Joanna Streetly

Joanna Streetly Prose Poetry: the Mystery Cat of Poetic Forms

B: The thing is it doesn’t have a definition.

B: Sure it does. A poem without lines.

B: Well that includes all of prose.

B: Right. “Conversation About the Definition of a Prose Poem on Woodpecker Trail at Coralville Lake at the End of March, the Wind Rising” —Robert Hass

One night in bed I searched “prose poetry” on my phone after reading the work of Robert Hass. This gave me answers like: a composition written in prose that contains elements of poetry. Clearly, if I wanted specifics I wasn’t going to find them from my bed. I pulled out In Fine Form, by BC poets Kate Braid and Sandy Shreve. I was not alone in seeking clarity; the authors wrote:

“When we began looking into prose poetry for this edition, it seemed few poets agreed precisely what distinguishes it from prose. Often it came down to ‘it just feels like poetry to me.’”

Intrigued, I called Kate Braid, who referred me to Robert Hass’s A Little Book on Form. This book details prose poetry from Coleridge in 1802 and Baudelaire in the 1860s, to present day. “It is part of an evolution,” Kate said. “When free verse came in everyone said, ‘That’s not poetry because it doesn’t rhyme.’ Now people say, ‘That’s not poetry because it doesn’t have line breaks.’ But in fact it’s just another move. Poets are curious and we want to know what’s underneath so we push the edges.”

I reached out to Eve Joseph, whose brilliant collection of prose poems, Quarrels won the 2019 Griffin Prize. “Those definitions do not catch the essence of the form,” she sympathized. “The form argues against narrative and demands something else of the poet. The prose poems I love make enormous leaps in logic and ask the reader to go along for the ride. They are not ‘nonsensical’ pieces; rather, they tap into the illogical in order to reveal the ordinary strangeness in all of our lives.” With prose poems the lack of line breaks makes reading them a new experience for the eye. “The prose poem, written in sentences, not lines, immediately challenges the writer to make a block of text into something other than a paragraph,” says Eve. “It’s where the magic of the form comes in. The square block of text visually sets up an expectation that the poet has to work against. It’s this internal tension that one reaches for when working with the form.”

About the form, Robert Hass writes: “The paragraph as a formal device differs from the stanza in that the proposition of the paragraph is unity.” Eve seeks to create that unity through association. “One of the great opportunities,” she says, “is that the form forces you to explore ways to explode narrative into pieces at the same time it demands that you follow the unconscious and make it visible. In his book about writing, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, David Shields suggests that momentum can be derived not from narrative, but from a build-up of thematic resonances. I worked at placing nonlinear lines close to each other, trusting that a deeper, associative thread would develop. I also tried to place clauses or phrases one after another without conjunctions. I wanted sparks to fly between words and sentences without being slowed down.”

Of course definitions cannot capture prose poetry; poetry has always resisted capture. Understanding a form requires reading it and writing it. But there is also the thrill of the future—the opportunity to participate in prose poetry’s evolution.

Red-Winged Blackbird In Frost

This morning I saw a photograph of a red-winged blackbird in frost. It was singing and the silhouette of its beak formed the mathematical symbol for greater than. At first I thought it was serenading the husk of a flower. Then I saw that the shape was song made visible. In the frosted glow of winter sun, breath flowed out like ectoplasm, the ghost in the song—generations of ghosts making notes as distinct as the red wing on a black bird. I saw this after making breakfast for my teenaged daughter, stirring oats at the stove while she gazed at last night’s snowfall, wondering if the school bus would be cancelled. I don’t want to go to school, she said, and already she was listing the things she could do with this snowy day. She leaped so far into the future with her plans that when I told her school was open, she argued with me as if I were the school board. Tell it to the birds, I said, our song floating there.