Too Gawky for a Lyric?
The prose poem is a form I don’t trust—can it be true that it was genuinely impossible to render the work as either prose or poetry?
My knee-jerk response is to call each prose poem intellectually lazy and dishonest. If it doesn’t trust itself to be A or B, why should I trust it? What need is there for some hybrid C?
Will most prose poems really, truly, honestly refuse to fit themselves into any of the uniforms worn by poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction? Shame on me, old curmudgeon? Anal fuddy-duddy? Prescriptive Tyrant?
As always, however, exceptions keep cropping up. Here is a prose poem in which the first paragraph seemed to be headed nowhere better or bigger than the bitter sarcasm of a crowd I call The Young, The Ironic, The Angry, and The Bogus (YIAB). I almost didn’t finish “Why I Don’t Write Autobiographical Poems,” and what a shame for me--and shame on me--that would have been.
The turns in Mary Wallach’s piece beautifully illustrate why poets talk so much about turns. In most poems the turns support the notion of a poem as discovery (or discoveries) for the poet as well as the reader.
If you think you know where you’re going, and that’s where you go, where’s the surprise for you? Without surprise, where’s the delight, the urgency? Are you just re-filling a prescription at the drug store? Where’s the chance for epiphany or other kinds of a-ha moments? And without those, are you offering a poem or a stale self-indulgence?
The fact that rhyme or the line breaks in free verse can produce, or at least add to, surprise and discovery in a poem is one more reason to doubt the prose poem as a genre or subcategory. Once again, however, the exception reinforces the rule.
See if you agree. Here is “Why I Don’t Write Autobiographical Poems.”
Why I Don't Write Autobiographical Poems by Mary Wallach | The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor
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