Review: Charles Simic, What is a prose poem?
Poet Charles Simic suspects that there is no answer to the question, What is a prose poem?—by design.
A 1980 chapbook of Russell Edson’s poems from Burning Deck, a small press specializing in the publication of experimental poetry and prose founded by the writers Keith Waldrop and Rosemarie Waldrop in 1961.
Prose poetry: that illegitimate child of prose and poetry rarely acknowledged by its parents, its practitioners either unknown or having a brief notoriety, only to fade out of sight as if they never existed. Though their kind of writing has been around for a couple of centuries, there is no general agreement as to what it is they do, besides noting that they write prose and think that it’s poetry. For most readers making such a claim is not only nonsense but a blasphemy against the long and noble tradition of poetry. Free verse by now has many defenders, but few readers expect their poetry to come in paragraphs.
And yet, could one imagine modern literature without Rimbaud’s Illuminations and Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, to name just two of the many other less known, but equally original works scattered among literatures of the world that usually have little in common except their appearance: a bit of prose occupying less than a page with an accompanying title, as in this poem by Russell Edson (1935–2014).
Antimatter
On the other side of a mirror there’s an inverse world, where the insane go sane; where bones climb out of the earth and recede to the first slime of love.
And in the evening the sun is just rising.
Lovers cry because they are a day younger, and soon childhood robs them of their pleasure.
In such a world there is much sadness which, of course, is joy.
The charm of this poem of his and others that Edson wrote lies in its light touch. “If the finished prose poem is considered a piece of literature,” he said, “this is quite incidental to the writing.” What makes us so fond of it, he added, is precisely its clumsiness, its total lack of ambition. This is a bit like what Castiglione in his sixteenth-century Book of the Courtier called sprezzatura, concealing the art and giving the impression that whatever one has done was done without breaking a sweat. Edson rarely left the small town in Connecticut where he lived and died, and published many books in this unassuming form, little concerned with what others considered them to be.
In the anthology An Introduction to the Prose Poem, the editors Brian Clements and Jamey Dunham attempt to classify the various kinds of prose poems in existence. Some of the twenty-four types they discuss and give examples of are more persuasive than others. Certainly, anecdote, fable, autobiography, extended metaphor, parable, description of inanimate objects, journal entries, lists, and dialogue have appeared in prose poems, but, as Michel Delville cautions us, a poem may suggest a genre at the outset only to shed its guise and become something entirely different by its end. He also wonders whether there may be as many kinds of prose poems as there are practitioners. I wonder about that too. How does one describe a genre that declares total verbal freedom from convention and about which every generalization one makes is contradicted by another poem that doesn’t look like the previous one? For example, prose poems by Edson, James Tate, W.S. Merwin, and John Ashbery clearly have more differences than commonalities
The upshot is that prose poetry is the least predictable among all literary genres and the least known. The Russian writer, Daniil Kharms (1905-1942), is one such unknown. His best pieces are brief and yet full of action like slapstick scenes in vaudeville. His specialty was satire. He delighted in making fun of every hackneyed plot and every type of narrative, and came up with this little masterpiece.
Blue notebook No. 10
There was a red-headed man who had no eyes and ears. He had no hair, so he was called red-headed only conditionally.
He could not speak, since he did not have a mouth. He also had no nose.
He did not have even arms and legs. And he had no stomach, and he had no spine, and he had no backbone, and he had no innards.
He had nothing! So it is not clear whom are we speaking about.
So it would be better if we do not speak about him anymore.
Anyone who was fortunate enough to hear Russell Edson read his poems in public is not likely to have forgotten the experience. He made the audiences roar with laughter, and so did the small circle of friends to whom Kharms read his work in the grim years of Stalin’s Russia where he died of starvation in February of 1942 during the siege of Leningrad.
Charles Simic is the author of twenty books of poems, most recently, Scribbled in the Dark.
The poem by Daniil Kharms was translated by D. Smirnov-Sadovsky.
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