Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory

A Sexy New Animal: The DNA of the Prose Poem

134 A Sexy New Animal The DNA of the Prose Poem The Prose Poem as a Beautiful Animal (by Russell Edson) He had been writing a prose poem, and had succeeded in mating a giraffe with an elephant. Scientists from all over the world came to see the product: The body looked like an elephant’s, but it had the neck of a giraffe with a small elephant’s head and a short trunk that wiggled like a wet noodle. You have created a beautiful new animal, said one of the scientists. Do you really like it? Like it? Cried the scientist, I adore it, and would love to have sex with it that I might create another beautiful animal.1 Over the last fifty years or so, the prose poem has produced much critical wringing of hands. Michael Riffaterre, for example , calls it “the literary genre with the oxymoron for a name.”2 And yet when we define those terms—that is, when we subdivide the genus and species, as it were—we do manage to make the creature’s status clearer. If the genre of poetry mates with the form of prose, then the prose poem is not an oxymoron, but a hybrid , like the verse novel or the prose play. As David Lehman puts it, “As soon as you admit the possibility that verse is an adjunct of poetry and not an indispensible quality, the prose poem ceases to be a contradiction in terms.”3 And unlike ligers and tigons, who produce defective off- 135 spring when bred, the prose poem mutts of literature have good healthy DNA, as evidenced by increasing birthrate. One might even say that the prose poem is a hybrid that actually derives its energy from the collision of opposites, notably those between realism and fantasy, and poem and novel. It is possible to sequence the genome of the prose poem. However, in the spirit of this strange and fecund animal, detours and back alleys proliferate. What Is “Poetic” Prose? While verse is literature written in lines, prose is writing whose margins are determined by the restrictions of the printing technology . Thus, because prose is not necessarily literature, some critics prefer to call prose poems “unlineated verse.” Meanwhile, the category of “poetic prose” is usually applied to literature with syntactical and lexical richness, anaphora, tropes, and word play. Suzanne Bernard distinguishes between two kinds of prose writing: plain, and “oratorical,”4 taking rhythms from formal speeches and from the Bible. Sir Thomas Malory’s 1470 Morte d’Arthur (one thousand pages) and Fénelon’s 1699 Telemachus (three hundred pages) have been called “poetic prose romances ,” because the mode of romance, along with their narrative structure, dominates our perception of them, but also because of the rich writing. But perhaps setting apart prose that is lexically, syntactically, and figuratively rich might just be another way of saying “good prose.” We don’t expect much from a driver’s manual, but with imaginative literature, style counts. The degree of complexity , however, varies with the prevailing fashion. In eighteenthcentury Germany, Novalis—the pen name for Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr (Baron) von Hardenberg (1772–1801)—was prompted by grief over the death of his fiancé to publish “Hymns to the Night,” twelve pages that intersperse short poetic prose with lyrics, featuring dense diction and syntax. Here’s the first paragraph, in an 1897 translation by George McDonald: Before all the wondrous shows of the widespread space around him, what living, sentient thing loves not the all-joyous light— 136 with its colors, its rays and undulations, its gentle omnipresence in the form of the wakening Day? The giant-world of the unresting constellations inhales it as the innermost soul of life, and floats dancing in its blue flood—the sparkling, ever-tranquil stone, the thoughtful, imbibing plant, and the wild, burning multiform beast inhales it—but more than all, the lordly stranger with the sense-filled eyes, the swaying walk, and the sweetly closed, melodious lips. Like a king over earthly nature, it rouses every force to countless transformations, binds and unbinds innumerable alliances, hangs its heavenly form around every earthly substance. Its presence alone reveals the marvelous splendor of the kingdoms of the world.5 Later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wanted to be a “poet en prose,” that is, a good stylist. So did Gustav Flaubert. Here is Flaubert on good prose, in a...