Lake House Diary VI (Thinking About the Prose Poem)

I just came back from a long weekend on a large island in Lake Erie. It was an annual gathering of writers that we figured out has been going on for 20 years. Good friends, good writing, good newcomers, surprising turns, noisy dinners, conclaves on the back deck, swimming off the bird sanctuary beach. Because I've been having kind of a dry summer, I brought with me a talismanic notebook (steno) that I used several years ago when I wrote like a storm pouring out and everyone would wish for a return of that kind of bounty as do I.

I also considered if I am nostalgic for the rhythms of the prose poem. Maybe I think that because of my two recent readings. At one, having read a number of poems in a row, I read the last poem (a prose poem) as if I was a furnace gusting out a great fireball or a prophet letting loose his proclamation. At the other, I read in a much more punctuated, measured style. But this second reading was only one poem--much time elapses--and then second poem (not prose poems). And I know a rhythm and a power can be built if there is a continuing in the reading. Something to think about.

Maybe my sense is that prose poems sometimes have something untamed about them and I like that. Do not gentle me! Nor should I gentle myself in this! I went to the prose poem because of rhythm but maybe there was also burgeoning and proliferation and carelessness in the right way which really means there was not care in a mingey persnicketty kind of way. I need that wildness again.

(note at the bottom of one of those notebook pages: feral cats in the backyard)

Thoughts on Form (in the Large) or There are Many Ways to Make Music

I have been running from form for years. And metrics. I think because it feels like a box, I say don't put me in it! Don't tell me I have to pose a problem and then solve it. Don't tell me there should be 10 syllables in each of my lines. I might be a milquetoast, but on the page I'm a rebel. Don't fence me in (a little twangy guitar music here not really frantic enough for my emotional response!). Of course, I know that I'm unconsciously working the system in my free verse way. Using the broken pieces of form and meter and rhythm to make my own patterns and echoes. I've understood this, intellectually, ever since I took "Forms of Poetry" from Leonard Trawick who opened my eyes to the meaning and uses of measure and tradition and made me write a sonnet and a sestina.

All this is a long introduction to my present quandary. I'm putting together a book of prose poems. They are poems without line breaks but with stanzas.The book is divided into 4 sections (unnamed) with an introductory poem standing before and outside of section 1. (I believe the last advice I got floating in the creative writing ether was that dividing a book into sections was bad. But come to think of it, I can just resist this encomium as well as many others.) Can I place a lineated poem as my introductory poem? It is standing outside of the book sections. I think it might work in its subjects and references. It is perhaps a little different in tone, left over from the book before where the speaker is in a very jumbled universe with a jangly voice--think too much caffeine with a slab of betrayal a la mode.

It all comes down to the question "does it work"? Can its well-thought-out line breaks hold the door open to poems with lines like a gust of air or a gush of water sluicing out over the page with some pebbles and broken flowers and scraps of paper tumbled in. It has a great title--"Ready as Mayo."