 | |||
| THE GREAT AMERICAN PROSE POEM |
There
is much crossover between prose and poetry forms in contemporary
literature, which one can read about in David Lehman's excellent
anthology The Great American Prose Form.
What he argues in his comprehensive introduction is that we need to rid
ourselves of the idea that postmodernism was the advent of writers
blurring genre boundaries and realize that writers, poets, and prose
writers both, have been mashing together the forms for quite a while;
rigid ideas of what "poetry" is should be loosened because of the way
the better (and lesser poets) of the day compose their verse won't obey
some one's global dictum.
The marvel of the anthology is that the
selections contradicts the general assumption of casual fans of
contemporary poems--those readers who haven't much knowledge of American
poetry besides a blurred and indistinct knowledge of the Beats--is that
the prose poem, as a form, isn't a radical and irreducible avant-garde
gesture only recently dropped on our country's credulous readership.
(Although we could use more bomb -throwers and trashers of tattered form
to allow us to sharpen our wits, collectively, or at least argue
constructively about what matters when we use words to describe events
and things and feelings about the world we attempt to navigate with a
minimum of the meanness of spirit). As
the subtitle insists, it begins roughly with Poe with his many
effusions that roamed beyond his Gothic decadence and wondered about the
metaphysical of the universe that is always striving to balance its
harmonies against man's self will, and taking us through the chatty and
unarmored paragraph-based lyricism of coming generations, a diverse
collection from TS Eliot, HD, Amy Lowell, Billy Collins, Gertrude Stein,
The Beats, Leslie Scalapino, Michael Palmer, an impressive roster of
writers, scribblers, musers, ponderers and poets all who've found
themselves , at various times, realizing that even the relative freedom
of "free verse" was not enough to extend language beyond the limits of
what a sentence can quest to uncover and address and turned to the
paragraph, that block of sentences on which our most exploitable
accounts of what we experience in the world we explore and attempt to
drive into the deepest parts of their individual mysteries.
This
is not the paragraph that instructs, enlightens, persuades, berates or
conventionally seduces, it is the paragraph as poetic expression, the
act of taking what is otherwise commonplace and otherwise banal in the
world and subject to a scrutiny and interrogation that might reveal a
dualism otherwise obscured, or perhaps expose a universe of dualism that
multiplies and continue to do so until we stop looking for them.
Styles, cadences, idioms and such vary greatly here among the writers
according to their backgrounds, regions, gender , and each pen to
paper, each finger to typewriter eye, each attempt to take what one
knows and test against what is not already cast in one's vernacular is a
journey surprising, passionate, chaotic, incoherent and vital in
keeping our language relevant and, shall we say, self-correcting when
another era's metaphors cease to give us light and instead are grown
over with such foliage that only a noxious shade is available to
us.
