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.
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine
Maybe no book of poems has better prepared us for this moment in American history than Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. By this moment, I mean our era of semi-constantly observing, via livestream, human atrocities on varying scales, in Palestine, Minneapolis, Sudan, across whatever swath of the Caribbean the United States government deems, on a given day, ripe for murder. A hybrid collection of image and text, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely places us in the days and years immediately following the election of George W. Bush—an election gifted him by an early iteration of our current corrupt, hyper-conservative Supreme Court. We follow Rankine’s speaker as they navigate the grief and outrage of deaths both personal and public, close friends and widely-televised strangers, the grief and outrage that attends living in a country founded upon, and that perpetuates, white supremacy. I’ve turned to this book often these past couple of years.
Bluets by Maggie Nelson
A friend lent me this book early in my poetry life, and I never gave it back. Fans of Maggie Nelson’s more contemporary work will recognize, in Bluets, much of what we know and admire in her writing—the easy glide between revealing personal narrative and rigorous criticism, the steady, understated voice punctuated here and there with the “low” or the profane, the shark-like circling around taboo. Something I love about this particular text, though—in addition to its innovative form, its 240 numbered prose blocks—is the room it allows for melodrama, something I might expect today’s Maggie Nelson to skirt: Last night I wept in a way I haven’t wept for some time. I wept until I aged myself. I watched it happen in the mirror. I watched the lines arrive around my eyes like engraved sunbursts…This is a younger Nelson, a not-yet literary star, writing from a place of real woundedness and lostness, recovering from alcoholism and what seems at best a toxic, long-running romantic partnership. It gives important context for the Nelson we know now—brilliant, self-assured—it shows the mess before all the pieces were picked up, and differently assembled.
The Year of Blue Water by Yanyi
Never before in a poetry collection have I experienced such a sense of intimacy and community as in Yanyi’s The Year of Blue Water. Rich with friends—Doreen, LiZhen, Kate, Katherine, Caitlin, Rebecca, Diana, Zoë—as well as artists and writers like Agnes Martin, Robert Hass, and Robin Coste Lewis, these quiet, often diaristic poems vibrate beneath the surface with an undeniable, if restrained, sense of lyric, the personal interior knit seamlessly into worldly detail and action, the present in semi-constant dialogue with memory. This book makes me want to keep better, more honest record of my days, my friendships, my past.
I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken
Siken wrote this, his third collection, while recovering from a life-altering stroke. The back cover of the book tells us—and I’ve read this account elsewhere—that Siken could “no longer manipulate the constructions of form, or speak lies that tell the truth.” That is, the trickery of craft and received form were no longer available to this poet, among the most important American poets of his generation. And rather than choosing to not write poems, Siken has gifted us these straightforward, unadorned prose poems that seem to reflect on a life so far lived: childhood wounds, loved ones lost, familial rupture and violence. His poem “Family Therapy” begins, The morning after my father killed his first wife, he woke up next to her dead body, rose from their bed, and began his morning routine. These poems hide nothing. They do not use poetic craft to gesture or allude. They do not lean on metaphorical or figurative language to say the difficult thing. They look you in the eye, and tell you what happened.
The Most of It by Mary Ruefle
Several years ago I had the pleasure of watching Louise Glück introduce Mary Ruefle for a reading at Stanford. The two were close friends, and in her introduction Louise described the experience of reading Ruefle as (I’m paraphrasing) witnessing a speaker come, for the very first time, into consciousness. I took this to mean that Ruefle’s poems put us into contact with a newborn wonder and unfilteredness, as though experiencing the world without getting weighed down by its social codes or morays. I too read that in Ruefle’s poems, and of all her collections I find it most unabashedly on display in The Most of It, wherein Ruefle’s voice is allowed to spill across prose sentences, across pages, her voice untethered from the poetic line. Free.
The Nick of Time by Rosemarie Waldrop
Rosemarie Waldrop’s poems remind me of the magic inherent to human consciousness. That we can formulate words, thoughts, that we can observe the sun through leaves and somehow attach to that experience a phrase or feeling that was born both of our unique selves, and also of some universal collective body—this is all a miracle. Waldrop’s complex, lively, often intellectual and funny prose poems demand rigorous attention, an open heart, and a childlike wonder not unlike that demanded by Ruefle’s poems: How daily my life. How tiny the impurities around which words might accrue. Worlds. Whorls. Pearls? The poems veer in and out of clarity, familiar straightforward language woven through with a Gertrude Stein infused playfulness and logic: A thought is a tremendous excitement. Like a stone thrown into a pond it disturbs the whole of our double nature, bass, reed, breasted, boiler, gänger, entry folded over understudy doubling the cape of good dope. I’m not sure how else to say it, these poems make me want to live, and for a long time.
This Body is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood by Robert Bly
I’ve heard that Bly was a rather gruff man, stern, a Minnesota farmer who, though Ivy League educated, maintained what I imagine was a toughness and prickliness born of those frigid, austere Minnesota winters. So I find something endearing in this book of prose poems; the work exudes a joy I hadn’t read before in Bly, joy and humor, ecstatic attention paid to the simple experience of occupying a human body. My friend, he writes in “The Origin of the Praise of God,” this body is made of bone and excited protozoa! And it is with my body that I love the fields. Bly said that, in writing these poems, it was as if he’d descended, finally, into his body, and that this immersion was the subject of the poems. These are refreshing, life-affirming, fun prose poems written, still, with Bly’s respected craftsmanship and particularity of image and phrase—The oysters open and close all questions… the wind that carries the henhouse down the road dancing. Bly dedicated the poems to Hermes who, he says, accompanies us to the door of the other world, knocks, then disappears.
DS Waldman‘s poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and ZYZZYVA, among other publications. A 2022-2024 Wallace Stegner Fellow, he teaches at Brooklyn Poets and Poets House. His debut poetry collection, Atria, is out now. He lives in Brooklyn.