I like prose poems. Lots of different kinds of them, too, from Paris Spleen to Perelman. And I write what goes by various cutely alliterative names: flash fiction, short short stories (I prefer the assonantal quick fiction). The more I read and the more I write, the more I wonder whether the modifiers in these monikers are really necessary.If a prose poem is a poem (and I know there are those who will argue that it's not), why can't we just call it a poem? And if a short short is a story (ditto), how about just "story"?
In the case of the latter, I've often invoked a track and field analogy: some stories are sprints, some middle distance races, and some are long, cross-country treks. Length is no real help in discussions of the prose poem (though there are p.p. sprints - the typical Eshelman or Matthea Harvey breaks the tape after a couple-hundred words - and longer distances - I'm looking at you, John Ashbery). But differentiating stories by their length is not the same as taxonomizing poems by length; even when we distinguish epic from lyric, length is only the most obvious (but perhaps not the most important) salient feature. No matter how long a poem is, as long as its right-hand margin is irregular, as long, that is, as it's broken into lines, we call it a poem. A prose poem, whether it's a single sentence or book-length, always has to wear its defensive-sounding adjective, as if admitting that it's somehow not a "real" poem (but if it listens to the blue fairy and the cricket and behaves itself for a long time, it might, someday, . . .).
Poem, it is worth remembering from time to time, is at least as much an indication of how we read a given text as of that text's essence or nature. Whether in lines or in paragraphs, if we read it with a special attention to language as a material out of which something is fashioned, if we're on the lookout for its self-referring, self-consuming characteristics, we're reading it as if it's a poem, and if we're doing that, we're making it, by the way we read it, a poem. Just a poem.
Ok, I agree with all this in spirit, and yet ... I still think that choosing to write a poem in prose rather than in stanzas or lines or verses does make it different. Because of how we process prose. The reason to write a poem in prose, it seems to me, deliberately trades on that distinction: the writer knows we will read it like prose, or try to, and that will make all the difference.
ReplyDeleteAnd I do think there's some point to saying something is "a lyric" and not simply mean length by that. Because it saves us, I think, from having to say "non-narrative."
"Lyric" effects in prose are some of the most fun I have reading, and that's always in distinction to narrative, or expository, writing.
And I like the name "quick fiction" because it plays off words (quick fix) like lyric would, and one thing I would want from quick fiction is writing where lyric (words) matter more than narrative (the story). But then I really don't like stories very much. I'd rather hear a well-turned phrase than a personal anecdote.