetry? What haven’t you seen in prose poems that you want to see?
ryan fitzpatrick
What haven’t I seen in a prose poem? Who knows? What
haven’t I seen in this interview? I’m shocked we never mentioned Gertrude Stein
once.
Jonathan Ball
Should we? Now it’s too late.
ryan fitzpatrick
Maybe? I feel like I’ve seen a lot of different ways
the prose poem can be used, from run-on sentences to like short clipped phrases
to polemics and narrative. I think there’s still a lot of juice in the form,
but I also think it’s been used in a lot of different ways.
Jonathan Ball
Yeah, that’s what I often find exciting, you know,
this is one thing I really like about sequences or books or prose poetry, is it
they start to capture a little bit of the strength and power of the novel. The
defining quality of the novel was that it was a container that you could can
put other artworks inside. But it itself wasn’t containable by other artworks. This
was Bakhtin’s idea. You can put poetry into the novel and it remains a novel, you
can put a photograph in a novel, you can put a drawing in the novel. You can
put anything in the novel and it still remains a novel. It can kind of subsume
different art forms into itself without losing its quality. Whereas, you can’t
put a novel into a poem.
ryan fitzpatrick
When you talk about a sequence of prose poems, I think
with the long or the sequential poem you can do some of that stuff. I feel I
can put a lot into a long poem. Maybe not a whole novel, though maybe you’d be
able to.
Jonathan Ball
If you can, all of a sudden, it’s a prose poem. Then
you’ve got a poem inside of that. You can do things like that. So, it becomes
kind of the reverse. You have a prose block in the middle of an otherwise-verse
poem. I just find it’s less successful for whatever reason.
ryan fitzpatrick
Yeah. I think, for me, the examples would be books
that absolutely straddle the line. In CanLit, the classic example maybe is
Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. Is that a book of
poetry? Or is it a novel?
And then there’s Dennis Cooley’s expansion/perversion/rip-off
of Billy the Kid, Bloody Jack, which is five times longer and way
weirder.
Jonathan Ball
Yeah. Cooley’s poetry is probably where I saw prose
poems the first time too. I’m trying to think precisely because I haven’t read
Bloody Jack for a while. But I want to say it features a prose poem or two,
and that’s maybe where I would have encountered them first. Cooley was one of
my big mentors and teachers when I started getting deep into poetry.
ryan fitzpatrick
Oh, yeah. Both of those are bouncing between lined
poems and prose poems. So, maybe it’s in that space between the novel and the
long poem, right? Where suddenly prose poetry can come in as one flavour of
that, or someone like Nicole Brossard, who’s writing in-between those forms as
well.
We could classify a lot of it as prose poetry, but it’s
a fragmented novel at the same time. So, prose poetry is interesting, because
it slides into these other genres sometimes, right? You can make the argument
about a lot of avant-garde fiction that if it’s not prose poetry, it’s prose-poetry
adjacent.
Jonathan Ball
If it’s not prose poetry, what is? Another big topic
this ties to, that we maybe don’t have time to get into, is the joke. I feel
like prose poetry in a weird way has that joke structure to it, like you’re
kind of in a book of poems, and you suddenly come across something that’s not
really a poem, but you’re being asked to receive it as one. That kind of mixed
signal.
That’s a better way to put it probably, mixed signals.
I like the mixed signal as an aesthetic value in a weird way. Well, final
thoughts on prose poems, Ryan?
ryan fitzpatrick
They’re great. If you’re reading this right now, once you’re
done, go read some prose poems.
Jonathan Ball, PhD [photo
credit: Michael Sanders], writes “stranger fiction”—horror, science fiction,
and fantasy influenced by experimental literature. He teaches creative writing
and hosts the podcast Writing the Wrong Way, showing writers new ways to
work and create innovative art that stands out. His book Ex Machina is
available for free at www.JonathanBall.com/FreeBook.
ryan fitzpatrick is the author of
three books and over fifteen chapbooks of poetry, including Coast Mountain
Foot (Talonbooks 2021) and Fortified Castles (Talonbooks 2014). Over
the last twenty years, he has been involved in the poetry communities of
Calgary, Vancouver, and Toronto. Currently, he is the editor of Model Press, an
online poetry micropress founded during the pandemic. You can find him at ryanfitzpatrick.ca.
