Cosmopoetica

I recently ‘fessed up to a friend that I sometimes enjoy William Logan’s vicious reviews. I don’t necessarily agree with the substance of Logan’s criticism—in fact I agree with most of the well-publicized pans—but I admire his verbal facility, his sharp, intelligent wit, and, yes, his literate snark. I’m not a big fan of negative reviewing for what I consider to be pragmatic reasons, but I can appreciate these aspects of Logan’s hatchety reviews in the way I can appreciate a standup comic even if I have no sympathy for the ideas he is joking about.

Bill Knott recently (re)posted a blast at Robert Hass that closely resembles the ideal of the comi-tragic critical form in my head. Knott’s diatribe made me laugh out loud, which I appreciate. It’s a creative work in and of itself, which so few examples of this kind of writing are… it’s pretty obvious that when he wrote this he was on some kind of crazy “roll.” And Knott doesn’t pretend he’s writing from some generic, generally representative, objective place but straight out of his own personal (and personally affronted) perspective. Plus, Bill’s a far better poet than William Logan.

I can’t say that I agree wholly with Bill’s take on Hass, but it’s a take that is something to behold. Hass’ poetry has never really stood out—it’s difficult for me to recall anything of his I’ve read—despite reading at least three of his books. But he is the author of one of my favorite traditional prose poems, which I (almost guiltily) include here:

"A Story About the Body"

The young composer, working that summer at an artist’s colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she mused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, “I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy,” and when he didn’t understand, “I’ve lost both my breasts.” The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity-like music-withered quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, “I’m sorry I don’t think I could.” He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl-she must have swept the corners of her studio-was full of dead bees.

–Robert Hass

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[image/poem by CURSIVEBUILDINGS]

At the opposite end of the poetry spectrum (granting the weakness of the metaphor) from the avant-garde and experimental faction– but in their own way embodying a similar inquiry into just what poems are– lies prose poetry. As I’ve grown older I’ve become much less concerned with what a poem is, and even less with what a poem isn’t. It’s OK with me if one wants to call these prosy poemy things prose poems, proems, flash fictions, poetic passages, whatever. I just like some of them.

There are different ways to consider the history of the form. The first prose poetry as such emerged in France in the early-mid 1800s, created by writers like Baudelaire and Rimbaud as– at least in part– an act of rebellion against the rigid (perhaps tyrannical) forms of French verse that dominated at the time.

"Be Drunk"

You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."

–Charles Baudelaire

But we can go back much further in time and find prose poetry… just pull out the Bible and pick at random from Psalms or Ecclesiastes:

Ecclesiastes 12

Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them; while the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars, be not darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain: in the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened, and the doors shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of the grinding is low, and he shall rise up at the voice of the bird, and all the daughters of music shall be brought low; also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets: or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.

Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.

In more recent times, prose poetry waned (but didn’t disappear… see Wilde’s Poems in Prose and many pieces by Gertrude Stein– whose work becomes more and more important to me as time goes by) until a resurgence starting in the 50s with the Beats, then Robert Bly and James Wright, until today when it has become commonplace, a form invoked by poets of all stripes, including some of our most recognized contemporary poets such as James Tate and current Poet Laureate Charles Simic.

I’m not trying to write a history of the form, just provide some context for my favorite prose poems, recognizing how easy it is to argue that they aren’t poems at all, but poetic prose, to which I answer (pick one): so what? and I’m not the only one… Some examples:

“Two Children Threated by a Nightingale”

Attentive as one is to a whisper, the children wade through standing water, uncertain of its depth or source. They find and salvage a sogged train schedule. For their short lives the depot has been boarded shut. One has a flair for death and can fashion a noose from corn silk. One keeps an archive of diaries. One is the movie extra a camera seeks out, lingers on. One reads the subtitles aloud before the characters speak. One imagines sleep to be a furnished room. One imagines rain on the rolled hay, the must of empty stables, the tin-edge of blood on the tongue. By schema and classifications, they are a sister and a brother. Waylaid between this puddle and the next, one creates a theory of the spectral. One fingers through a cache of candies. One is plump and ready for the oven. One could not even flavor a stock pot. One is the overlooked subject. One is a language of mishearings. They cling to the hitherto unknown. When they dissect the bird they find nothing of the song.

–Eric Pankey

"The Toad"

Every so often he jumps, just to make it clear that he is essentially immobile. The jump is in some way like a heartbeat; careful observation makes it plain that the whole of the toad is a heart.

Clamped in a hunk of cold mud, the toad sinks into the winter like a mournful chrysalis. He wakes in the spring knowing that he has not changed into anything else. Dried to his depths, he is more a toad than ever. He waits in silence for the first rains.

And one fine day he heaves himself out of the pliant earth, heavy with moisture, swollen with spiteful sap, like a heart tossed onto the ground. In his sphinxlike posture there is a secret proposition of exchange, and the toad’s ugliness appalls us like a mirror.

–Juan Jose Arreola

“Messenger of Tyranny”

He spits sparks on the night, cinders, love, lightning, broken wings, hate, stars and gold coins which hasten away. He sighs of remorse on the night. At the breath of silence, he grapples with man and knocks him down. He rams the silence down his throat. And, whether in the fermented cities, the red cities where a deep well sleeps at every intersection, where the passerby leave a luminous trail in the shadow; whether in open country sparsely furnished with vague inhabitants; whether in hopeless deserts no one will ever enter, he sows desire in the air and in people’s minds. Men are thrown into a sea of a single night’s sleep. At each half-open door, at each windowpane where the gleam shivers one can overhear what he says, one can hear the dull blows of anguish.

Everything is clenched in the hand that never pardons. Everything is said and everything is set down under the same heading. One day you close your eye to the light of night. All these lamps in the evening. All these lost paths that wind at dawn. All these falling fires from the woods of the heavens. And all the dead dreams that still flicker. Everything will be covered by leaves of lead, by the copper-colored laughs of the days that time incubates. Then the eternal fire will burn your past, your past torn by a sacrilegious hand. Whereupon the insane ravens dismember the gray sky. The black, skipped pages in the book become dog-eared; the book wherein the chords of your life are inscribed.
Nothing is left but the black saliva, streaming in the night, and hate, love, gold, the desire for gold, the freedom without wings, the biting against the chains. And, in the white of the eye, of the heart, on the reverse side of truth, force, the force that weighs down and kills, the whole force.

–Pierre Reverdy

"A Story About the Body"

The young composer, working that summer at an artist’s colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she mused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, “I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy,” and when he didn’t understand, “I’ve lost both my breasts.” The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity-like music-withered quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, “I’m sorry I don’t think I could.” He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl-she must have swept the corners of her studio-was full of dead bees.

–Robert Hass

Incidentally, it’s worth noting that the sometimes-surreal, sometimes-absurd prose poems by Russell Edson spawned a genre of their own. I quickly grow weary of Edson’s poems if I over-indulge, but I can’t deny that they carry with them a kind of insistence:

"The Floor"

The floor is something we must fight against. Whilst seemingly mere platform for the human stance, it is that place that men fall to.

I am not dizzy. I stand as a tower, a lighthouse;  the pale ray of my sentiency flowing from my face. But should I go dizzy I crash down into the floor;  my face into the floor, my attention bleeding into  the cracks of the floor.

Dear horizontal place, I do not wish to be a rug. Do not pull at the difficult head, this teetering bulb of dread and dream…

–Russell Edson

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