opera ended the mother agreed to go outside. Several ravens were talk-
ing to one another. Storm clouds were moving in. The mother suddenly
slapped the child across her cheek.^11The subgenre of prose poetry represented by Tate’s piece is that of the sar-
donic fable, the seemingly casual little tale that leads up to an ironic epiphany
—in this case the reality of motherhood that de®ates the child’s dream. Max
Jacob was an early master of this form. In this parabolic variant of the prose
poem, the semantic dominates, the visual playing no appreciable part: the
reader’s eye moves from start to ¤nish without paying attention to the right
margin. Indeed, the narrative (“This is what happened”) demands conti-
nuity and hence there is little internal sound play or eye rhyme. The page, as
McCaffery and Nichol put it, is little more than an obstacle to be overcome.
But as the authors of Rational Geomancy argue, there can be prose that
doesn’t satisfy these conventions. To begin with, the prose poem is itself a
calling into question of lineation. Verse, even free verse (the word verse [Old
English fers] comes from the Latin vertere, “to turn,” which is to say, to move
from a to b and, in turn, from b to c) is by de¤nition a kind of container, and
hence poets from Baudelaire to the present have tried, at particular junctures,
to circumvent it. “Linear progression,” McCaffery notes, “we have come to
understand not merely as a spatial arrangement but as a way of thinking.”^12
A way of thinking, one might add, called into question as long ago as the
1860s, when Baudelaire, in the dedication to Arsène Houssaye (1862) that
prefaces Le Spleen de Paris (Les petits poèmes en prose), declares, “Which of
us in his moments of ambition, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic
prose, musical, without rhythm and without rhyme, supple enough and rug-
ged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations
of reveries, the jibes of conscience?”^13
Baudelaire’s own prose poems are set as normal printed pages: visual design
plays an appreciable role. Paragraphs are often quite short, and the longer
ones are often interrupted by snatches of dialogue. Indeed, since the narra-
tive element is so marked here, the Spleen de Paris poems might more prop-
erly be designated short ¤ctions. Neither Baudelaire’s nor Rimbaud’s (nor
even Mallarmé’s) prose poems, for that matter, set the stage for Concretist
experimentation with prose. Rather, the Noigandres poets looked to two
prose writers: Gertrude Stein and especially James Joyce. The de Campos
brothers had been translating Finnegans Wake since the late ¤fties, and in
1962 they brought out a book called Panorama do Finnegans Wake, which
contains, among other things, what Haroldo calls “the creative transposition
(‘transcréation’) of eleven fragments (bilingual presentation), accompanied
178 Chapter 9