Marianne Moore’s silent rhyme can be placed into a tradition of what I would characterize as lineated prose that stretches back at least to Alexander Pope – actually, there are antecedents back well into the middle ages – and forward to such diverse contemporary examples as the investigative poetics of Jena Osman, the use of the linebreak in the poetry of Alan Dugan, the early poems of Ronald Johnson or the six-word-line of Bob Perelman. It is, I would suggest, almost an invisible tradition, one that counters the far more theatrical history of the prose poem, even as the two phenomena strike me as conjoined twins.

 

Even as Baudelaire asks, in the famous introduction to Paris Spleen,

 

Which one 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 rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jibes of conscience

 

what is it about the paragraph, that visible marker of Prose Here, that suggests it can only be done that way? Far more mysterious, I think, than the ways in which prose can be poetic are – and I mean this in the most positive possible sense – the ways in which poetry can be prosaic. This is just part of what Pound is getting at when he suggests that verse needs to be as well written as prose.

 

But, deeper than that, there are ways in which the values of prose – its distinctive features – can & do bring value to the poem. What has not yet been done, at least not successfully, has been to articulate precisely what those values are. There would seem to be two ways of going about exploring that question. One is the theoretically based approach – to start from classic definitions of prose and work outward. The other is to look at these writers who have shown us glimpses – and I suspect that, to date, this is all they have been, of what a consciously prosaic poetry might be.

 

Part of the problem no doubt has been the ways in which the very term prosaic is used as a pejorative. It’s that old poetry = prose + X thing, which necessarily implies that prose therefore must also equal poetry minus that ever so elusive X. Yet clearly there are poets who have seen through that ruse – Pope for one, Perelman for another, Marianne Moore for a third – and brought back the goods for us all to see.

 

This it would seem to me is the absolute inverse of what somebody like Billy Collins is doing. A good project for someone to take on in the coming year(s) would be to articulate more completely how these approaches diverge. And why.