Visual placement is central to meaning: the possible pairs—almost nudes de-
scending a staircase—are blocked in line 11 by the isolated word para, fol-
lowed by the reversed matching pairs of the penultimate lines, which yield
to the ¤nal clara. The modulation from the initial fala / prata to the ¤nal
clara is certainly temporal, but the text is also self-re®exive, each item point-
ing back to its previous partner as well as forward, the constellation as a
whole resembling, as Haroldo himself notes, serial structure in music—for
example Anton Webern’s “Klangfarbenmelodie” (see Concrete Poetry 12).
Whereas a Concrete poem like this one is to be understood as what the
Noigandres poets, following Joyce, called verbivocovisual (see Concrete Poetry
72), the prose poem, read as it must be from beginning to end, is primarily
temporal. No matter how disjunctive or semantically open it may be, no mat-
ter how fully it is constituted by what Ron Silliman has called “the new sen-
tence,”^8 the prose poem is usually a block of print whose words, syllables,
and letters have no optical signi¤cance. In the case of Western prose, as R. P.
Draper notes, “it is an automatic assumption that letters forming words are
separated by space from other letters forming words, that these letters march
across the page from left to right, and that the lines so formed are strictly
parallel and progress downwards at equal intervals.”^9
In their Rational Geomancy, Steve McCaffery and bpNichol remind us
that the conventional book “organizes content along three modules: the lat-
eral ®ow of the line, the vertical or columnar build-up of the lines on the
page and thirdly a linear movement organized through depth (the sequential
arrangement of pages upon pages).”^10 Practically speaking, this means that
“the book assumes its particular physical format through its design to ac-
commodate printed linguistic information in a linear form” (60). And fur-
ther, “Prose as print encourages an inattention to the right-hand margin as
a terminal point. The tendency is encouraged to read continually as though
the book were one extended line” (60). The page, far from being a visual unit,
thus becomes “an obstacle to be overcome” (61). Even when the prose poem
avoids narrative, it generally exhibits the very continuity Concretism rejects
in favor of spatial form.
Here, for example, is James Tate’s prose poem “Casting a Long Shadow,”
which appears in the 1998 issue of the journal The Prose Poem:
This is where the child saw the vision of the Virgin Mother. She was
standing right here and the Blessed Mother was up there on that rock
(smoking a cheroot—but we don’t believe that part). The child wept
for joy and ran to get her mother. The mother was watching her favorite
soap opera and accused the child of playing pranks. When the soapde Campos’s Galáxias and After 177