So, you’ve just gotten my little chapbook, Doctor of the World. You’ve come to expect a certain kind of poem from me and now this! You’re not used to reading poetry, anyway, but you’re my friend, or you’ve liked what’s popped up in the past, so you ordered the book.
These are prose poems. What that means is that they don’t “look like” what you expect.
The prose poem blurs the lines between prose and poetry. The first prose poems were written in 19th-century France, to break away from strict rules of French verse. Poets like Charles Baudelaire used it to rebel against traditional verse forms, but its popularity spread to Germany and the English speaking world. The British “decadent” writers like Ernest Dowson and Oscar Wilde liked the form. At first it was seen as a kind of protest against rigid patterns.
“Which of us has not,” writes Charles Baudelaire in the introduction to Paris Spleen (1869), “in his moments of ambition, dreamed the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm or rime, sufficiently supple, sufficiently abrupt, to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of the soul, to the windings and turnings of the fancy, to the sudden starts of the conscience?”
In the 20th century, a whole lot of poets began using the form (Gertrude Stein, Amy Lowell, Robert Bly and so on). In this country the Beat Generation poets loved the form, because it felt like a rebellion against tradition.
The prose poem feels natural, like natural speech, not pushed out of shape to conform to a pattern. But in the successful ones (in my opinion) it still sounds like a poem. If it doesn’t sound like a poem, what’s the point?
Not everyone is a fan. As Pulitzer prize winner Charles Simic said, “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.”
Why did I write these? I dunno. It certainly wasn’t a deliberate radical move. There are many poets I admire writing prose poems. I think the prose poem is particularly good at holding together a mood, even if the content shifts.