What is a prose poem?

“It is a piece of writing in prose having obvious poetic qualities, including intensity, compactness, prominent rhythms, and imagery.” — Chrome Browser Link.

Why write it?

“Baudelaire used prose poems to rebel against the straitjacket of classical French versification. He dreamed of creating ‘a poetic prose, musical without rhyme or rhythm, supple and jerky enough to adapt to the lyric movements of the soul, to the undulations of reverie, to the somersaults of conscience.’” –Edward Hirsch, quoted in “Prose Poem: Poetic Form” on the Poetry Foundation website.

Why study it?

The poet Mallarmé is quoted as saying, “There is the alphabet, and then there are verses which are more or less closely knit, more or less diffuse. So long as there is a straining toward style, there is versification.”

Many writers are “afraid of poetry” of all kinds and even poets question the prose poem, wondering why it should be considered a poem if it doesn’t need line breaks and looks like a paragraph.

If you read sample prose poems, those questions will diminish and you will see how helpful understanding prose poetry is for developing your craft of writing well in any genre. Language is the thing we writer’s love to create with—a prose poem is an exquisite creation, a music in prose or a prose in music. It doesn’t matter which order you see it in. What matters is that it transports readers with its sound and images, something you know to be true when you experience it, and something you want to do more of in all of your writing.

This week, I am providing model prose poems and a selection of exercises to help you begin to shape your own prose poem or poetic prose.

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Following are three prose poems I admire because of their poetic qualities. The first two are from Web del Sol, an online literary journal devoted to prose poetry and the third is from The Prose-Poem Project (the third poem as you scroll down). Reading the three I have selected and any of the prose poems on the websites will inspire you to use one or more of the strategies you experience the prose poets employing to write a stand alone piece of your own or to tighten and heighten language you have used in a prose piece, especially one that occurs in a narrator or chatacter’s reflective or emotional moment.

Here are the three poems I’ve chosen followed by an exercise inspired by each of them:

THE RUBBING

by Jennifer L. Holley

We both wake up in the night. On her way from the bathroom, she meets me in the kitchen, a glass of water in my hand. Will you please rub my legs? she asks. I take her arm, walk her back to bed. She stretches on top of the blanket, turns on her stomach, pulls off her turban, and spreads her fingers through the gray fuzz on her scalp. I lean over to stroke it, too, before dousing my hands in rubbing alcohol. I massage her calves until my hands burn from the heat between us. All over, she says. I move up the backs of her knees. Then up her thighs. She moans as if the pain worsens under my care. I notice the open door, and wish I had shut it. I find the creases higher on her legs and slide the sides of my palms in them, brushing along the lace hem of her nightgown. Do you hurt all over? I ask. Yes, she says, even higher. She quiets as I lift her nightgown and let it gather in the small of her back. She wears nothing else. I take her buttocks in my hands, knead them. I now know how soft and loose the skin of my own body will feel in thirty years. We have no words to travel through the walls, to wake up my sister so that she will walk in and see. Our mother, on her stomach, her gown hitched to her waist. Me, straddled over her body, about to collapse, on my knees.

Writing Idea #1: Remember an intimate moment with a person and describe that moment by how you responded to a request. Use details from that moment to evoke why the person might have asked for what she or he asked for. What did you feel like offering assistance? Evoke that too.

Note: The sentences are mainly short, subject verb, subject verb. It is usually too monotonous to have so many in a row like this. But here they keep us in the moment and eventually toward the end the sentences get longer, starting, I think, with: “I find the creases higher on her legs and slide the sides of my palms in them, brushing along the lace hem of her nightgown.” Perhaps the most intimate of the touching demands this longer sentence, or perhaps it is that the rhythms show us the speaker has gotten into a smoother, and ever more gentle, rubbing. When you are writing well in flow, rhythm in keeping with the emotions of a moment just seems to happen.

We learn who the subject is at the end of the poem. We learn they are quiet on the bed, that this is a private moment between mother and daughter, not shared. Where will your words lead you and what will your observation of how it is for you be?

PSALM

By Mary A. Koncel

Cats of paper and pencil. Cats deep in embryonic thought. Cats who write only on Mondays and always begin with bladder. Bladder this and bladder that. Then they turn the page.

I watch them. Beseechingly, I stand behind them. May I stick my fingers down their throats, may I squeeze their inner truths until I’m faint? Let me do this in the name of envy, before I bow my head, before I bind my hands, thumb over thumb, in reams of thistle.

Cats of obsequious margins. Cats with middle initials and big snappy verbs. Cats who never swear. Instead they press down hard. Isn’t it sadder that the food is badder. A puddle of drool and the gray one growing plump and moody, like Kafka on his wooden stool.

Let’s not pretend. They sharpen their pencils. Lords of lead and petty anecdotes: a butcher, a resurrection, an island slapped silly by belligerent tides. May I kneel in the shadow of cats, may crows bounce off my forehead.

It’s true. I’ve called them names, made unbecoming noises, imagined their tails tucked deep inside them. I am shameful. All of me. Forgive my fingers. Forgive my desire.

Writing Idea #2: Let your imagination roam free using the prose poem form: Choose a nonhuman subject such as a species of animal, a category of tableware, or a species of plants. What would you write as you think of yourself watching the members of this species or category? It is fine if you would like to imitate Mary Koncel’s strategy of asking question here and there, of seeming to “come clean” with language like “Let’s now pretend” and “It’s true.” Tell the reader some things you have never owned up to about the species or category you are observing, remembering, evoking.

Note the prose poet’s sentences: longer ones made of lists and the ones that are short. See what you can do using lists and then short sentences. Surprise yourself as you allow a string of words onto the page.

APRIL 27, 9:23

By Anthony Warnke

When I was born a baby, I was born alone. Nurse, father, unwombed oxygen brushed my blood-colored hair. Doctor, mother, epidural buzz clung to my cartilage like smoke. I had no one to talk to, really, except a thumb, which I used to plug my feeder up. Past my twelfth hour, I turned to my fellow babies in a row, but they were so angry about everything. I asked one, whose heart beat through her head, what time she’d arrived, did she agree it was too warm in here, was she excited to be alive, etc. She howled at the lamps. She was hard to get to know. I asked another, who flickered yellow, if he missed home, the hose meals, the Mozart, the living your potential in a bath, is that why he couldn’t quit barking. At the last sound of my voice, he burst the stars on our blankets into tears. It must have been nearly night, for I was getting delirious. I had no other neighbors, save cheeping boxes, so I balanced carefully on the edge of my incubator and pled to the apeish faces behind the wall of glass. The more I reasoned, the fewer fathers listened. I turned back to my thumb. Achy and shriveled, it tucked itself into my hand. I laid back down and tried to sing to myself. And that’s when I, too, couldn’t stop crying.

Writing Idea #3: Note the opening here: “When I was….”

What place can you imagine yourself into so you can write what the world, both outer and inner, is to you in that spot at that time? Starting with the phrase “When I was…” is a good way to dive into the moment, the subject, the feelings and the particulars. Can you be the dew on a cloverleaf? The genie on a flying carpet? A wisp of pollen in the air?

Can you be a star, a planet, an ocean? Can you be a violinist in an orchestra? Can you be a mom waiting for your child after school? Any being usual or unusual will work as you report what you see, feel, hear, taste, touch and smell and what is happening in response to your gestures, desires, words.

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Questions on the prose poem? Thoughts? Please leave a comment below.