Prose writers make sparks through character and plot, endlessly blackening the page from one margin to the other. But there are some who recognize that sometimes emotion needs to breath. I like to point those prosestitutes (as Walcott used to call them) toward the prosy end of poetry. These poems present the idea of word choice and white space as muscle, poems that are not just the co-opted regulation subject-verb-object but also are not dauntingly complex syntactically. Seemingly. Five books of poetry for fiction writers who really want to jettison their agents and struggle in the poet's pure genre:
The Performance of Becoming Human by Daniel Borzutzky. How to take prose lines and hold them in poetic tension.
Childhood of an Equestrian by Russell Edson. Master of the funny dialogue prose poem.
Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich. Have you read it lately? It's so clear it burns. It also teaches line break strategy plus advocacy.
The Movie At the End of the World by Tom McGrath. Blacklisted but a poet with a breath like Whitman who takes history and America head on.
All-Night Lingo Tango by Barbara Hamby. A funny mix of high and pop cultural references turned into formally strict, lyrically extravagant poems. Shows how form can be your friend.
May I recommend the variety of prose poems in "Great Americn Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present" (Scribner, 2003). We have works by Edson -- and also Strand, Simic, Lydia Davis, James Tate, Merwin, Margaret Atwood, Gertrude Stein, Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, many others including T. S. Eliot's one and ony contribution to the form. -- DL
Posted by: The Best American Poetry | April 10, 2019 at 01:06 PM