Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present Read online

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  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  [organized chronologically by year of poet’s birth]

  RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 1803–1882

  “Woods, A Prose Sonnet”

  EDGAR ALLAN POE, 1809–1849

  “Shadow—A Parable”

  EMMA LAZARUS, 1849–1887

  “The Exodus (August 3, 1492)”

  AMY LOWELL, 1874–1925

  “Red Slippers”

  GERTRUDE STEIN, 1874–1946

  22 “Objects” from Tender Buttons

  WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, 1883–1963

  Three Improvisations from Kora in Hell

  H. D. (HILDA DOOLITTLE), 1886–1961

  “Strophe”

  “Antistrophe”

  “Epode”

  T. S. ELIOT, 1888–1965

  “Hysteria”

  e. e. cummings, 1894–1962

  “i was sitting in mcsorley’s”

  JEAN TOOMER, 1894–1967

  “Calling Jesus”

  THORNTON WILDER, 1897–1975

  “Sentences”

  HART CRANE, 1899–1932

  “Havana Rose”

  ERNEST HEMINGWAY, 1899–1961

  “Montparnasse”

  RUTH KRAUSS, 1901–1993

  “News”

  EDWIN DENBY, 1903–1983

  “Aaron”

  W. H. AUDEN, 1907–1973

  “Vespers”

  ELIZABETH BISHOP, 1911–1979

  “12 O’Clock News”

  CZESLAW MILOSZ, 1911–

  “Esse”

  “Be Like Others”

  KENNETH PATCHEN, 1911–1972

  “In Order To”

  “Delighted with Bluepink”

  “The Famous Boating Party”

  DELMORE SCHWARTZ, 1913–1966

  “Justice”

  DAVID IGNATOW, 1914–1997

  “I sink back upon the ground . . .”

  “The Story of Progress”

  BARBARA GUEST, 1920–

  “Color”

  JAMES SCHUYLER, 1923–1991

  “Two Meditations”

  “Wonderful World”

  “Footnote”

  KENNETH KOCH, 1925–2002

  “On Happiness”

  “The Allegory of Spring”

  “The Wish to Be Pregnant”

  ROBERT BLY, 1926–

  “The Hockey Poem”

  “Warning to the Reader”

  “A Rusty Tin Can”

  “One Day at a Florida Key”

  ALLEN GINSBERG, 1926–1997

  “A Supermarket in California”

  JAMES MERRILL, 1926–1995

  Three Poems from “Prose of Departure”

  FRANK O’HARA, 1926–1966

  “Meditations in an Emergency”

  “Schoenberg”

  JOHN ASHBERY, 1927–

  “Whatever It Is, Wherever You Are”

  “Haibun 6”

  “A Nice Presentation”

  “Disagreeable Glimpses”

  “Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland”

  W. S. MERWIN, 1927–

  “Humble Beginning”

  “The Dachau Shoe”

  “Our Jailer”

  “The Lonely Child”

  JAMES WRIGHT, 1927–1980

  “On Having My Pocket Picked in Rome”

  “Honey”

  JOHN HOLLANDER, 1929–

  “The Way We Walk Now”

  “Crocus Solus”

  “Not Something for Nothing”

  HARRY MATHEWS, 1930–

  Three Entries from 20 Lines a Day

  MARK STRAND, 1934–

  “In the Privacy of the Home”

  “Success Story”

  “From a Lost Diary”

  “Chekhov: A Sestina”

  MICHAEL BENEDIKT, 1935–

  “The Doorway of Perception”

  RUSSELL EDSON, 1935–

  “A Performance at Hog Theater”

  “The Pilot”

  “The Taxi”

  “The Rat’s Tight Schedule”

  “The Canoeing Trip”

  “The New Father”

  ROSMARIE WALDROP, 1935–

  Five Poems from The Reproduction of Profiles

  CHARLES SIMIC, 1938–

  Three Poems from The World Doesn’t End

  “The Magic Study of Happiness”

  “Contributor’s Note”

  MARGARET ATWOOD, 1939–

  “Women’s Novels”

  “In Love with Raymond Chandler”

  FRANK BIDART, 1939–

  “Borges and I”

  FANNY HOWE, 1940–

  “Everything’s a Fake”

  “Doubt”

  TOM CLARK, 1941–

  “Death, Revenge and the Profit Motive”

  BILLY COLLINS, 1941–

  “Five Fondly Remembered Passages from My Childhood Reading”

  ROBERT HASS, 1941–

  “A Story About the Body”

  “In the Bahamas”

  “Tall Windows”

  LYN HEJINIAN, 1941–

  Three Sections From My Life

  JOE BRAINARD, 1942–1994

  “Freud”

  “History”

  LOUIS JENKINS, 1942–

  “Football”

  “Appointed Rounds”

  “The Prose Poem”

  RON PADGETT, 1942–

  “Light as Air”

  “Album”

  MICHAEL PALMER, 1943–

  “A word is coming up on the screen . . .”

  JAMES TATE, 1943–

  “The Second Greatest Story Ever Told”

  “Same Tits”

  “The List of Famous Hats”

  “Distance from Loved Ones”

  “Rapture”

  “Bernie at the Pay Phone”

  PAUL VIOLI, 1944–

  “Triptych”

  “Acknowledgments”

  JOHN GODFREY, 1945–

  “So Let’s Look At It Another Way”

  BERNADETTE MAYER, 1945–

  “Visions or Desolation”

  ALICE NOTLEY, 1945–

  “Untitled”

  IRA SADOFF, 1945–

  “Seurat”

  ANNE WALDMAN, 1945–

  “Stereo”

  TERENCE WINCH, 1945–

  “Shoot the Horse”

  B.J. ATWOOD-FUKUDA, 1946–

  “The Wreck of the Platonic”

  ANDREI CODRESCU, 1946–

  “De Natura Rerum”

  “Secret Training”

  “Power”

  RAE ARMANTROUT, 1947–

  “Bases”

  “Middle Men”

  “Imaginary Places”

  MICHAEL BURKARD, 1947–

  “A Conversation About Memory”

  LYDIA DAVIS, 1947–

  “The Thirteenth Woman”

  “In the Garment District”

  “Agreement”

  AARON FOGEL, 1947–

  “The Chessboard Is on Fire”

  YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA, 1947–

  “Nude Interrogation”

  “The Hanoi Market”

  “A Summer Night in
Hanoi”

  MAUREEN SEATON, 1947–

  “Toy Car”

  “Lateral Time”

  LESLIE SCALAPINO, 1948–

  “That They Were at the Beach”

  TOM WHALEN, 1948–

  “Why I Hate the Prose Poem”

  AGHA SHAHID ALI, 1949–2001

  “Return to Harmony 3”

  LYNN EMANUEL, 1949–

  “inside gertrude stein”

  KIT ROBINSON, 1949–

  “The Person”

  CHARLES BERNSTEIN, 1950–

  “Comraderie turns to rivalry . . .”

  ANNE CARSON, 1950–

  “On Waterproofing”

  “On Orchids”

  “On Hedonism”

  “On Shelter”

  CAROLYN FORCHÉ, 1950–

  “The Colonel”

  JAMES RICHARDSON, 1950–

  “Vectors: Thirty-six Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays”

  JOHN YAU, 1950–

  “Predella”

  “Summer Rental”

  PETER JOHNSON, 1951–

  “Pretty Happy!”

  “Tex-Mex”

  MAXINE CHERNOFF, 1952–

  “His Pastime”

  “Vanity, Wisconsin”

  “The Inner Life”

  RITA DOVE, 1952–

  “Kentucky, 1833”

  CARLA HARRYMAN, 1952–

  “Magic (or Rousseau)”

  “Matter”

  MARK JARMAN, 1952–

  “Epistle”

  MARY RUEFLE, 1952–

  “Monument”

  KILLARNEY CLARY, 1953–

  “Because the ones I work for . . .”

  “Life is boundless . . .”

  FRAN CARLEN, 1954–

  “Anna Karenina”

  “Anal Nap”

  THYLIAS MOSS, 1954–

  “An Anointing”

  TYRONE WILLIAMS, 1954–

  “Cold Calls”

  HARRYETTE MULLEN, ?–

  “Variation on a Theme Park,”

  “The Anthropic Principle”

  “Sleeping with the Dictionary”

  SUSAN WHEELER, 1955–

  “Invective: You Should Know”

  APRIL BERNARD, 1956–

  “Exegesis”

  AMY GERSTLER, 1956–

  “Dear Boy George”

  “Bitter Angel”

  “The Bear-Boy of Lithuania”

  DIONISIO D. MARTÍNEZ, 1956–

  “Avant-Dernières Pensées”

  CATHERINE BOWMAN, 1957–

  “No Sorry”

  WANG PING, 1957—

  “Of Flesh and Spirit”

  NIN ANDREWS, 1958–

  “Notes on the Orgasm”

  “Always Have a Joyful Mind”

  MICHAEL FRIEDMAN, 1960–

  “Lecture”

  “Death”

  “State”

  STEPHANIE BROWN, 1961–

  “Commencement Address”

  DENISE DUHAMEL, 1961–

  “A Nap on the Afternoon of My 39th Birthday”

  CHRISTOPHER EDGAR, 1961–

  “In C”

  CAMPBELL MCGRATH, 1962–

  “The Prose Poem”

  LINH DINH, 1963–

  “Fish Eyes”

  “The Most Beautiful Word”

  CLAUDIA RANKINE, 1963–

  “Intermission in Four Acts”

  GABRIEL GUDDING, 1966–

  “A Defense of Poetry”

  JOE WENDEROTH, 1966–

  Twelve Epistles from Letters to Wendy’s

  LISA JARNOT, 1967–

  “Still Life”

  “Ode”

  KAREN VOLKMAN, 1967–

  “It Could Be a Bird”

  “When Kiss Spells Contradiction”

  MARK BIBBINS, 1968–

  Two Poems from “Blasted Fields of Clover Bring Harrowing and Regretful Sighs”

  RICHARD BLANCO, 1968–

  “Mango, Number 61”

  JENNIFER L. KNOX, 1968–

  “Hot Ass Poem”

  RICHARD DEMING, 1970–

  “Requiem”

  ANSELM BERRIGAN, 1972–

  “The Page Torn Out”

  KATHERINE LEDERER, 1972–

  “According to the Appetites”

  ANDREW ZAWACKI, 1972–

  Two Poems from Masquerade

  JAMEY DUNHAM, 1973–

  “An American Story”

  MATTHEA HARVEY, 1973–

  “The Crowds Cheered as Gloom Galloped Away”

  SARAH MANGUSO, 1974–

  “Nepenthe”

  “What We Miss”

  JENNY BOULLY, 1976—

  “He appeared then . . .”

  Acknowledgments

  Notes on Contributors

  Index of Poems

  Index of Poets

  It is even in

  prose, I am a real poet.

  —Frank O’Hara,

  —“Why I Am Not a Painter”

  INTRODUCTION

  by David Lehman

  In December 1978, two members of a three-person committee voted to give the year’s Pulitzer Prize in poetry to Mark Strand for his book The Monument. It was a bold move. The Monument was anything but a conventional book of verse. It comprised short prose musings on the subject of death, with the author’s sentences presented in counterpoint to quotations from Shakespeare, Unamuno, Sir Thomas Browne, Nietzsche, Wallace Stevens, and other experts on mortality. In the end, however, Strand didn’t win the prize, because the third judge—the committee chair, Louis Simpson—adamantly opposed the choice. Simpson objected to The Monument on the grounds that it is predominantly in prose. He argued that the prestigious award is designed expressly to honor verse, and the argument prevailed with the Pulitzer higher-ups who act on the committee’s recommendations. To an admirer of The Monument it was as if the very qualities that distinguished this quirky, unfamiliar, hard-to-classify sequence worked against it when it came time to distribute accolades. It was clear then that prose had not yet gained acceptance as a medium for writing poetry. The poets who had been doing it were still working in advance of official recognition and in some cases (the Ashbery of Three Poems, the Merwin of The Miner’s Pale Children) despite their own misgivings about the terms “prose poem” and “prose poetry. “Such terms implied a link to a modern French tradition with which the American poets were familiar but from which they meant to keep a respectful distance. “The prose poem has the unusual distinction of being regarded with suspicion not only by the usual haters of poetry, but also by many poets themselves,” Charles Simic observed.

  So when Simic won the Pulitzer for The World Doesn’t End in 1991 it seemed doubly significant, marking an event not only in Simic’s reputation but in the place of the prose poem itself. Its validity as a form or genre with a specific appeal to American poets could no longer be denied. For Simic’s Pulitzer volume, like Strand’s jinxed volume thirteen years earlier, consisted mainly of prose poems, and it was defiantly as prose poems that they succeeded. In neither case was the prose tarted up to ape the supposed prettiness of verse. The writing was not self-consciously “poetic.” On the contrary, the prose of these poems—one might say their “prosaic” nature if a pejorative valence did not hang over that word—was a crucial dimension of their being.

  The prose poems in The World Doesn’t End are brief, spare, sometimes chilling, dark. Many evoke Simic’s childhood in Belgrade during World War II. A strange whimsy makes a grim memory of smoke and fog no less grim but perhaps more haunting. One untitled prose poem begins:

  I was stolen by the gypsies. My parents stole me right back. Then the gypsies stole me again. This went on for some time.

  This succession of sentences, not lines, moves at a speed faster than verse. Then comes the formulaic last sentence to slow down the action. The effect is to make the extraordinary seem somehow routine, and it has everythin
g to do with the rhythms of narrative prose. In another poem the opening sentence introduces a metaphor, and the rest of the piece elaborates it in an effort to sustain the epiphany:

  We were so poor I had to take the place of the bait in the mousetrap.

  As it happens, the opening part of the sentence scans perfectly as blank verse. But it owes its force to the tension between the flatness of the delivery and the macabre twist in the plot. By putting his understated prose style at the service of the fantastic and surreal, Simic had found a way to capture the foreignness of his boyhood experience in war-torn Yugoslavia. His use of simple, declarative sentences, sometimes at a staccato pace, recalls the prose style of his fellow Oak Park High School alumnus, Ernest Hemingway, himself a prose poem pioneer.

  It is possible to read Simic’s prose poems as dream narratives that end abruptly, enigmatically. You might almost treat them as prose fiction, except for their extreme brevity, the ambiguous ways they achieve resolution, and their author’s unmistakably poetic intent. Simic told an interviewer that his book originated as “quick notations,” “ideas for poems,” written haphazardly and on the run. They came, he said, from a place where “the impulses for prose and those for poetry collide.” What made them poems? “What makes them poems is that they are self-contained, and once you read one you have to go back and start reading it again. That’s what a poem does.”

  What is a prose poem? The best short definition is almost tautological. The prose poem is a poem written in prose rather than verse. On the page it can look like a paragraph or fragmented short story, but it acts like a poem. It works in sentences rather than lines. With the one exception of the line break, it can make use of all the strategies and tactics of poetry. Just as free verse did away with meter and rhyme, the prose poem does away with the line as the unit of composition. It uses the means of prose toward the ends of poetry.

  The prose poem is, you might say, poetry that disguises its true nature. In the prose poem the poet can appropriate such unlikely models as the newspaper article, the memo, the list, the parable, the speech, the dialogue. It is a form that sets store by its use of the demotic, its willingness to locate the sources of poetry defiantly far from the spring on Mount Helicon sacred to the muses. It is an insistently modern form. Some would argue further that it is, or was, an inherently subversive one. Margueritte Murphy’s A Tradition of Subversion (1992) contends that an adversarial streak characterizes the genre. Others are drawn to the allegorical formula that would align the prose poem with “working-class discourse” undermining the lyric structures of the upper bourgeosie. Many examples and precedents elude or combat this facile notion, and commentators have begun to stress the inclusiveness of the genre and not its putatively subversive properties. While it sometimes seems that the only generalization you can safely make about the prose poem is that it resists generalization, certain terms recur in essays and critical discussions. The prose poem is a hybrid form, an anomaly if not a paradox or oxymoron. It offers the enchantment of escape whether from the invisible chains of the superego, or from the oppressive reign of the alexandrine line, from which Charles Baudelaire broke vehemently in his Petits Poèmes en prose (1862), which inaugurated the genre in France. Sooner or later in the discussion it will be said that the prose poem, born in rebellion against tradition, has itself become a tradition. It will be noted approvingly that the prose poem blurs boundaries. “My own formal literary education had not accorded much regard to what in English are referred to as ‘prose poems,’ and I am not at all sure what the genre is supposed to entail,” W. S. Merwin wrote in a 1994 reprinting of The Miner’s Pale Children (1970). “I recalled what I thought were precedents—fragments, essays, journal entries, instructions and lists, oral tales, fables. What I was hoping for as I went was akin to what made a poem seem complete. But it was prose that I was writing, and I was pleased when the pieces raised questions about the boundary between prose and poetry, and where we think it runs.”