November 7, 2019 35
Positive Capability
Nick Laird
The Penguin Book of the
Prose Poem:
From Baudelaire to Anne Carson
edited and with an introduction by
Jeremy Noel- Tod.
Penguin, 432 pp., £25.00
Like the honest politician or the re-
ality TV star, the prose poem is an
oxy moron. Charles Simic, a brilliant
practitioner of the form, says that it’s
“the result of two contradictory im-
pulses, prose and poetry, and therefore
cannot exist, but it does. It is the sole
instance we have of squaring the cir-
cle.” In a new anthology, Jeremy Noel-
Tod pulls together two- hundred- odd
of these square circles from a span of
nearly two centuries. Though they are
primarily from English- speaking coun-
tries, there are also translations from
twenty other languages.
There’s a marvelous depth and reach
to the book, testament to the prose
poem’s elasticity. Noel- Tod has it run
chronologically backward—“so as to
foreground,” he claims, “the impor-
tance of the present moment in the his-
tory of the form”—with three sections:
“The Prose Poem Now,” from 2017
to 2000 (109 pages); “The Postmod-
ern Prose Poem,” from 1999 to 1946
(177 pages); and “The Modern Prose
Poem,” from 1943 to 1842 (114 pages).
The overrepresentation of the first sev-
enteen years of the twenty-first century
is meant to reflect the recent popular-
ity of the form, though it also highlights
the difficulties for any anthologist of
evaluating one’s contemporaries and
excluding one’s friends, collaborators,
and colleagues, as evidenced by the
overlap here between the acknowledg-
ments and the contents. Noel- Tod, an
academic in Norwich, England, and
a prolific social media presence (who
for years pseudonymously satirized
the poetry world as “Ron Paste”), at-
tended Oxford, where he was a stu-
dent of Craig Raine and at Cambridge
wrote his doctorate on Eliot. Later, he
worked as an editor on Raine’s journal,
Areté. As poetry critic of The Sunday
Times, he has established himself as
something of a gatekeeper in the Brit-
ish poetry scene.
In this anthology, the prose poem
begins with the French—Aloysius
Bertrand and Baudelaire. American
anthologies of the form tend to begin
with Poe, who published Eureka: A
Prose Poem in 1848, though for Noel-
Tod “the form did not come to fruition
as a lyric poem... until the 1850s, when
Baudelaire began to write and publish,
over the course of a decade, the fifty
short prose texts that would be gathered
in Paris Spleen.” Noel- Tod quotes Paris
Spleen’s famous preface: “Which of us
has not, in his ambitious days, dreamed
of the miracle of a poetic prose, musi-
cal without rhythm and without rhyme,
supple enough and choppy enough to
fit the soul’s lyrical movements, the
jolts of consciousness?”Like all poetry, the prose poem has
no rules, although, as with all poetry,
certain traits might be distinguished.
In life, the anecdote might have two
subsets—the comic tale and the seri-
ous testimony—and prose poetry is
much the same. (It is, I think, at its best
when it manages to mix these tropes to -
gether.) In his introduction, Noel- Tod
declares that the comic anecdote has
been the prose poem’smost popular manifestation in
America and Britain since the
1960s, under the influence of up-
the- garden- path absurdists such
as Russel [sic] Edson, James Tate,
and Maxine Chernoff. Prose
poems in this vein often feel
like jokes that overshoot their
punchlines into something more
serious.The American absurdists appear
(perhaps somewhat dutifully, sinceJames Tate gets only six lines), and
most of the poets one might expect in
such an anthology—Gertrude Stein,
Paul Éluard, Pierre Reverdy—get
their due. There are also appearances
from those who wrote only a few prose
poems, but whose status as big beasts
of poetry guarantees entry: Heaney,
Eliot, Auden, Miłosz, Herbert, Bishop,
Bly, Rich, O’Hara, Holub. There are
also some surprises: Katherine Mans-
field, Turgenev, Wilde. For an anthol-
ogy striving to be definitive, there’s a
contingent of missing Americans: of
the Wrights there’s C. D. and James
but no Charles or Franz; no Merwin,
Komunyakaa, Armantrout, Koch,
Patchen, Bidart, H. D., Lydia Davis,
Billy Collins, Michael Palmer.
There is, though, plenty to be getting
on with: poems in the form of a prose
sestina (Mark Strand’s intricate “Chek-
hov”), a translation from an invented
source (Don Paterson’s “Little Co-
rona”), “language poetry” ( Bernadette
Mayer’s “Gay Full Story”), rants (a
faintly amusing poem about “that talk-
ing claw” Iain Duncan Smith, a lack-
luster British Tory politician, which
does perhaps make the book seem al-
ready dated), poems- as- essays (Anne
Carson), epistolary poems (an extract
from Jack Spicer’s “Letters to James
Alexander”), a list poem (Emily Ber-
ry’s taxonomy “Some Fears”). The fears
Berry collects cycle fearlessly through
a multitude of realms and associated
dictions:Fear of breezes... fear of proxim-
ity to self- belief... fear of non-
specific impact leading to the
vertical ejection of the spine from
the body; fear of leaf mulch... fear
of fear; fear of help. Fear of asking
for, receiving, refusing, giving, or
being denied help.There is also the genus of prose poems
that take an ordinary object and defa-
miliarize it: Zbigniew Herbert’s “Peb-ble,” Francis Ponge’s “The Pleasures of
the Door” (“The happiness of seizing
one of these tall barriers to a room by
the porcelain knob of its belly”).
How might one define the prose
poem? Is the only viable definition
that the lines are set by the printer and
not by the poet? In his rangy introduc-
tion, Noel- Tod attempts to go further,
arguing that “the prose poem’s genius
for expansiveness is not only due to
its freedom from formal constraint.”
He argues that the “expansiveness of
feeling that characterizes the prose
poem is often created by a moment of
metaphor giving it a sudden lift, like
the flare of the burner in a hot- air bal-
loon.” This seems like the right track
to me: many prose poems—or at least
the successful ones—seem to work
their way up to an image that crystal-
lizes some strangeness. One thinks of
the unforgettable simile in Carolyn
Forché’s famous poem “The Colonel,”
included here:The maid brought green mangoes,
salt, a type of bread. I was asked
how I enjoyed the country. There
was a brief commercial in Span-
ish. His wife took everything away.
There was some talk then of how
difficult it had become to govern.
The parrot said hello on the ter-
race. The colonel told it to shut up,
and pushed himself from the table.
My friend said to me with his eyes:
say nothing. The colonel returned
with a sack used to bring grocer-
ies home. He spilled many human
ears on the table. They were like
dried peach halves. There is no
other way to say this.The grotesque comparison of the ears
to “dried peach halves” is visually
acute but also reinforces the sense that
life is cheap and disposable here, where
human ears are as casually abundant as
fruit, and treated as such.
In his push toward a definition for
prose poetry, Noel-Tod asks:If poetry is not synonymous with
verse—as canonical anthologies
such as The Oxford Book of En-
glish Verse assume—how do we
define a poem at all? This ques-
tion, at least, has been answered
by many authorities. “All good po-
etry,” wrote William Wordsworth
in the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads
(1802), “is the spontaneous over-
flow of powerful feelings.” Verse
serves as a mould to a moment of
emotion, shaping it to a rhythmic
pattern. Without line breaks, the
prose poem is free—like this para-
graph—to extend across and down
the page as far as the printer’s
margins will allow. And it is in this
freedom that we can locate the dis-
tinctive feeling to which the prose
poem gives form: expansiveness.This is cogent perhaps but feels a little
partial. Surely an anthology called
The Oxford Book of English Verse
does not, prima facie, assume poetry
is synonymous with verse: otherwise
wouldn’t it be called The Oxford Book
of English Poetry, and contain onlyClockwise from top left: Christian Bök, Claudia Rankine, Carolyn Forché, Anne Carson, Cathy Park Hong, and Patricia Lockwood