Ed note: I propose a toast to Mark Strand, who, was, in addition to all else, a master of the prose poem. (The photo was taken by Stacey Lehman at a Civitella Ranieri party in, I think, 2009). He had written a number of them but in 2012 he broke new ground in Almost Invisible, his collection of prose poems (or "prose pieces," as he preferred to think of them), such as "The Minister of Culture" (below). In "The Minister of Culture," the key word is "nothing," and it is tempting to identify the title character as a type of the poet, a hardworking chap who falls asleep into the "nothing," the oblivion which "in its absent way" is welcoming him at the end of the day -- or at life's end.
For Strand's poem "Fire" and an editor's note on the poet and the poem, click here.
Strand told Nathalie Handal (who interviewed him for Guernica) that he wrote Almost Invisible in eight months. On the subject of the prose poem he said,
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I thought I knew what prose poetry was for years and years. It was simply prose that had the integrity of poems, that is they seem to hold together. They were short pieces of prose. Each word had a different and specific gravity than words have in just pure prose. They have the weight somehow of poems. And that’s true of prose that some people call prose poetry. I was just trying to define something for myself. I don’t feel in my new prose pieces that words have that kind of weight. I think the book is essentially a light book.
You don’t feel the pressure in those prose pieces that you would in a poem. You don’t feel so much hinges on an individual word. I think you can feel their writtenness but they don’t have the compactness or the weight of a poem. And when I said escaping poetry, I meant the concerns that a poet has over lineation, the adjustments one makes for measure if one if using meter or rhyme or the syntactical consideration that you experience when writing poetry. In prose, you are essentially writing sentences, that’s what I’m doing. Each of my prose pieces is a paragraph. I am not writing stanzas. I’m not saying should this twenty-four line poem be in six four lines stanzas or four six line stanzas. I’m not worrying about the same things. And I’m free to be funny.
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The Minister of Culture
The Minister of Culture goes home after a grueling day at the office. He lies on his bed and tries to think of nothing, but nothing happens or, more precisely, does not happen. Nothing is elsewhere doing what nothing does, which is to expand the dark. But the minister is patient, and slowly things slip away—the walls of his house, the park across the street, his friends in the next town. He believes that nothing has finally come to him and, in its absent way, is saying, "Darling, you know how much I have always wanted to please you, and now I have come. And what is more, I have come to stay."
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