I was listening to the New Yorker Fiction podcast the other day, to Teju Cole reading and commenting on Ann Carson’s beautiful story 1=1 when I heard, early in the podcast, Deborah Treisman point out that some readers consider the story to be a prose poem. Cole responded in disbelief, belittling the very idea of prose poetry. According to Cole, the essence of a poem is the line break.
How often I have heard that! It seems that no matter how mainstream prose poetry becomes, it still offends a certain percentage of the literary community. It’s like a cross-dresser in a world where one must identify as either male or female.
I asked award-winning Australian prose poet, Cassandra Atherton, what she says to those who deny the existence of prose poetry. After all, she has written extensively on the topic.
Cassandra: I’m very familiar with all the arguments about the prose poem as illusory or nonsensical— George Barker has even compared the form to the Loch Ness monster, “a creature whose existence we have only very uncertain evidence.” However, the prose poem has an exciting and reasonably illustrious history – starting with the French poets Aloysius Bertrand and Baudelaire (although there are traces of prose poetry and poetic prose far earlier in a range of diverse sources). The American prose poetry tradition owes much to the French tradition in its exploration of surrealism and fabulism, in particular. If I’m being provocative, I’d say that those who deny the existence of the form are challenged by it. Prose poetry often returns poetry to the realm of colloquial utterance.
What makes this genre irresistible to you? Why do you choose it? Or rather, does it choose you?
I am entirely beguiled and seduced by the prose poem. I don’t write any other form of poetry because it would be like cheating on my one true love. Perhaps it’s about the rebellion, masquerade and camouflage of prose poem—it looks like paragraph of prose fiction or nonfiction but once you start reading it, you realise it’s poetry. Paul Hetherington once compared it to the TARDIS – a prose poem is bigger on the inside—which I think is a wonderful analogy. And I love how feminist the form is, that’s so important to me and I often return to Holly Iglesias’s comment: “women articulate the constraints of gender in prose poems, battling against confinement, boxing inside the box.” As I am Australian, Peter Johnson’s comparison of “the genre-blending nature of prose poem to the platypus, which is an egg-laying mammal with webbed feet, a beaver-like tail, and a duckbill” is so witty and so perfect.
I’d love to close with one of your lovely ekphrastic poems. Maybe “Beata Beatrix” after Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting.
Beata Beatrix
If you elegize me, do it slowly. Don’t write a pantoum one evening over a chicken curry. Or a villanelle on the train between suburban stations. Take your time, compose a prose poem longhand in a notebook with a fountain pen. Buy an inkwell and fill it with pink ink. Let it stain your writing fingers. Set aside a few nights each month to put in commas and take out adjectives. Picture me in every metonym and alliteration; imagine us inhabiting the spaces between words. When it’s finished, don’t publish it. Make a bonfire and watch the paper catch and burn—the letters taking off like hundreds of fireflies in the starless night.
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Author: Nin Andrews
