Transcription of the Absurd

You’re not doing well. The mirror dims, and more objects are extinct to light. You think what fades here blazes elsewhere, furnishing another world’s illumination.

This avenue of shadows falls from the overhanging brows of teachers you’ve forgotten. Their motion has stilled to the palsy of atoms. Having mislaid the names of gods they inherited, they cast prayers without direction, and miss you. Their hearts are artifacts under moss, arteries and veins dried to wires that—uncovered—are intention without meaning and—buried—are the engine of your mind.

In my dream, they lead you someplace unlearned. Follow the road the wind makes, blind and groping. Losing your way may yet lead you home.

The three paragraphs above are my first prose poem.

Of the prose poem, Peter Johnson said, “Just as black humor straddles the fine line between comedy and tragedy, so the prose poem plants one foot in prose, the other in poetry, both heels resting precariously on banana peels.”

I’m teaching an independent study this semester that swings between prose and poetry, often resting in the strange region between—microfiction and prose poetry. I’d read so little of this work before that I could not name any prose poets beyond Baudelaire and, of his work, I’d only read what everyone has.

Reading about the form for this independent study, however, I’ve run into essays that place the psalms, the whole of the King James Bible and Wordsworth beneath its banner. And poets I’ve always admired, like Russell Edson and Charles Simic (whose work I’d always seen as dividing into lines) appear under “prose poets.”

I wonder what the form could be if you can’t know it even if you see it.

So I looked in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, which claims the form arrived as backlash to French neoclassicists who created rules to differentiate poetry from prose. Baudelaire called his work “prickings of the unconscious” and, though the Encyclopedia says the form is appropriate to “An extraordinary range of perception and expression,” most of what I’ve encountered seems surreal.

The stringiness of prose poetry makes it tangle like spaghetti uncut by the knife of lineation.

I also learned that, though people credit Baudelaire with creating the form, he credits Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit, published in 1842. Gaspard arrives in bursts of imagery, offering glancing angles on a Dutch town. A dwarf named Scarbo wanders through like a Hieronymous Bosch character still half-submerged in a dream.

None of this information, however, helped. Having traveled through some prose poetry (and some essays about it) and figuring the best way to know anything may be inside out, I had to give the form a try. Here is what I learned:

1. Prose poetry won’t liberate you from any poetic verity—you still edit, compress, and rest on imagery instead of exposition. The only liberation—where to divide lines—brings restlessness.

2. Despite what you might think, the prose part of the poetry is more dangerous than the poetry, giving suffocating logic to what, in poetry, might be blissfully and acceptably disjointed.

3. If poetry is a dream on film, prose poetry is the half-remembered moment before sleep that engendered the dream, the mind’s struggle to organize the absurd instead of the stylized effort to render the absurd as art.

4. Prose poetry is harder—and more interesting—than I thought.