184 The Writing Experiment
not combine to form an overall narrative or exposition. Nevertheless, the
sentences in any particular paragraph (or in the whole text) may resonate
with each other, through recurring ideas, contexts or images. This creates
continuities which pull the poem together, while the discontinuities push
it apart.
The new sentence can have many different manifestations. Ron Silliman’s
work explores many varied manifestations of the new sentence and his ‘Sun-
set Debris’ shows one imaginative use of it. This prose poem is a tour de force
which lasts for 29 pages, of which I quote only the beginning. Each sentence
is a question which does not necessarily follow on logically from the one
before. Nevertheless it resonates with the other questions around it:
Example 8.20
Can you feel it? Does it hurt? Is it too soft? Do you like it? Do you
like this? Is this how you like it? Is it alright? Is he there? Is he
breathing? Is it him? Is it near? Is it hard? Is it cold? Does it weigh
much? Is it heavy? Do you have to carry it far? Are those hills? Is this
where we get off? Which one are you? Are we there yet? Do we
need to bring sweaters? Where is the border between blue and
green? Has the mail come? Have you come yet? Is it perfect bound?
Do you prefer ballpoints? Do you know which insect you most
resemble? Is it the red one? Is that your hand? Want to go out? What
about dinner? What does it cost? Do you speak English? Has he
found his voice yet? Is this anise or is it fennel? Are you high yet?From ‘Sunset Debris’ (Silliman 1986c, p. 11)Notice here how the sentences do retain normal syntax: poems which use
the new sentence sometimes retain this syntax, sometimes jettison it.
Such prose poems also sometimes play with the relationship between
narrative and anti-narrative and with the conventions of representation.
Lyn Hejinian’s prose poem, My Life , is a kind of anti-narrative: it poeticises
and breaks up narrative continuity and replaces it with a more poetic
cohesion. In the following passage there is no absolute narrative, chronol-
ogy or overriding idea which holds the whole passage together, though
there are many glimpses of multiple narratives, chronologies and ideas:
Example 8.21
A pause, a rose, A moment yellow, just as four years
something on paper later, when my father returned home
from the war, the moment of greeting
him, as he stood at the bottom of the