On the Prosing of Poetry

How Contemporary American Poets Are Denaturing the Poem
By JOAN HOULIHAN

Prufrock's Peach A rebuttal by Fred Moramarco, Editor of "Poetry International" THE FOLLOWING WORKS ARE CITED IN THIS ARTICLE: - Babel to Byzantium: Poets and Poetry   Now, James Dickey - The Best American Poetry of 1999,   Guest Editor, Robert Bly - The Prose Poem and the Ideology of   Genre, Michel Delville - Charles Simic, Kim Addonizio excerpts from   Poetry International - Reputations of The Tongue, William Logan

hy poetry? Or, to put it another way, why not say it in prose? Because the need to say something profound, or new, or significant, or deeply personal, compels us to find a better way of saying it than through prose, our everyday language. Just as the lover turns to uncharacteristic orations and flowery phrases because he senses the inadequacy of everyday speech in the face of new and profound emotion, so our toasts, elegies, special occasion speeches—all of these turn us into poets of the moment as we sense that the vehicle of expression needs to be worthy of its significant subject matter. Nowhere so much as in poetry is the need to communicate something significant, complex or profound coupled so fiercely with the need to communicate it exactly, such that the hearer understands it even to the point of experiencing the original event or emotion him or herself. We turn to poetry—either in poetic forms or in the heightening of prose with poetic devices—when the matter to be expressed threatens to burst the bounds of prose.

This has long been the case. Before writing was invented, poetry was used to mark special occasions and strong emotions and to burn the necessary stories—the myths and truths of a culture—into the memories of the people. Mnemonic devices such as sound, rhythm, and heightened, pictorial language, economy of expression (“epigrammatic” speech that encodes many meanings in as few words as possible) and assonance, consonance, alliteration, parallelism, were the branding irons used for the task. As well, these devices were incantatory, stirring primal responses to their sound and rhythm, and creating an atmosphere for the sacred and magical. Although spoken, poetry was not common; it was instead, a singular kind of speech, reserved for relaying important or sacred events, ensuring that such events would be remembered almost in a physical way, in the body’s deep response to sound, rhythm and imagery. Speaking poetically served a purpose. Speaking prosaically also served a purpose—to negotiate everyday reality, to speak of those things which were common to all and not worthy of long remembrance—to speak of the world in transit.

Our ability to write did not erase the distinction. It took contemporary American poets, writing in deliberately flat prose about insignificant personal events and feelings; and editors, publishers and critics dubbing such anecdotes and everyday journal entries “poems,” to erase the distinction. We have reached the point we are being asked to believe that a text block, chopped randomly into flat, declarative lines, is a poem. We are told to kneel and stare at this specimen of dead lines laid out in its little coffin on the page, and declare it alive. What do we say?

Although the distinction between prose and poetry as separate genres had already been challenged

We are told to kneel and stare at this specimen of dead lines laid out in its little coffin on the page, and declare it alive. What do we say?

in Europe by the appearance of the "prose poem"*, in America the distinction was seriously blurred when William Carlos Williams began a new turn in American poetry, a reliance on flat, declarative sentences, the “common speech” of man, and a subsequent eschewing of heightened language and the poetic devices associated with poetry—in short, a turn toward prose—and not even, in many cases, a prose poetic enough to meet the standards of good prose (which includes heightened language and poetic devices to maintain interest):

This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox


and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast


Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold.

As James Dickey puts it: “How many beginning writers took Williams as their model: were encouraged to write because..Well, if that’s poetry, I believe I might be able to write it too!”* And how many people, some forty years later, now look to our Best of American Poetry collections at the millennium’s end and, seeing what’s there, make the same exclamation?

She was twenty-five when they settled in our town.
When they moved from the city into their colonial
They unpacked wedding china and silver from boxes
Labeled Tiffany, Bergdorf Goodman, and K-Mart.
Both men and women leaned like peonies
Toward the luster and power of her unlimited
Determining smile. They brought with them a small son
And she bore two daughters in five years.
She dressed her children in primary colors
So that they resembled child models in a catalog,
Yet they played with such charm they made childhood
Seem happy. Her handsome husband adored her.

Smile, Donald Hall

This “poem” goes on for a total of 106 lines in a block of text separated into paragraphs. In all of these lines, itis only the fifth line (“Both men and women leaned like peonies.. etc.”) that could reasonably be classified as“poetry” simply because it uses poetic devices—simile (like peonies), internal rhyme (leaned, peonies) consonance(luster, power) and repetition of sounds (unlimited, determining). The rest of the “poem” has been denatured of itspoetry. It seems almost deliberate, this boiling off of the images and sounds to leave a monotonous recitation of one bland moment after another.

From the same collection:

The guy picked me up north of Santa Fe
Where the red hills, dotted with pinon,
Loop down from the divide into mesas and plain.
I was standing out there
--just me, my pack, and the gila monsters—
when he hauled his Buick off the road
in a sputter of cinders and dust
and got out, a gray-bearded, 6-foot, 300-pounder,
who stretched and said, “Do you want to drive?”

Story, John Balaban

Unlike Hall’s poem, which contains one line of poetry, this poem contains zero lines of poetry. Here is what Balaban says about his “poem”:

"A true story. Almost a found poem."

...the greater mystery is why anyone would choose to think of this anecdote as a poem at all...when it is clearly an anecdote truncated into lines.

What could this mean? That Balaban titled it “Story” in an ironical, self-conscious way, to make a comment on the state of poetry, much as Warhol’s soup cans made a statement on art? That, just as the soup cans were “found” to be art objects, so this anecdote is included in a collection of poetry because it was “found” to be a .. what? A poem? But he says it’s “almost” a poem. Mysterious as all of this is, the greater mystery is why anyone would choose to think of this anecdote as a poem at all, as implied by its inclusion in The Best American Poetry collection, when it is clearly an anecdote truncated into lines.

Another best poem of 1999 is an anecdote from the poet's teaching experience:

Once when I was teaching “Dover Beach”
To a class of freshmen, a young woman
Raised her hand and said, “I’m confused
About this ‘Sea of Faith.’” “Well,” I said,
“let’s talk about it. We probably need
to talk a bit about figurative language.
What confuses you about it?”
“I mean, is it a real sea?” she asked.
“You mean, is it a real body of water
that you could point to on a map
or visit on a vacation?”
“Yes,” she said. “Is it a real sea?”
Oh Christ, I thought, is this where we are?
Next year I’ll be teaching them the alphabet
And how to sound words out.

Sea of Faith, John Brehm

This goes on in the same vein for another page. As with Balaban’s Story, you read through this tedious personal anecdote unable to believe it is as devoid of meaning, humor or point as it appears, and with nothing in the language, line after line, to redeem it. Its conclusion is sophomoric:

..I wishedit was true, wished there really was a Sea of Faith
that you could wade out into,
dive under its blue and magic waters,
hold your breath, swim like a fish
down to the bottom, and then emerge again
able to believe in everything, faithful
and unafraid to ask even the simplest of questions,
happy to have them simply answered.

“Swim like a fish”? Yes, the only poetic device. Enough to make you want to drink like a fish. A simple question I have is: why is this called a poem? Another is: why is it included in a collection of best poems? Perhaps the most extreme case of stripping the poem of all its identifying characteristics is Robert Creeley’s anorexic anecdote Mitch:

Mitch was a classmate
later married extraordinary poet
and so our families were friends
when we were young
and lived in New York, New Hampshire, France.

In a kind of shorthand, Creeley shoots off one thought fragment after another, blurting them out breathlessly as if to a jogging mate. As William Logan points out:

"In Creeley we never get a memorable image, a thing seen precisely, a sentence carried as far as thinking will takeit. He has eliminated most of the texture of verse, of the pleasurable massing of words. He has at times lost hisvery taste for sentences and dissolved into the tedium of diary jotting or the Dictaphone."*