James Tate once stated that “[i]mage, metaphor, rhythm, syntax, are all available to the prose poem in their full variety.” I agree. Who would argue with one of the greatest practitioners of the genre? I would add that these same considerations are prominent in short fiction as well, that the line between prose poetry and “flash” fiction is blurry, so too the line between prose poetry and verse, and fiction and non-fiction, and…you get the point.
Everything I write starts as prose, morphs into verse, and moves back and forth across those supposedly immutable boundaries. I always want to create what Charles Simic called “the monster child of two incompatible strategies, the lyric and the narrative.” Over time and a few books worth of prose poems, I concluded that a justified right margin guarantees a limited space to write within that can be adjusted to accommodate the needs of the poem, and within that space such a “monster child” could be Frankensteined into existence.
In the New Testament, the devil is characterized as a deceiver, and in this way the prose poem has a lot in common with Satan. It deceptively presents itself as prose, a paragraph (or paragraphs) inviting its reader in, then tricking that reader into reading a poem. I like that quality. The reader isn’t required to sell their soul, but a good prose poem will seduce the reader into experiencing something they may have resisted had they known what they were reading at the outset.
When I was in graduate school at Syracuse University in the mid-eighties, my workshop mate, Jane Mead, told me all her first drafts were in prose. I was stunned by that revelation. Jane’s poems seemed to be so scrupulously concerned with line, so elegant and carefully crafted, that I couldn’t imagine a block of prose as their starting point. But the more I thought about it, the more I asked myself how that was any different than Michelangelo working from a block of marble?
Some years later, I was working as the administrative assistant in the Syracuse MFA Program and teaching a class for first-year students that at the time was called Living Writers (& their dead pals). Hayden Carruth, who would later become a mentor of mine, and who scoffed at me when I told him I was writing prose poems (“Why the hell would you want to do that?”), delivered a brilliant lecture to the class on Shakespeare’s sonnets (Hayden’s dead pal), that focused on the idea of the sonnet. I can’t remember the specifics, but what stood out to me was the notion that more than just a form, the sonnet was also a concept, which might seem obvious but was revelatory to me at the time. Hayden would have been chagrined to know his lecture, along with Jane’s approach to her poems, and the prose poems I’d been reading by some of the genre’s greatest practitioners, led to my obsession with the “form.”
Over the years, I had stumbled on prose poems by Tate, Charlie Simic (at a reading he gave from The World Doesn’t End, when I was blithely unaware he was reading prose poems), James Wright, and Robert Bly, as well as work by the French Symbolists and Surrealists, and Polish poet, Zbigniew Herbert. What struck me most about the poems was how little they had in common except the physical quality of being rectangular. Their contents ranged from the absurd to the pastoral, and that variety drew me to the form.
Thirty years ago, Hayden wrote me a letter in which he stated, “the language of a poem is like a balloon, it must be stressed enough by internal pressure to make its shape full and taut, but not enough to make it explode.” Hayden was responding to a group of poems I had sent him, all written in verse, but something about that balloon image resonated with me, and I began to think more about the relationship between formal constraint and content in terms of what a prose poem could provide. It would be several years before I imposed the constraint by means of a justified right margin, but the idea gestated around the image I saw in my mind’s eye, a balloon that resembled the type that magicians use to make balloon animals at children’s parties. Instead of a cylinder, though, I imagined a rectangle that would provide parameters, ones that could be adjusted (letting air in or out) to create the proper tension with the words that filled the space.
There are limits to how this can work, of course. An e-book version of a collection will change the margin, a shift in font will do the same. However, if the sentences are as good as they can be, it shouldn’t matter enough to derail the poem. That’s why I switch from prose to verse and back again repeatedly. I want any iteration of the poem to survive slight or even substantive changes to the shape.
The first poem in the second section of my most recent collection, The Strange God Who Makes Us, is a good example of how my process works towards that balloon shape. The poems in that section function as a “story” about my relationship to my mother in the last years of her life when she had Alzheimer’s. They began as prose and eventually, after many iterations, became double sonnets, and then ultimately reverted to prose.
Here are the final verse and prose poem versions of the first poem in the section:
Memory Unit: Pregnancy Scare
On the way to the hospital,
my 92 year-old mother tells me
she can’t be pregnant. I’ve never
even dated, she says. I don’t know
what to say. I explain that she’s deficient.
Vitamin B. Precautionary measures.
But when I check her in, the woman
at the desk says she’ll need to go
to the fifth floor, the psych ward,
where she spent a few weeks the year before.
The doctor asks her to disrobe,
and she tells him she’s not pregnant.
He seems impatient, unwilling to humor her.
I tell her it’s all right. No one thinks
you’re pregnant, I say. The doctor
excuses himself. He’s red-faced, impatient.
A nurse appears with a hospital gown,
tells my mother to put it on. Why?
my mother asks, near tears. I take
the gown from the nurse and set it down
on the metal table next to where
my mother sits. She’ll be fine, I say.
The nurse seems about to speak,
then thinks better of it. She looks
at the doctor. They leave the two of us alone.
Now what? my mother asks.
I don’t know, I say. She says, the least
you could do is ask me to dance.
Memory Unit: Pregnancy Scare
On the way to the hospital, my 92-year-old mother tells me she can’t be pregnant. I’ve never even dated, she says. I don’t know what to say. I explain that she’s deficient. Vitamin B. Precautionary measures. But when I check her in, the woman at the desk says she’ll need to go to the 5th floor, the psych ward, where she spent a few weeks the year before. The doctor asks her to disrobe, and she tells him she’s not pregnant. He seems impatient, unwilling to humor her. I tell her it’s all right. No one thinks you’re pregnant, I say. The doctor excuses himself. He’s red-faced, impatient. A nurse appears with a hospital gown, tells my mother to put it on. Why? my mother asks, near tears. I take the gown from the nurse and set it down on the metal table next to where my mother sits. She’ll be fine, I say. The nurse seems about to speak, then thinks better of it. She looks at the doctor. They leave the two of us alone. Now what? my mother asks. I don’t know, I say. She says, the least you could do is ask me to dance.
Given the absurdity of the situation and the highly charged emotional tenor, I wanted as little artifice as possible, so I settled on the prose poem as the appropriate vehicle. Why would I alternate between prose and verse? I wanted the sentences to be as tight as possible, and the process of creating tension in the verse iteration inevitably makes the sentences tauter. Setting the hard right margin offers resistance against which those sentences push, and the result, if I’m doing it right, should make for an accessible prose poem with a surprising result, in this case both disorienting and absurd, and a little unsettling.
This isn’t the only way to write a prose poem. Part of its appeal is its flexibility. However, the process of using a justified right margin has served me well, as much as the constraint provided by a sestina or a sonnet, and I’d like to think that Hayden would approve.
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