* This fictive conversation comprises factually-based dialogue I have put in the speakers’ mouths along with their actual words (sometimes lightly adapted), which are in italics.
TIME: The never-present
SETTING: The Théâtre du Splendide Hotel. The backdrop—hand-painted by Manet—reads: “And the Splendide Hotel was built amid the tangled heap of ice floes and the polar night—Rimbaud.” The stage is bare except for five café chairs for the inductees. The audience includes members of the Short Prose Society, who represent several countries and centuries. Because it is my fantasy, I get to be the host.
AZ
Welcome to the Short Prose Hall of Fame’s inaugural induction, coinciding with publication of Short: An International Anthology of Five Centuries of Short-Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays, and Other Short Prose Forms. Thank you all for coming from such distances of time and space; I expect that many of you will be sitting on this stage in future ceremonies. Our first honoree’s only book, the posthumously published Gaspard de la Nuit (Gaspard of the Night), is widely considered to be the first book of prose poems, though he didn’t use the term. Louis (Aloysius) Bertrand lived most of his life in Dijon, with forays into the Paris literary scene. He attended Victor Hugo’s salon, where the great literary critic Saint-Beuve described his “shrewd and bantering expression” as he read his “little ballades in prose.”
(Louis “Aloysius” Bertrand enters, a bit dazed by the applause.)
Edgar Allan Poe, our only non-French honoree, is a writer of tales, poems, and essays, as well as an editor. He is known as the master of the macabre and the inventor of the detective story. Of most concern here is his enormous influence as a writer of short prose.
(Edgar Allan Poe enters, not terribly surprised by the acclaim.)
And now the man who did the first important translations of Poe’s work into French, and credited Bertrand as inspiration for his Paris Spleen, the first self-identified collection of prose poems—alas, also published posthumously. He is also an art critic and essayist whose work chronicles and fosters modernism: Charles Baudelaire!
(Charles Baudelaire runs out and engulfs Bertrand and Poe in a group hug.)
Stéphane Mallarmé published prose poems and verse poems in the same book, further establishing the prose poem as a form of poetry. He has had enormous influence in spite of—and due to—his celebration of the difficult and the obscure. Even his good friend Degas fled a eulogy he was giving, exclaiming, “I do not understand. I do not understand.”
(Mallarmé enters and addresses the audience.)
MALLARMÉ
I become obscure, of course! if one makes a mistake and thinks one is opening a newspaper.
(Mallarmé introduces himself to Bertrand and Poe, and enjoys a warm reunion with Baudelaire.)
AZ
I’m not sure if our final inductee has arrived, but let me tell you about him. His star shone bright but was self-extinguished before the age of 21 when he embarked on a new life in Africa as an itinerant entrepreneur (though reports of his involvement in the slave trade are greatly exaggerated). His two books of prose poems, A Season in Hell and The Illuminations, have been enormously influential, and his face and last name are cultural icons: Is Arthur Rimbaud here?
(After a minute of anxious waiting, Arthur Rimbaud reluctantly saunters across the stage, looking bemused at the Splendide Hotel sign. He nods to Mallarmé (whomhe knew only in passing) and gives a respectful bow to Baudelaire, whom he never met but called “the first seer, the king of poets, a real god.” As much as Rimbaud tries to act blasé, you can tell that he is glad to be here. The inductees take their seats. I invite members of the audience to stand and speak whenever they feel so moved.)
AZ
Bertrand and Poe were born two years apart (1807, 1809), separated by an ocean and a language. But they shared a sensibility that would set in motion this anthology.
BAUDELAIRE
(addressing Bertrand)
Louis, it was while thumbing through—for the twentieth time at least—your celebrated Gaspard de la Nuit that the idea came to me to try to do something analogous. I knew it was going to be a remarkable book but was sure that it would pass unnoticed.
AZ
Paris Spleen established you as the inventor of the prose poem.
POE
Excuse me, but I published a prose poem, Eureka, fifteen years before the first of Charles’s.
AZ
Yes, but that was a different creature, almost 40,000 words. In 1765, Jaucourt used the term poeme en prose to discuss “poetry in prose works…which might have never seen light if their authors had to subject their genius to rhyme and measure,” but he gave as an example Fénelon’s novel-length Les Aventures de Télémaque. Let’s stipulate that “prose poem” and “poetic prose” are not necessarily synonymous. But let’s also stipulate that we go with whatever the author says: John Ashbery published a book called Three Poems, the shortest of which is 37 pages, and I’m not going to tell him he can’t call them prose poems.
(addressing Bertrand)
You had a formal notion of the short prose poem, even if you didn’t call it that.
BERTRAND
I did try to create a new kind of prose; I referred to my paired paragraphs as couplets,and I left instructions for Monsieurtypesetter to cast large white spaces between these couplets as if they were stanzas in verse. I sold the book—including my illustrations— to Eugene Renduel, then I waited and waited for him to publish it. After five years I made one last plea for his good will, leaving a conciliatory sonnet by his door. Five more months went by, and I stopped living.
AZ
Two years later, your friend David d’Angers acquired the rights by returning your advance to Renduel, and the book was published.
(Hisses and boos from the audience. One figure skulks out the rear door, while another gets handshakes from those around him.)
In 1865 I wrote to Bertrand’s eventual publisher for a hard-to-get copy, imploring that it pains me to see my library deprived of his deep exquisite work.
(addressing Poe)
I learned English solely in order to read you the better.
BAUDELAIRE
(addressing Poe)
The first time I opened one of your books, I saw, with horror and delight, not only topics I’d dreamed of, but sentences I’d thought of, and that you had written 20 years earlier.
MALLARMÉ
(addressing Poe)
You have one of the most wonderful minds that has ever appeared on this Earth.
POE
I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.
AZ
Arthur, you’re being quiet. You closed down your poetic voice at the age of 21, but do you have any idea how influential you’ve been? By the way, the first appearance of the Illuminations poems was credited to “the late Arthur Rimbaud.”
RIMBAUD
Merde! But understandable. I got a letter saying I was becoming legendary in a small coterie, and that my death was widely rumored, but I didn’t bother coming back. For one thing, I had spent so much time in Africa that I was afraid France would be too cold.
AZ
You became kind of a rock star.
PATTI SMITH
(from the audience)
I am a rock star, and on the anniversary of your death I gave the first of my “Rock and Rimbaud” performances. I also have one of your calling cards
PAUL SIMON
(from the audience)
Here’s the only line from a song I never could finish: We go together like Rimbaud and bo bo bo bo bo bo Baudelaire.
BAUDELAIRE AND RIMBAUD
We never even met!
AZ
Yes, but your names are forever entwined. On episodes of Law and Order and Dragnet the two of you are invoked as literary mentors to criminals.
RIMBAUD
I was the one who got shot—by Verlaine—though it was really just a scratch.
AZ
Let’s take a look backward. The story of Cain and Abel can fit on a page, and “Jesus wept” on a postage stamp. In ancient Greece we had Theophrastusus’s “characters” and Herodas’s “mimes.” Michel de Montaigne’s 16th Century essays derive their strength partly through digressions and chaque lopins (fragments)—common characteristics of modern short prose.
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
(from the audience)
I advocated language that is succulent and sinewy, brief and compressed, irregular, disconnected, and bold, each bit making a body in itself.
AZ
This is a harbinger of the disjointedness found in, say, Arthur’s prose poems, where seemingly unrelated nuggets of coherence are clustered under one title—though Arthur would never alert the reader, as Michel did, with a phrase like “let me switch subject.” A couple of centuries later, we have Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
(from the audience)
I kept a faithful record of my solitary walks and the reveries that occupied them, when I gave free rein to my thoughts and let my ideas follow their natural course, unrestricted and unconfined. In prose.
BAUDELAIRE
A sentimental and vile author! When I stopped living I was working on My Heart Laid Bare, in which I was accumulating all my rage. Oh, if that ever saw the light of day, Rousseau’s Confessions would have seemed pale.
AZ
Now now, Charles, you can’t deny that you were thinking about Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker when you considered calling your collection of prose poems The Solitary Walker…
POE
(addressing Baudelaire)
…or that you took the title My Heart Laid Bare from me: I wrote that the road to immortal renown lies straight, open, and unencumbered before anyone who writes and publishes a very little book with that title.
AZ
Neither of you published a book called My Heart Laid Bare (though Charles left behind fragments for it), but you both found the road to immortal renown! Back to walking: Rousseau’s solitary walker roamed the countryside; Charles, yours is an urban flâneur walking amidst the crowds of Paris as modernity is brewing.
BAUDELAIRE
In the midst of the fugitive and the infinite—for the flâneur, the crowd is his element…
POE
...and you don’t even have to walk to be a flâneur: sitting in a café, one can become absorbed in contemplation of the scene without—and regard with minute interest the innumerable varieties of detail, dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of countenance.
AZ
The quick changes of scenery, mental digressions, and fragmentation inherent in flâneury is another hallmark of short prose. Edgar used his Marginalia column in various magazines as a platform for fragmentary pieces.
(addressing Poe)
Tell us how you came up with the idea.
POE
In getting my books, I am always solicitous of an ample margin, for the facility it affords me of penciling suggested thoughts, agreements, and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general. Where what I have to note is too much to be included within the narrow limits of a margin, I commit it to a slip of paper, and deposit it between the leaves; taking care to secure it by an imperceptible portion of gum tragacanth paste.
AZ
If only Edgar had marketed these as Poe-stits, he might have lived a more affluent life.
Let’s hear from the audience about the branches these five nourished.
ANDRÉ BRETON
(from the audience)
Bertrand is Surrealist in the past. Poe is Surrealist in adventure. Baudelaire is Surrealist in morality. Rimbaud is Surrealist in the way he lived, and elsewhere. Mallarmé is Surrealist when he is confiding.
ALL
Surrealist? I am not familiar with the term.
BRETON
I got it from Apollinaire. You would have loved him.
JUAN RAMÓN JIMÉNEZ
(from the audience)
I read Baudelaire in Spain. Charles, you are the master of all contemporary poetry in the world.
PETER ALTENBERG
(from the audience)
I read Baudelaire in Vienna.
FRANZ KAFKA
(from the audience)
And I read Altenberg in Prague. Peter,you are a genius of nullifications; your small stories mirror your whole life.
RUSSELL EDSON
(from the audience)
I found a good example in the works of Kafka, who explored the vaunted dreamscape, and yet was able to report it in rational and reasoned language.
LYDIA DAVIS
(from the audience)
Russell Edson opened my eyes, and after that I realized that absolutely anything could work as a form—just try it, and don’t self-censor before you do it.
DEB OLIN UNFERTH
(from the audience)
Lydia Davis is the source text, the Gospel of Q.
AZ
(addressing Baudelaire)
See how important you turned out to be, Charles. Not bad for a guy who couldn’t even get into the French Academy, despite your humiliating efforts.
(Hisses and boos from the audience. Several figures skulk out the rear door.)
AZ
Edgar, you said that a short story should be brief and have a “unity of effect.” That describes some flash fiction.
POE
I am not familiar with that term.
AZ
That’s not important now. We just love putting names on forms and movements.
RIMBAUD
I loved pissing off the Parnassians and the Nasty Boys.
(Scattered whoops from the audience.)
AZ
(addressing Poe)
Edgar, as you can see, your influence on the early prose poets of France became part of the ever-mutating DNA of short prose writers.
POE
But why France?
OCTAVIO PAZ
(from the audience)
Such a form could have developed only in a language in which the absence of tonic accents limits the rhythmic resources of free verse.
(Mutters of agreement from some in the audience; snickers from others.)
GUSTAVE KAHN
(from the audience)
French writers had a choice: Not only was I partly responsible for getting Rimbaud’s Illuminations into print, I also came up with the term vers libre…
AZ
...which became the predominant form in America, where poets—armed with their “tonic accents”—thought: I want my freedom from formal restraints, but I also want my linebreaks.
MALLARMÉ
So, what I was doing in my poem “Un Coup de Des” caught on, with its irregular lines and the paper’s white space as a surrounding silence? I guess Paul Valéry was right when he called it “an event of universal importance.” Me? I was afraid it was an act of insanity.
STUART MERRILL
(from the audience)
I was born in Hempstead, Long Island, but I spent many years in France. I tried to do for prose poems in America what Baudelaire did for Poe in France. In 1890 Harper & Brothers published my anthology Pastels in Prose, which included Baudelaire, Bertrand, and Mallarmé (who even let me publish a couple of pieces before they appeared in his own book). The form didn’t catch on.
AZ
(addressing Merrill)
Stuart, you’ll be pleased to know that eventually the number of Americans writing prose poems and other short prose forms expanded exponentially, especially starting in the 1960’s. It’s big stuff now.
(addressing the inductees)
As great an influence as the five of you have been, your successors did not deduce a static approach to short prose from your work. I see Max Jacob out there. Monsieur Max, your “Beggar Woman of Naples” was the first prose poem I fell truly in love with.
(thunderous applause)
MAX JACOB
(from the audience, addressing Rimbaud)
You extended the scope of our sensibility and every literary man must be grateful to you for that, but the prose poem must submit to the laws of all art, which are style or will and situation or emotion, and you lead us only to disorder and exasperation…
AZ
Hey, he was just a kid!
RIMBAUD
You’re not too serious when you’re seventeen years old…
AZ
...and you wrote that when you were fifteen!
(addressing Jacob)
Are Baudelaire and Mallarmé off the hook?
JACOB
(from the audience)
Not with their parables, which we must avoid to distinguish the prose poem from the fable. It is probably clear that I do not regard as prose poems those notebooks containing more or less quaint impressions published from time to time by my colleagues who have a surplus of material. A page of prose is not a prose poem, even if it encloses two or three lucky finds.
AZ
Here’s what I think: If you don’t want to call a piece a prose poem because it doesn’t meet Max Jacob’s standards (or any other), well then, call it something else! Or don’t call it anything! The point is, if we take the sum total of all the work done by our five inductees, we have a pretty good foundation for convergence and divergence in all kinds of short prose.
(The audience rises, applauding.)
Before closing, I must observe that this evening has been pretty much a toast to testosterone when it comes to prose poems. Emma Lazarus wrote some “little poems in prose” in the 1880’s, and Katherine Mansfield experimented with the form in 1918, but, for the most part, women came late to the prose poem party.
MAXINE CHERNOFF
(from the audience)
I was one of the only women writing prose poems in the 70’s.
AZ
I am happy to say that this has changed dramatically, and many contemporary women are in the Short anthology.
That’s it for now. Please go home safely—stay in your temporal lanes. And remember to pick up some swag in the lobby: We have Poe-stit Notes, Baudelaire Bobbleheads, Rimbaud Joke Fake Merde, and I Don’t Break for Lines bumper stickers.
(The house lights go up in the Théâtre du Splendide Hotel. Audience members mingle as an accordionist plays a medley consisting of themes from Rachmaninoff’s setting of Poe’s “The Bells” followed by the Phil Ochs version, Ravel’s settings of pieces from Bertrand’s Gaspard of the Night, arias of Baudelaire prose poems from John Adams’s opera Doctor Atomic, Debussy’s “Afternoon of a Faun” based on Mallarmé’s poem, Benjamin Britten’s setting of pieces from Rimbaud’s Illuminations, Alban Berg’s “Five Songs on Picture Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg,” and Satie’s second set of “Furniture Music,” composed for a long-lost Max Jacob play.)
A splendid and auspicious evening; I feel privileged that I was able to find a sitter and get there on time. Particularly impressed with how you were able to trick out the New School auditorium as the Theatre du Splendide. Thanks, AZ.
Posted by: jim c | June 24, 2014 at 04:19 AM