[New-Poetry] prose poem

[Anny Ballardini]

A great poem, thanks for forwarding, Anny

On Sat, Nov 29, 2008 at 4:22 PM, TheOldMole <Opus40-01 at opus40.org> wrote:

> Constance Urdang, an unfairly neglected poet these days and one of the real
> masters of the prose poem form, told me -- "I don't think of them as prose
> poems, I think of them as very short novels."
>
> None of her prose poems online, but here's a poem poem:
>
> By Constance Urdang
>
>     1
> Take your boulevards, your Locust Street,
> Your Chestnut, Pine, your Olive,
> Take your Forest Park and Shaw's Garden,
> Your avenues that lead past street-corner violence,
> Past your West End, past your Limit,
> To shabby suburban crime,
> Vandalism in the parking-lot,
> Abductions from the shopping mall—
> Like making the same mistake over and over
> On the piano or typewriter keys,
> Always hitting the wrong note—
> How "very alive, very American"
> They are, how chockful of metaphysics,
> Hellbent to obliterate the wilderness.
>
>
>     2
> Learn to live with sycamores,
> Their sad, peeling trunks, scabbed all over
> With shabby patches, their enormous leaves
> In dingy shades of ochre and dun
> Rattling like castanets, their roots
> Thick as a man's leg, crawling
> Like enormous worms out of the broken pavements,
> Continually thrusting themselves up
>
>> From pools of shade they make,
>>
> Sculpturing the street
> With dappled dark and light
> As glaucoma, a disease of the eye,
> Makes the world more beautiful
> With its mysterious rainbows.
>
>
>     3
> Already in Iowa the monarchs are emerging,
> Signaling with their tawny wings;
> In regalia of burnt orange and umber
> The spangled imperial procession
> Meanders along the democratic roadsides,
> Across straight state lines,
> Over rivers and artificial lakes
> And the loneliness of middle America
> On the way to Mexico.
> The tiny wind of their passing
> Is not even recorded
> As a disturbance in the atmosphere.
>
>
>     4
> Driving back into the American past,
> Homesick for forests, flowers without names, vast savannahs,
> Lowlands or mountains teeming with game,
> Bluffs crowned with cottonwoods, mudbanks
> Where crocodiles might sun themselves;
> Finding instead the remains of strange picnics,
> Replications of old selves, a cacophony of changes
> Like a room crowded with chairs
> In which no one can sit, as if history were furniture
> Grown splintered and shabby;
> Studying a picturesque rustic architecture
> To master its splendid abstractions,
> Shady verandas and porches,
> Or the republican simplicity of a cow.
>
>
> Anny Ballardini wrote:
>
>>
>> *
>> *
>>
>>
>> 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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>>
>>
>
> --
> Tad Richards
> http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/
> http://opusforty.blogspot.com/
>
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>
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-- 
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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