Prose Poetry — A Rebel With a Cause

The Ant Farm

In spite of Columbus the world collapses and goes flat again.
The sky is a bell jar where a child in another scale watches his ant farm.
When the bored child yawns two thousand years pass.

Someday we have crashed to the playroom floor; the careless child knocks us over with his fire truck…All that dirt lying in its broken sky.
Swept up, it is thrown into a garbage can at the back of the universe.

The prose poem and flash fiction hang out together like best friends. I once had the opportunity to take a class with the prolific poet David Wagoner, who dismissed the prose poem as an oxymoron. For Wagoner, and other traditional poets, a poem must break into lines to receive the honorable label of “poem”. I don’t know if Wagoner ever changed his mind.

Most writers dislike the eccentric prose poetic form because it is modern, untraditional, misunderstood and therefore not honored as poetry. A prose poem breaks the rules of poetry and that’s what I like. It is the rebel with a cause, a woman ruling her own country. It identifies with no form in particular, but is a mixed genre. That being said, let’s look at what makes the prose poem an enigma.

Prose poems do not use the line breaks of traditional poetry and may offer complete sentences in narrative form or odd fragments strewn across a page. They might consist of half-page or three-page narratives or one-line symbolic declarations. In the prose poem, the obvious and the implied work in balance to surprise the reader. Whether a poem runs in broken lines or dense narrative, a prose poem’s major element, as with all poetry, is its language. Often, its language is simple with implied symbolism, as with Edson’s The Ant Farm.

Many writers cannot define this eccentric genre. At the same time, the use of sentences as opposed to broken lines does change the rhythm and oral read of any poem, and the use of sentence structure in dense or loose narrative elicits a different “feel” and expectation for the reader. Prose poetry allows experimentation and a breaking of poetic rules because of its flexibility and lack of strict definition. It often, but not always, has a specific shape on the page but except for line breaks, it makes use of poetic device and tactics such as imagery and does not employ the plot or storyline as does short fiction. For the amazing geography of the world of prose poetry, take a look at Great American Prose Poems From Poe to the Present edited by David Lehman (Simon & Schuster).

The cited poem above, Ant Farm, by Russell Edson, (The Tunnel: Selected Poems) does not boast all the definitive elements of flash story but it does have some—small frame, compression, minimalism, a tiny world, word weight. Not much of a story line though, is it? This poem works by implication and imagery, subtext and symbolism, the marks of poetry. What does The Ant Farm say to you? What is Edson saying in this prose poem?

Lehman, in Great American Prose Poems, states that the prose poem “is a hybrid form, an anomaly if not a paradox…offers the enchantment of escape…from the invisible chains of the superego…the oppressive reign of the alexandrine line…born in rebellion against tradition,…blurs boundaries…is a hybrid form”. (Paraphrased from page 13 of the text) It’s a vague description, but so are the definitions of prose poetry. Try writing one. It’s fun.

Prompt: Write a prose poem with no story line but as a response to an event or a situation. (For example: a walk through a historic graveyard, a snake in the roses, a monkey who throws garbage at you when you pass by his tree) Use vivid imagery, tight language and meaningful word choice to offer the reader a “picture” of a scene. Keep it tight. Make it surreal if you like.

Take the reader by surprise.

Suggested prose poetry reading:

The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry (one of my favorite resources) Check out their other guides as well.

Wearing Dad’s Head by Barry Yourgrau

An Introduction to the Prose Poem by Brian Clements and Jamey Dunham