I've Been Thinking About Poetry Lately

Forgive me.

Specifically, or in order to paint you as precise a painting as possible of what it is that whizzes about in my wibblewobble-laden whirlygig, prose poetry.

What is prose poetry, exactly?

Forgive me again, but due to my thinking and the nature of my very own process of thinking, this post may not make a whole lot of sense.

But then again, if it's a straight sort of thing that you're after, you really should be reading Silliman's blog anyway, and not mine. As opposed to possessing a train of thought like most people, I like to think of mine more as a kangaroo of thought. Anyhow,

What is it? I know what people seem to think it is, and that is poetry without line breaks. But that really seems too simplistic an explanation, doesn't it? I can't help but think that, if we (being people in general, and poets specifically) equate the prose vs. poetry dichotomy with a paragraph-format vs. line-break dialectic, we are boxing ourselves in somehow. Almost as if we are diminishing the poetic genre. Don't ask me how, I don't know. I haven't come up with an explanation yet.

Before you ask, yes, I have read quite a bit of "prose poetry," and I tend to like the form. My current favorites are Todd Colby's "Lives of the Ventilators," from his book Tremble & Shine.

I was speaking about this with Barry Benson the other day and he said that prose-poetry had to contain "poetic elements," whatever that means. I'm assuming he means vivid imagery, alliteration, a natural rhythm (by natural I do not mean fixed. I hate fixed meters. Unless, of course, the first line contains the word "Nantucket"). But then I'm not sure that he knows what he's talking about, because most of what I have read that is considered prose poetry doesn't contain those things.

I don't know. I don't know I don't know I don't know. I want to take a nap. I want to have a drink, and THEN take a nap.

But if we say then, as we must by accepting the notion of a prose poetry, that line breaks don't determine the poetic; if we can consider Charles Baudelaire's "Be Drunk" to be poetry:

 You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it--it's the
only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks
your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually
drunk.
But on what?  Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be
drunk.
And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of
a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again,
drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave,
the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything
that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is
singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and
wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you:  "It is time to be
drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be
continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."

Then surely we can consider Ted Kooser's "A Happy Birthday" to be prose:

This evening, I sat by an open window
and read till the light was gone and the book
was no more than a part of the darkness.
I could easily have switched on a lamp,
but I wanted to ride this day down into night,
to sit alone and smooth the unreadable page
with the pale gray ghost of my hand.

There really isn't a whole lot of difference, formulaically speaking, between them. But if we are willing to go that far, so as to say that they really are the same thing genre-wise, then why cling to the 500-word-limit convention for prose-poetry? Why not say that Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" is a fine example of it as well? It certainly contains moving imagery. Hell, the very title of the story is an illustration of the overriding metaphor that is the story. And if that, then why not Thomas Mann's Death in Venice?

And then on the other side, the "poetic" side of things, we must admit that the entirety of the twentieth century has been a demonstration against poetic convention. That is, meter no longer makes a poem. Rhyme no longer makes a poem. In fact, nothing anymore makes a poem a poem except line-breaks. But line-breaks, as implied by the acceptance of the "proem" form (hehe. proem. oh god), no longer make a poem a poem either. So then really, damn near every poet who has written in the twentieth-century, with the exception of those old die-hards, those few reactionaries that have refused to give up their beloved Victorian England, has been writing prose.

Holy hairy horseshit, Herbert. I suddenly feel very, very sick. I feel like I have drunk not one, but TWO Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters (in other words, like I have had my brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick. Twice).


ps - I really am very sorry about this entire thing.

pps - I really do try not to do this to people.

ppps - Alrighty then. Moving on.

pppps - Poetry. I too dislike it.

ppppps - Have I mentioned what e e cummings said about galloping?