NA: Why prose poetry?
CA: I love prose poetry’s compression and the allied sense of breathlessness it so often conveys. Where lineated poems tease the right margin, the prose poem embraces it. I also adore prose poetry’s celebration of the quotidian—those daily engagements at the heart of so much experience. It’s a form of poetry that always looks so approachable, largely because it’s composed of sentences and paragraphs, and it is able to exploit the illusion that that a reader may be about to encounter prose fiction or nonfiction rather than a piece of writing focused on the figurative possibilities of language. I like to think that once you have started reading a prose poem, you are compelled to finish it because you are inside a block of text that just keeps going—until the final full stop. It’s hard to resist the beguilements of a rectangular block of poetic text that floats beautifully in the space of the page or on the screen.
NA: You co-authored Prose Poetry: An Introduction. In writing it, did you come away with a new appreciation 
for the form? Were there any surprises?
CA: Prose poetry always surprises me. Its protean nature is the reason I never tire of it. Co-writing Prose Poetry: An Introduction was such a joy because I lived in a prose poetry world for three years—and in that world, almost all I did was think, write, eat, and breathe prose poetry. I have a wonderful collection of contemporary prose poetry, too. I especially enjoy some contemporary prose poetry that plays with a kind of ghosting of lineation. Some prose poets use slashes or spaces between words or phrases in the prose poem, and others use different forms of punctuation—such writing can be extraordinarily suggestive and playful.
NA: You are also working on an anthology of Australian prose poets. Is there a difference between American and Australian prose poetry?
CA: American prose poetry is part of a longer tradition than Australian prose poetry, which has only begun to flourish in the last three decades or so. Where American prose poetry has a wonderful relationship with neo-surrealism, Australian prose poetry is often connected to its colonial history and to re-imaginings of the suburban. However, the American and Australian traditions are often connected via their humor, which is often dark and uncanny, invoking aspects of the enigmatic or mysterious.
NA: How about between male and female prose poetry? Do you think women are doing anything unique with the form?
CA: Both women and men are writing powerful prose poetry in the twenty-first century. Women are at the forefront of some of the current developments and innovations in the form. For example, I’ve always adored Holly Iglesias’s book, Boxing Inside the Box: Women’s Prose Poetry, which asks pertinent questions about the prose poetry form and its traditions. In the various prose poetry projects in which I’ve been involved, I have always given priority to exploring the way women are able to politicize the rectangular prose poetry box. They often do this by playing with the prose poem’s use of the conflicting tropes of confinement and freedom. Words are squeezed vice-like inside the block of prose poetry until they explode into the space around it.
NA: What are you currently working on?
CA: I like to keep busy, so I have lots of projects. I was thrilled when Peter Johnson asked me to co-edit an anthology of US, English and Australian prose poetry with him. The prose poetry anthology is all new work and it’s electrifying! It’s coming out later in the year with MatHat Press. I’m also working on a collection of prose poetry, Saving Face, which is about the Hiroshima Maidens. They were Japanese women disfigured by the atomic bomb dropped and were taken to New York for plastic surgery. I’m very fortunate to have received an Australia Council grant to fund this project.
NA: I’d like to close with one of your prose poems:
Hiroshima is for Lovers
You must forget that I kissed you in Hiroshima. Leave behind our hot silences and the way your shoulder pressed against mine on the blue streetcar circling the city. It is all a cliché. It has happened many times before. Remember that your body is marked by others’ narratives and their stories don’t belong on my lips. Nothing happened. Your wife is waiting at the hotel bar with a bottle of cold, white wine and an empty glass. Everything happened. In your hotel room, you stretched my arms above my head and placed my palms on the window. From behind, you pressed me against the glass, like a specimen. I saw the steel skeleton of the A-bomb dome against the blue sky. I tried to speak but my words slipped down the Ōta River and into the Seto Inland Sea. We stand on the Aioi bridge and I imagine its T shape is a ventricle, and you are its beating heart.
Cassandra Atherton is a widely anthologised and award-winning prose poet and scholar of prose poetry. Her prose poems have been translated into Japanese, Korean. Cassandra co-authored Prose Poetry: An Introduction (Princeton UP, 2020) and co-edited the Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (Melbourne UP, 2020) with Paul Hetherington. She is a commissioning editor for Westerly magazine, senior editor at Spineless Wonders and associate editor for MadHat Press. Cassandra is Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin University, Australia.
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Author: Nin Andrews
