How did this anthology come about?
I’m very proud of A Cast-iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 Contemporary American Poets on Their Prose Poetry. There are many excellent anthologies out there, but I think A Cast-iron Airplane is unique, and I was extremely happy that Marc Vincenz at MadHat Press had the vision to publish it. How did it come about? The seed was planted forty-three years ago, when I came across Alberta T. Turner’s Fifty Contemporary Poets: The Creative Process. At the time it was published people were speaking seriously about the writing process, even in freshmen composition courses. What made Turner’s anthology significant was that poets no longer feared that they might diminish their genius by describing how they wrote. Some of the poets in Turner’s anthology even reproduced various drafts of their poems with original cross-outs and annotations, so we could see how ideas and strategies for poems came about. Their commentaries affirmed my suspicion that there was no one way to write a poem.
Turner’s questionnaire was very specific, so much so that some poets refused to participate. They thought her questions were uninspiring or too rigid. One poet, whom she did not name, in a fit of hysteria, likened the questionnaire to something out of 1984, which suggested how distasteful it was for some poets to discuss their process. After all, one way to crown yourself a genius is to suggest that your poems are tiny gifts delivered by the gods in the wee hours of the morning, bestowed upon only special people, of whom you are one.
Alberta Turner was a friend of mine, and I think she would have been very happy to hear you talk about her book, especially about her questionnaire. She loved questionnaires. So it was her anthology that inspired you? I remember you talking about her when you were editing the journal.
I was thinking about Turner’s book when in the last two volumes of The Prose Poem: An International Journal (digitized at https://digitalcommons.providence.edu/prosepoem/), I asked a few selected poets to choose one of their prose poems and to write a commentary on it. Unlike Turner, I didn’t give much guidance. It would be nice, I said, to comment on it as a prose poem, but I didn’t want to restrict anyone. As it turned out, many of the poets chose to discuss the prose poem as a genre, anyway.
A Cast-iron Airplane is an expansion of that project. I think it’s a useful book. For one thing, it’s a solid collection of prose poems written by some of the best American practitioners of the genre. It also provides a good way of looking at the prose poem as a legitimate genre by focusing on what the poets themselves have to say. Certainly, if poets call their poems prose poems and confess that they were self-consciously writing them as prose poems, thinking about a tradition that preceded them, then we should pay attention to that. If we find, as Charles Simic suggests, that he never thought of the short prose pieces in The World Doesn’t End as being prose poems, then that, too, is significant. In short, by hearing poets describe their writing processes, we can often situate their prose poems in a broader literary, historical, and cultural context, which helps us to evaluate and appreciate their poems.
Two submissions—one from Charles Simic, and the other from Carolyn Forché—provide very different examples of the commentaries in the book. Rather than comment on them, I’ll let these two poets speak for themselves.
Carolyn Forché
“The Colonel”
What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.
COMMENTARY
I wrote the poem in a single night on an electric typewriter that faced a window tufted with frost. Between the sentences of the poem, I watched the snow fall on the other side of the black glass. The room was painted white and did not belong to me. I was not present in the room during the writing of the poem, but somewhere else. I was there again, in the colonel’s house, typing from memory verbatim the details of that night because one day I thought I might write about it and I didn’t want to forget anything. I worried that I would forget but I need not have: everything still comes back very precisely and sometimes in slow motion although the night I was taken to talk with the colonel is now forty years in the past. The poem that was not intended to be a poem emerged as a cube, shaped like a room. The moon in the poem hangs from a black cord the way a lightbulb hangs from the ceiling of an interrogation room. It may have to do with a trick of the mind, turning the room into the site of an interrogation. Or that is what I have thought at times in the years since. The parrot said hola not hello. I could have written hola but kept it in English. As children, we used to press our ears to the ground to listen for trains coming. Trains about to arrive. In that sense, we were listening for something that would happen in the time to come. I know that dead ears cannot hear anything. I know that. I had no power to convey the colonel’s sentiments to the American president.
Charles Simic
I was stolen by the gypsies. My parents stole me right back. Then the gypsies stole me again. This went on for some time. One minute I was in the caravan suckling the dark teat of my new mother, the next I sat at the long dining room table eating my breakfast with a silver spoon.
It was the first day of spring. One of my fathers was singing in the bathtub; the other one was painting a live sparrow the colors of a tropical bird.
COMMENTARY
I remember the night well. It was quarter to three and I was about to compose a poem. My dog Igor was barking viciously at the moon out in the yard and getting on my nerves. In my laboratory, Ligeia had just put the final cleaning touches to a test tube and was reaching for a jar labeled prose poetry on the shelf, when to my horror I noticed that this admirable woman of rare learning known for her singular yet placid cast of beauty was chewing bubble gum. I threw a fit so loud and protracted, it even made that stupid dog out there shut up. You’d think, I asked heaven to be my witness, that after everything she had to put up cohabitating with that bum and souse, Edgar Poe, she’d have learned how to conduct herself in the presence of another lofty poetic genius sensitive to the slightest distraction? I must have blacked out after that, since I remember nothing else of that horrible night.
So how did the poem get written then? I’ve no idea. What I can swear on a stack of Bibles is that never in my life did I sit down with the intention of writing a prose poem. My book of untitled prose fragments, The World Doesn’t End, was not originally labeled prose poetry. In fact, the manuscript I sent to the publishers wasn’t called anything. What I had done is to copy some of my nearly illegible scribblings from old notebooks, which after I rediscovered them and read them, struck me as having poetic qualities of their own and strung all together surprisingly read like a tongue-in-cheek autobiography. After tinkering over them for several months and reducing the manuscript to sixty-eight pieces, I showed them to my editor at Harcourt who to my surprise offered to publish them. However, just before the book was to appear, I got an urgent call from her asking me what do we call this? Don’t call it anything, I told her, but she explained to me that a book needs to be called something, so that libraries and bookstores know on what shelf to put it. After giving the matter some thought, I agreed to call it prose poetry.
Looking at the poem today, I can guess what was in my mind when I wrote it. Warning children about being stolen by the gypsies if they wander off is a stock phrase East European grandmothers and mothers use to scare children. As a city kid, stuck living in an apartment building, the life of the gypsies, from what I saw of it in Yugoslavia, seemed far more attractive to me. Of course, I knew my little tale about how I kept changing identities had to be short. I had read and liked plenty of prose poetry before I wrote what I wrote here, but I admired most of all the brevity and stunning lunacy of Max Jacob’s, Daniil Kharms’ and Russell Edson’s finest poems. They are like parlor magic tricks which make you scratch your head after you see them, like the one called “Miser’s Dream” where a seemingly infinite supply of coins is plucked out of the air by the magician. That’s the marvel of a prose poem too. It looks like prose on the page, but acts like a poem in your head.
“The Colonel,” from The Country Between Us by Carolyn Forché, Copyright (c) 1981 by Carolyn Forché. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Commentary used by permission of Carolyn Forché.
“I was stolen by the gypsies,” from The World Doesn’t End, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1989. Poem and commentary used by permission of Charles Simic.
Peter Johnson’s most recent poetry titles are Old Man Howling at the Moon (Madhat Press, 2018) and A Cast-iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 Contemporary American Poets on Their Prose Poetry(Madhat, 2019). His prose poetry has received an NEA and the James Laughlin Award from The Academy of American Poets. See his other poetry and fiction at peterjohnsonauthor.com.
I hope it's not too impolite to do this, probably it is, but times are weird. Here's a prose poem I brought back today, in celebration of Donald Trump's acquittal. It was translated into a number of languages following the Abu Ghraib events, which are now pretty much forgotten, of course, though Trump does his best to keep the memory alive by championing the employment of torture:
https://www.dispatchespoetrywars.com/poetry/poem-for-donald-trumps-acquittal-link/
Posted by: Kent Johnson | February 06, 2020 at 07:32 PM
By the way, there is, in Forche's legendary poem, a curious detail that seems off. In Central America, during the 1980s, grocery bags were decidedly not made of paper, but of plastic. I worked as a literacy and adult education instructor on two occasions in Nicaragua, once for six months in 1980 and then for nine months in 1983, in the mountains, in the midst of the Contra war. I went back on two later extended occasions to do research for books and articles I later published on Nicaraguan poetry and culture, with the close collaboration of Ernesto Cardenal, the great Nicaraguan poet and Minister of Culture at the time. Never once, in all that time do I remember seeing a paper bag, such as we have at grocery stores here in the U.S., either at supermarkets or at the outdoor mercados. It is possible, I suppose, that this Colonel in Forche's poem had special commissary stores where such paper sacks were available, I don't know. Anyway, I am not calling the veracity of the memory into question, just noting the anachronism, if that's the word, which is highlighted by the fact that severed human ears would be less "messily" kept in a plastic bag, rather than a paper one. Human ears are not mushrooms, after all.
Posted by: Kent Johnson | February 06, 2020 at 08:42 PM
Forgive me, I know three comments under a single poet is obnoxious, and I promise this will be my last one, but I want to be clear that I admire Carolyn Forche. She and I graduated from the same program, at mid-level Bowling Green State U. (she some years before me), and she was kind (and brave!) enough to provide a supporting comment for the Araki Yasusada writings. Here is what she said (present at Jacket Magazine, from years ago):
"’Yasusada’s’ writing is an entry into a spiritual space . . . It is a
work of art in the largest sense."
As caretaker of that work, I value that comment by Carolyn Forche. (Poor Charles Simic is another matter, altogether. There's a surprising--sad and confused, in his case--link to Yasusada, there, also).
OK, basta ya.
Posted by: Kent Johnson | February 06, 2020 at 08:55 PM
Thanks for your comments. Interesting about Forche. I have been to El Salvador several times--no memory of what kind of shopping bags were there, but it was such a heart-breakingly beautiful country--the people especially.
Posted by: Nin Andrews | February 07, 2020 at 10:39 AM
My love for the poems you post, especially by poets of the caliber of Denise Duhamel and Terence Winch, is unbounded.
Posted by: Perjury Maloff | November 15, 2020 at 05:54 AM