1. The thing developed from the invention of writing. And print gave it its principal formal character, two justified margins. The word comes from the Latin prosus, which means “straightforward,” and is also derived from provertere, which means “to turn forward.” Pro + versus, so it is distantly related to the etymological root of “verse.” Prose turns forward. Verse turns.
2. In 1802 Coleridge contributed a few of his journal entries to a miscellany edited by his friend Robert Southey. He gave one of them a title:
December Morning.
The giant shadows sleeping amid the wan yellow light of the December morning, looked like wrecks and scattered ruins of the long, long night.
It did not start a stampede toward a new poetic form, so prose did not get annexed to the formal possibilities of poetry until August 26, 1862, when a Paris daily newspaper La presse published a few of Baudelaire’s Petits poemes en prose (Le spleen de Paris). The entire collection of fifty prose pieces was published in 1869, two years after Baudelaire’s death. He had written a preface describing his ideal as “a poetic prose, musical, without rhythm and rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the gibes of conscience.” Baudelaire’s model was a strange little prose book, Gaspard de la Nuit, published in 1842 by the Belgian writer Aloysius Bertrand.
3. The term “prose poem”: it had the force at one time of contradiction, of breaking down categories. And there may still be great value in a term impossible to define. All you have to do is read the scholars to see that it is impossible to define. Prose using all the techniques of poetry except meter, lineation, and rhyme? But there are no techniques special to poetry except meter, lineation, and rhyme. Short prose written by poets? Then their letters are prose poems. Short prose that avoids the usual discursive uses of prose? A proscription, not a definition. Writings that the authors call “prose poems”? Short pieces of prose organized in books like poems?
4. Conversation About the Definition of a Prose Poem on Woodpecker Trail at Coralville Lake at the End of March, the Wind Rising:
B: The thing is it doesn’t have a definition.
B: Sure it does. A poem without lines.
B: Well, that includes all of prose.
B: Right.
5. There are at least two kinds of this kind of thing: proses that are one paragraph long and proses that are more than one paragraph long.
The paragraph as a formal device differs from the stanza in that the proposition of the paragraph is unity.
The proposition of a composition of one paragraph is completeness.
A paragraph that goes on for much longer than a page breaks the basic contract of the paragraph.
These are all expressive possibilities.
Since one of the claims of poetry is brevity, the longer a prose is, the more involved it becomes with the expectations created by the existence of particular genres of prose.
This is also an expressive possibility.
What the texts for writers say is true: The four kinds of prose are narration, description, exposition, and argument.
This expectation is also an expressive possibility.
From the beginning, this kind of prose was torn between undermining its medium and appropriating it.
So a paragraph, which is a proposition of unity, full of non sequiturs is a contradiction in terms. This is, has been an expressive possibility.
The prose poem came into existence not only during the age of prose and the age of realism, but at the moment when prose and realism were just beginning to enjoy the prestige of art.
This kind of prose was sired by ambivalence and envy. The “prose poet” is either worshipping at or pissing on the altar of narration, description, exposition, and argument. Or both.
To write this kind of prose you probably have to love or hate the characteristic rhythms of prose.
The rhythms of poetry have quicker access to the unconscious than the rhythms of prose. It may be that this is one of the reasons many people prefer prose to verse. It does not make an indecent claim on the reader’s person at the outset.
One of the obvious possibilities of this kind of prose was to fill it full of the devices that people identify as lyrical as a kind of alchemy to transform prose and the world of prose into poetry. This was the way of Rimbaud.
Another possibility was to thwart the expectations of prose. Cubist prose, like Tender Buttons, did it at the level of grammar. Surrealist prose did it at the level of representation and at the level of sequence.
In all three cases, varying in intensity, the idea was to use the medium in ways that would subvert the usual expectations of the medium.
6. Second Conversation at Coralville Lake:
B: Really, there are only two things about it, the right hand margin and the left hand margin.
B: Yes, the left hand margin is the father and the right hand margin is the mother.
7. The history of this form in the nineteenth century is almost entirely French. So, for that matter, is the history of free verse. The scholarly consensus seems to be that the reason for these two developments at this time has to do with a crisis in French verse brought about by the extreme inflexibility of the French alexandrine. The other explanation is that it was a bourgeois age, and poets wanted to find a way to a medium that had acquired a glamour that used to be reserved to poetry alone, to what Hegel called “the world of ordinary life and of prose.” Which may seem contradictory, so that there is a tension in the form between prose as the medium of realist representation and poetry as the medium of the transformation of the world through imagination. It was not toward newspaper realism that the form developed, but it did, from the outset, represent the world and interrogate language as a means of representing it.
Here’s a reading list for the rest of the nineteenth century:
Arthur Rimbaud: Une Saison en Enfer Les Illuminations (1886)
Stéphane Mallarmé: some prose as early as 1864
Comte de Lautréamont: Chant de Malador (1892)
and for the first half of the twentieth:
Paul Claudel, Connaissance de l’Est (1900)
Pierre Reverdy, Poemes en prose (1915)
Max Jacob, Cornet a des (1916)
Leon-Paul Fargue, Poemes (1918)
St.-John Perse, Anabase (1924)
Henri Michaux, Plume (1937)
Francis Ponge, Le Parti pris des choses (1942)
Jean Follain, Canisy (1942)
Edmond Jàbes, The Book of Questions (1963–1965)
8. The American prose poem in English probably begins with Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914). It belongs to the same moment as Max Jacob’s Cornet a des and to the poetics of cubism. Eliot wrote “Hysteria” in 1915. Williams’s Kore in Hell belongs to 1920. Then—I think it’s not inaccurate to say—it disappears until the postwar generation.
9. And in those years many European and Latin American poets wrote prose based on the French models. And some prose writers like Julio Cortázar and Italo Calvino wrote short prose, which belongs to this hybrid. Tomas Tranströmer and Zbigniew Herbert both did powerful work in the single paragraph form. Tranströmer’s “How the Late Autumn Novel Begins” is a great example of a way the prose poem poaches on the conventions of fiction. Herbert’s “A History of the Minotaur” is an example of the way it appropriates fable. The prose in Elegy for the Departure mimes the still life, the definition, the fable. Franz Kafka’s short prose is relevant here. And see Seamus Heaney, Stations.
10. The form began to be used widely and extremely variously in the United States after about 1960.
Some instances:
Robert Duncan, The Opening of the Field (1960)
Robert Bly, The Morning Glory (1969)
W. S. Merwin, The Miner’s Pale Children (1970)
John Ashbery, Three Poems (1973)
Russell Edson, Clam Theater (1973)
Robert Creeley, Presences: A Text for Marisol (1976)
James Wright, Moments of the Italian Summer (1976)
Mark Strand, The Monument (1978)
Lynn Hejinian, My Life (1980)
Ron Silliman, Tjanting (1981)
Robert Hass, Human Wishes (1989)
Charles Simic, The World Doesn’t End (1989)
11. A note: The one great English ancestor of the prose poem may be the devotional prose of the seventeenth century, and after. And the great instance of this kind of writing is Thomas Traherne’s The Third Century. Though it is really an instance of mixed form.
12. Also in the America grain:
Henry David Thoreau, Journals
Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time (the short interchapters)
Jean Toomer, Cane
Fanny Howe, The Wedding Dress (from prose poem to essay)
Claudia Rankine, Citizen
13. Useful anthologies:
Michael Benedict: The Prose Poem: An International Anthology (Dell, 1977)
David Lehmann: The Great American Prose Poem (Scribner, 2003)
Stuart Friebert and David Young: Models of the Universe: An Anthology of the Prose Poem (Oberlin University Press, 1995)
Charles Simic and Mark Strand: Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers (Ecco Press, 1976)
Alan Ziegler: Short (Persea Books, 2014)