[New-Poetry] prose poem

[Anny Ballardini]

*
*

Excerpts from an interview with Hass by the *Iowa Review* in 1991


*Question*: Why a prose poem, and what is a prose poem?

*Hass*: I haven't arrived for myself at any very satisfactory formulation of
what a prose poem is. Certainly it has something to do with condensation . .
. I don't know how to define it in terms of genre, and when I was working, I
guess I just stopped trying to think about that. What I *did* think about
was what the conventions of the prose poem were. At the time that I was
starting to write them, the prose poem, as it had been revived in America,
was used almost entirely for a kind of wacky surrealist work, and I think
that nervousness about using prose was that then you had to put a lot of
what people *thought* was poetic—that is to say, wildness and imagination
and free association—into it to make sure that it was poetry, because if it
got too near the conventions and sentence sounds of expository prose or
narrative prose . . . then it really wasn't poetry. So almost as soon as I
started working, I got interested in those boundaries: what the prose poem *
wasn't* supposed to sound like . . .
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/haas/prosepoems.htm


-- 
Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html
I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing
star!
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