Debutiful

My students often have difficulty with the idea of a prose poem.  How do we define it?  How is it a poem and not just prose?  And in truth, I rarely have satisfying answers for them.  Part of what I love about the prose poem is its aversion to tidy definition.  It’s mysterious and amorphous.  It’s a you know it what you see it sort of thing.  

Prose is the everyday form; we encounter it not just in novels and textbooks, but also in our group chats, Instagram captions, emails, MTA service disruption alerts, the little pamphlets in the waiting room at the gastroenterologist.  And the prose poem, to me, uses that approachable, everyday form and charges it with the ancient, underlying current of capital-p Poetry.  There’s no formal trickery—no linebreaks, no rules or received forms—just the spoken voice, laid across the page, bound by nothing but that timeless lyric contract, the direct channel to the gods.

These seven are among my favorite collections of prose poems, books I keep within an arm’s reach of my desk.  They represent a range of what the prose poem is capable of, from frank retellings to criticism-infused confessionals to strange, elliptical leaping lyrics.  In all of them, though, we are welcomed into what I think is a more intimate relationship to the speaker, their voice unburdened by form and convention, free and ready to tell you something surprising.