Poet Charles Simic suspects that there is no answer to the question, What is a prose poem?—by design. 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.