36 The New York Review
verse? In any event, that book was origi-
nally published in 1900, so it’s hardly
indicative of contemporary opinions.
Recent canonical anthologies such as
The Norton Anthology of Poetry in-
clude prose poems as a standard variety
of poetry. Also, Noel- Tod’s choice to de-
scribe the melos, the music of a poem, as
a “rhythmic pattern” seems a thumb on
the scale. It’s as if modernism never hap-
pened: one thinks of Pound on rhythm
more than a century ago: “To compose
in the sequence of a musical phrase, not
in the sequence of a metronome.”
I also pause over the word “expan-
siveness,” which deliberately conflates
a physical property with an intellectual
one. The prose poems in this anthol-
ogy often embody the opposite, a kind
of restrictiveness as a modus operandi.
The surreal or humorous prose poem
in particular often leads the reader
into a paradox, a trap. We open wide
and finish caught in a corner of weird
logic. (Chernoff’s “Vanity, Wisconsin”
ends with a visitor “taking pictures of
his pictures.”) The good prose poem
must know, à la Cocteau, how far to go
to go too far, and many of the poems
here underline that notion, beginning
in humor and ending in some eldritch
place, far from the familiar. Simon
Armitage’s “The Experience” opens
with “I hadn’t meant to go grave rob-
bing with Richard Dawkins but he can
be very persuasive,” and ends in the
eerie image of a fox staring at them, “a
silent man- size fox in a dark frockcoat
and long black gloves, standing up on
his hind legs, watching.” Some of the
poems here treat tone as a kind of M. C.
Escher staircase, where you aren’t sure
what floor you’re on. Here’s Cathy
Wagner’s “Chicken,” in full:
A poem goes to the other side. It’s
different there, but that’s not why I
wrote it. There’s all there is, in the
chicken joke. Where are you going
with this.If there is a problem with expansive-
ness as a definition for prose poetry,
it’s the suggestion that saying more
is equal to more meaning—yet even
prose poetry often lives by implicitness
and curtailment and suggestion. Noel-
Tod goes on:
Unchecked by metre or rhyme,
prose poetry flows by soft return
from margin to margin, filling
the empty field of the page, like
the vision of Aloysius Bertrand’s
“Mason” who, on his scaffold-
ing above the cathedral roof, sees
further into the surrounding land-
scape with every sentence, from
“gargoyles spewing water” to “a
village set afire by troops, flaming
like a comet in the deep- blue sky.”I am not sure that meter or rhyme
“checks” poetry exactly. And any
poet knows the field of the page is not
“empty”: the white space is responsive
silence that the language is speaking
into. Noel- Tod equates prose poetry’s
“expansiveness” with seeing “further,”
which, accidentally or not, appears to
structure a hierarchy of achievement in
poetic form.
Noel- Tod’s notion of “expansiveness”
may owe something to Rod Meng-
ham’s essay “A Genealogy of the Prose
Poem,” which Noel- Tod references. In
it, Mengham writes of how the prose of
various writers “expands the measures
of containment,” and turns dialect into
“the expanded field of community.”
Mengham’s own poetic contribution
here demonstrates the problems with
“expansiveness” as a working principle:
“Knife” is a description of a stone- age
flint tool. To those used to lyric poetry,
the three- page poem feels intermina-
ble. Mengham, a Cambridge academic,
writes in his essay that the prose poem
“favours the microscopic scrutiny of
tiny details.” Perhaps, but he repeat-
edly uses three paratactic phrases to
expand his thought, and the concep-
tual steps between the adjectives seem
so small that the reader may wish he’d
chosen just one: “After three thousand
years of dumb neglect, the instrument
was attuned, responsive, prompt to its
ancient cue.”
Here is his description of a stone- age
artisan making the implement, which
uses the phrase “setting his sights,”
an idiom arising from the very differ-
ent modern domain of a sharp- shooter:
“Best of all is when the artist, setting
his sights on perfect function, sees
it rise above the horizon at the same
point as beauty of form.” The image
of an ancient tool- maker watching
the moon rise—and recognizing in
its shape a blade—stands behind the
words. The language forces a slow-
ing down: it feels like a strange com-
bination of the consciously inert, the
deliberately managerial—the curato-
rial—and the enraptured. In this bored
way of speaking, there is an excited way
of thinking, and over three pages this
becomes a symptom of something in-
tended and serious: a wish to address
the object in the scientific round and
in the somewhat dogged spirit of in-
quiry that propagated, perhaps, its own
manufacture. The poem ends; the in-
strument “brought the cross- sections
of life within grasp. Behind it, the phy-
sician’s trial and error, the surgeon’s
initiative; the whole breathing, falter-
ing body of science.”
Still, the reader may wish for the curt
felicity of Bishop’s description of the
knife in “Crusoe in England,” which
Crusoe had, on the island, relied on
for almost everything, and which, in
London now, sits inertly on the shelf,
“reek[ing] with meaning.” Saying more
does not equal expansion per se: the ex-
pansiveness of ambiguities of sense can
also lie, as in Wagner’s chicken poem,
in what is withheld. I’m reminded of
Fred D’Aguiar’s definition of poetry,
“that art of the marvellous,” as a “si-
multaneous compression of language
and an endless expansion of meaning.”
Noel- Tod’s assertion that Words-
worth’s definition of good poetry is
“the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings” gives just half of the famous
quotation. The entire sentence: “I have
said that poetry is the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings: it takes
its origin from emotion recollected in
tranquillity.” This not only qualifies the
first half but entirely rewrites it. Poetry
that is just the spontaneous overflow of
emotions is going to be bad. Think of
Harold Pinter’s poem about the Iraq
War (“your nose/Sniffs only the pong
of the dead”). One needs the recol-
lection, as Wordsworth said, in tran-
quility; one needs to be forced to have
second, third, fourth thoughts, and one
of the reasons verse survives as verse
is that any type of form, any mode of
restriction, ensures a concentration, adistillation, of the thought moving into
language. Poetry is not a happening of
emotion: it’s a happening of language.
Perhaps a way into understanding the
prose poem is asking what a line break
actually does, and what is lost when it’s
not used. In nonmetrical contemporary
poetry, lineation, aside from contribut-
ing to rhythm, can be used for investi-
gating, accentuating, confounding. The
pitch pattern changes depending on
where the line breaks, and that empha-
sis on the last word of the line changes
the meaning of the line. The oft- used
example of meaningful lineation is Wil-
liams’s old woman eating plums:They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to herEach iteration of the same words means
something different depending on the
lineation. Denise Levertov has written
insightfully on the line break in “On
the Function of the Line,” her essay
in Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry
(1984), explaining how it foregrounds
the slight but realhesitations between word and
word that are characteristic of
the mind’s dance among percep-
tions but which are not noted by
grammatical punctuation. Regu-
lar punctuation is a part of regular
sentence structure, that is, of the
expression of completed thoughts;
and this expression is typical of
prose, even though prose is not at
all times bound by its logic. But in
poems one has the opportunity not
only, as in expressive prose, to de-
part from the syntactic norm, but
to make manifest, by an intrinsic
structural means, the interplay or
counterpoint of process and com-
pletion—in other words, to present
the dynamics of perception along
with its arrival at full expression....
Line- breaks—together with intel-
ligent use of indentation and other
devices of scoring—represent a
peculiarly poetic, a- logical, paral-
lel (not competitive) punctuation.Lineated poetry contains a kind of
narrative of its construction, which a
reader reading it relives.
Prose’s articulation of completed
thoughts is why prose poetry tends to-
ward the anecdotal: it doesn’t give the
sense of a mind casting about for the
next word, for the next stepping stone,
but is the more fully ritualized prose
transmission of a completed thought, a
recounting, not a reliving. Lineated po-
etry involves hesitation, reenactment.
Prose poetry is about telling. One of the
effects of losing the line break is losing
the provisionality that poetry achieves,
the sense of a mind at work. Making
one’s way through the pauses and sur-
prises of a lineated poem demands that
one exist suspended for a moment in
doubt, in ambiguities of sense.Noel- Tod has large aspirations for his
book: he declares thatthe precise, documentary prose of
a poet such as Claudia Rankine...
evinces an ambition to rewrite
literary tradition that recalls the
radical claim made two centu-
ries ago by Wordsworth, when, inLyrical Ballads, he presented “in-
cidents and situations drawn from
common life” in “language really
used by men.” This anthology aims
to capture something of the same
moment of change and renewal in
contemporary writing, as the prose
poem dissolves and reforms along
the same horizon that enraptured
Baudelaire’s “stranger” on the first
page of his Little Poems in Prose:
“the clouds that pass... over
there... the marvellous clouds!”Though it’s not entirely clear what
Baudelaire’s “same horizon” has to do
with Noel- Tod’s radical renewal, the
“moment of change” appears to in-
volve poets who are drawn “to prose
for the poetry of plain statement; what
Vivek Naryanan calls, in his ‘Ode to
Prose,’ ‘the only heart we can trust if
only because it beat so firmly’” (though
the quoted poem is not included here).
Noel- Tod’s renewal, then, seems to ex-
clude poets who continue to use frag-
mentary prose as a prism “to refract
the ‘crystalline jumble’ of modernity,”
like Ashbery or Rimbaud.
In any event, rather than support his
thesis—that a radical disruption is oc-
curring, in which the prose poem edges
further toward prose—the anthology
tends to show instead the continuity
of the form. Noel- Tod notes that the
rise of the prose poem “can be partly
attributed to the rise of the defining
invention of our own era—the inter-
net—as a forum for literary experiment
and exchange, and the evolution of new
daily forms of prose such as the email,
the blog, and the tweet.” He doesn’t
elaborate further, but the claim raises
questions. Is the Internet—specifically
social media—influencing the poetry
that is currently being written? And if
so, how? Also, why should the rise of
the Internet cause a surge of interest
in the prose poem rather than, say, the
sonnet or free verse? From the start,
prose poetry was a reaction—Baude-
laire rebelling against the straitjacket
of French alexandrines—but since the
rise of modernism and free verse, there
are no rules of versification, so what is
prose poetry rebelling against?
Or is the prose poem’s growing popu-
larity that Noel- Tod notes simply owing
to the fact that lineated verse is trick-
ier to read and write and understand?
Does the Internet, as it has in so many
areas (see: cat videos), select poetry
that is the most easily digestible con-
tent in order to attract the available—
and limited—attention in a ruthless
attention economy? One person might
like bass fishing, another might be in-
terested in Beethoven, but both will
click on a video of a man falling down
a manhole. One might think abortion is
murder, one might believe that ghosts
exist, but both will (hopefully) agree
that racism or rape is terrible. In this
way, poems can be reduced to emo-
tional memes: impossible to disagree
with, but not, perhaps, in themselves
tonally challenging or complicated lin-
guistic events.
The poetry that thrives will be
“the spontaneous overflow of power-
ful feelings,” in Noel- Tod’s truncated
definition, rather than that emotion
recollected in tranquility. Which is
not to say that poems that get picked
up and passed around the Internet are
bad poems. Very often they are not.
But most poetry that becomes popu-
lar online tends to be less concerned