The Dead Horse: Prose Poetry [by Terese Svoboda]

The question of whether prose poetry is poetry is no longer. After Anne Carson trained us to see
poems in diffuse dialogue and (sometimes awkward) chunks of imagery, the meditations of the
French prose poets of Ponge and Baudelaire seem quaint. We have moved on: if the language holds
the page, it counts as poetry, whether it be in blocks or scattered syllables or tweets. What is the
virtue of maintaining the question? Quarantine for poets who can't rhyme or maintain rhythm or
even break a line properly? A place for beginning literary aesthetes lured into appreciating poetry
by the lack of puzzling line breaks, the equivalent to those still moving their lips while reading?
With lyric poetry, readers want to dwell within the complexities of a poem carefully placed in its
white space, yet the eyes will still move, they drift toward THE END. Is the next stanza worth my
time? What about the next line? Will the poet go postmodern and end midway, leaving a whole lot
of resonating whiteness? There's always the possibility with lyric of the epiphanic drama queen.
Can you trust a prose poetry to deliver the goods when it's just doggedly returning the carriage (to
invoke a luddite analogy).

The problem for all poetry is holding the page, that is to say, enticing us to read it. Prose poetry
refuses the use of refreshing white space, it employs no stanzaic cliff-hangers or exciting line breaks
to lure the reader forward. The most boring instruction book breaks up its prose with illustrations, and keeps its sentences short. Does the block of prose invite with its sneaky prose-like structure, or repel with its serious wad of words? Prose poets accrete narrative drive in the surprise of the imagery in such a sequence, in the assonance and consonance between words, in the cumulative weight of the stanzas. Instead of producing the novel's dead body, the prose poem evokes intensity from margin to margin. The more wily prose poets (W.C. Williams to Maureen Seaton and on) use all of those, plus dialogue or madlibs or menus or advertising or recipes, a whole shivaree of associations.

Prose poetry rides free!

There's always payment. Would a more stanzaic form better present the poet's material? Some
poets, like Daniel Boroztsky in The Performance of Becoming Human space between end-stopped lines to give it a “couplet look.” What about Latasha Nevada Diggs's Twerk and her taunting poems spaced out in various languages, looking, for the most part, pretty darn prosey – but rely heavily on prose footnotes at the end of the book? "Out of the strong came forth sweetness." The dead lion (okay, not a horse) on the label of the Golden Syrup attracts bees, and thus honey.