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the prose poetry upsurge
Enisled flitting prose in novels finds its inverse in contemporary poetry’s unprecedented prosification. An abundance of prose poetry fundamentally demotes the line and line break, rejecting the cut as the scaffold of meaning, espousing the plenitude of the sentence instead. Accomplished poets who have recently turned away from the line and toward the sentence and even the paragraph, who have also been publishing essays they call “prose poems,” include Claudia Rankine, Anne Boyer, Lydia Davis, C. S. Giscombe, Daniel Borzutzky, James Tate, Mark Strand, C. D. Wright, and many others. Two recent anthologies attest to the form’s importance in the contemporary (The Penguin Book of Prose Poems, and British Prose Poetry), while a recent Princeton University Press book offers an authoritative critical introduction to “the contemporary renaissance” ushered in by the mode.74 Prestige attends these moves: Charles Simic’s The World Doesn’t End first won a poetry Pulitzer for sentence and paragraph poems in 1990; in 2014 Rankine’s Citizen won numer- ous prizes. Critics pose many ways to interpret the waning allure of the poetic line break—the ever-evolving “real language of men,” or the deepening of “lyric shame,” or an unescapable polit- icization, and each of these dovetails with immediacy’s retreat from the symbolic into the delectation of formlessness.75
Prosification also instantiates the professionalizing imperatives for entrepreneurial writers, as the poet Brigitte Byrd helpfully catalogues:
We are expected to check our phone and messages and emails daily, all day long . . . We are constantly under pressure. We cannot stop writing. And there it is. Compact, controlled, melodic, polyphonic, lyric, heroic. The poem in a box. The prose poem.76
While the movement is notable for the conventional prose it is producing, we can take the lead from Byrd’s reference to “the poem in a box” to also appraise prosaic poetry destined to be consumed on smartphone screens. Prose is quick reading, rapid uptake; prose is the illusion of the unfigured; prose is the run-on continuity of quotidian temporality—while poetry is extra- ordinary rhythm, arresting images, opaque swerves.77 Prose poems conduce to immediatism because the pieces strive for integration rather than break, for flow rather than disruption, for continuous consumption rather than punctuated production, for metonymy rather than metaphor. Jerome McGann long ago observed that, in general, “the object of the poetical text is to thicken the medium a much as possible” but the current vogue for prose poems suggests something else entirely: a thinning of the medium, a reduction of mediation toward tingling unformed speech-like continuous current.78 This thinning undermines genre. Prose poems trouble the steadfast opposition associating prose with the merely worldly and situated, and poetry with ancient forms and timelessness. Dispelling the expectations of both poetry and prose, prose poems undo genre, dissembling rules and hierarchies and established forms of production and consumption, and immanentizing language fullness. The remarkable poet Anne Boyer’s multi- award-winning Garments against Women features a prose poem that clarifyingly thematizes prosaicism as a literary flux uniting poetry, novels, social media, and memoirs. She writes:
I am not
Writing a scandalous memoir. I am not writing a pathetic memoir. I am not writing a memoir about poetry or love. I am not writing a memoir about poverty, debt collection, or bankruptcy. I am not writing about family court. I am not writing a memoir because memoirs are for property owners and not writing a memoir about prohibitions of memoirs.
When I am not writing a memoir, I am also not writing any kind of poetry, not prose poems contemporary or otherwise, not poems made of fragments, not tightened and compressed poems, not loosened and conversational poems, not conceptual poems, not virtuosic poems employing many different types of euphonious devices, not poems with epiphanies and not poems without, not documentary poems about recent political moments, not poems heavy with allusions to critical theory and popular song.
“Not writing” encircles, with its loose, looping negation—here at the line turn, here not—the sweeping negation of medium at the heart of immediacy. Enacting the unformed, unrepresentational quality of the many genres that do not shape this blocked prose poem, this is not quite a verse list, but it is a catalogue, whose point seems to be accumulation. In not writing a poemy poem, Boyer amasses negations in/and/as amassing text, an aggregation of writing that isn’t being done—accumulation by repetition. Writing negates itself, the superabundance of prose and personal gerunds undoes form and genre, but the repetitions and enjambments congeal. Boyer ends the prose poem:
I am not writing a history of these times or of past times or of any future times and not even the history of these visions which are with me all day and all of the night.
The concluding weight given to history, figured as the unwritten ledger of accumulated negated writing, ends by reciting a rock song title from the Kinks, preserving its original beat, “All day and all of the night.” Mixing lyrics is not writing, blending lyric and prose is not writing, history is not writing, but writing redounds to these paralleled negations. Generic indistinction, a prose poem residually attached to verse devices like stanzaic structure, a non-memoir rock song, a famous poem that is not— these blurs and enmeshments and multiplied negations fructify immediacy. As forms melt and voice soars, prosaicism suffuses in many-laureled accretion of the heft of the real defying genre, undoing mediation.
Boyer’s striking work in de-versification importantly climaxed in a recent Pulitzer Prize–winning memoir, The Undying, suggesting the continuity of prosaic poetry and the prosaic lyrical “I” that has become the defining mode of the me-generations, both the baby boomers and the millennials. Her use of present tense also exemplifies another common feature in the stream of immediacy: present tense now comes to motor fictions—even those not in the first person, and even those whose subject matter would be categorized as historical fiction. Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel speaks of the advantages of the present:
It is humble and realistic—the author is not claiming superior knowledge—she is insider or very close to her character, sharing their focus, their limited perceptions. It doesn’t suit authors who want to boss the reader around and like being God.79
Mantel makes clear the theological and ethical entailments of this grammatical choice. Writer Richard Lea notes the similarities of Mantel’s tense with Kevin Barry, who explains that the use of present tense in his recent novel about the life of John Lennon aspired to impart the impression of voice above all: “It is a case of trying to plant a voice inside the reader’s head, to make him or her hear the words as they read them . . . to make them read with their ears, essentially. You’re aiming to mesmerize.”80 Present tense is so prevalent in the twenty-first century that it envelops high literary works like Rachel Cusk’s The Bradshaw Variations, John Banville’s The Infinities, J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, and Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, but also YA chart-busters like Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games. Present tense compresses event and narration into one temporal register, an immediate here-now. Autofiction and the perpetual present of the status update (What’s on your mind?) reinforce this grammatical func- tioning as a metaphysical index, instantaneity, and directness. Moreover, present tense often forecloses conclusiveness, judg- ment, or resolution, lacking hindsight and favoring openness or even nonsensical, unplotted, impressionistic indeterminacy.81 All this advances to things speaking for themselves, fluid streams, the voice of your own personality.
The immanent presence of so much contemporary writing ticks the temporal register of immediacy. Digital humanities scholar Alan Liu emphasizes that “the new discourse paradigm” of internet writing prioritizes “postindustrial efficiency coupled with flexibility—that is, the ability to say anything to anyone quickly,” an effusive instantaneity he contrasts with “academic knowledge,” whether philosophical, historical, or artistic, that texturizes saying anything by saying it “fully, richly, openly, differently, kindly, or slowly.”82 Speed—of composition, publishing, circulation—founds the sensation of immediacy. Hot takes burning and bounding, episode recaps published minutes after airing, real-time reactions from live news scenes. But Liu’s point also brings home how much this speed is not just technological but cognitive and affective: reflexive impressions pressed from the hip, #NoFilter.♦
All endnotes from this excerpt are available here in .pdf format.
