Beyond choice of form, how does a magazine that focuses exclusively on the prose poem differ from one that focuses on haiku? Or on the sonnet? I’m not aware of any sonnet-centered magazines in recent years, but the ones devoted to haiku have largely been part of the great broad fringes of poetry where the art becomes, as much as anything else, a form of recreation. For every poet of note who has written seriously in the haiku form – Jonathan Williams & Anselm Hollo come immediately to mind – there are dozens, possibly hundreds of casual writers attracted to that genre because, on the surface, it “looks easy.” The result is that every magazine that I’ve seen devoted to exploring haiku has read like the print equivalent of open mic night down at the coffee house. One has to have almost an anthropological interest in poetry to wade in.¹
But where the haiku has very explicit rules, the prose poem’s history is rather quite the opposite. It was born reveling in its violation of categories, as if that alone might be a reason for existence. If so, then one might imagine that over time the prose poem would become that genre most open to a continual test of genre borders & their impact on texts, reading & meaning. The prose poem – especially if we head Baudelaire’s first claims for it – would thus be close kin (maybe even direct ancestor) of vispo, conceptual poetry & all manner of over-the-border literary projects.
In
The culprit of sorts would appear to be that old mad monk, Max Jacob, whose concept of art as distraction & its corollary that a poem must be “distant” from its object translated, particularly in the hands of Robert Bly & company in The Fifties & The Sixties (and those of Bly’s AAA farm-team, George Hitchcock’s Kayak), into little prose vignettes with a vaguely surreal air. The more erudite recognized an affinity with Kafka but very quickly the defining feature of the School of Quietude prose poem was that it seldom went beyond a single page, was often indistinguishable from the “short short story,” save for a certain improbability in the referential world.
Then in the 1970s, the post-New Americans (not just language poets, but also others who were often quite critical of langpo, such as Leslie Scalapino) simply blew apart the constraints on what was possible using prose within a poem. John Ashbery published Three Poems, which is still his finest book. Creeley’s prose publications of that decade – Mabel and A Day Book – challenged the borders first with fiction & then with the journal or diary.
By the end of that decade, U.S. poets had claimed at least as much freedom & flexibility of form in the prose poem as the French ever had – though you wouldn’t know this just by reading magazines like The Prose Poem, Paragraph or the first few issues of Cue. Morgan Lucas Schuldt, Cue’s editor, tells me that he hopes to expand its horizons in forthcoming issues & I’ve sent along work to help in that effort, but looking at Cue vol. 2, no. 1, reminds me that I heard similar spiels from the editors of those earlier journals as well. Which makes me wonder (a) why all the magazines devoted to the prose poem as a form have come out of the same aesthetic background when the prose poem itself so clearly does not, and (b) what it means to have a journal devoted to a single form.
Another way of asking this, of course, would be why didn’t – for example – the language poets ever devote an issue of any one of their key journals such as Hills or Poetics Journal to the question of prose? This focused on the work and generally avoided “themes” altogether. After Grenier’s famous critical pieces in its first issue in 1971, it generally stayed away from critical writing. Roof likewise. Hills had one famous issue devoted to talks, another to plays. Poetics Journal built most of its issues around specific themes, but the closest it ever got to addressing concerns related to prose in one of those themes was the Non/Narrative fifth issue. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E devoted its special issues to the politics of poetry. Even more recent post-avant journals like Temblor or Chain have steadfastly resisted the temptation. And when you think about it, you realize that Jena Osman & Juliana Spahr are exactly the editors you would want if you were doing something critical not just on the prose poem, but even haiku. They would unearth layers of nuance you hadn’t even imagined before, such as the post-colonial discourse of appropriated forms.
This isn’t to suggest that the latest issue of Cue isn’t interesting. There are a number of worthwhile works in it by writers such as A. Van Jordan, Mark Yakich & especially Matthew Thorburn. But most interesting perhaps is Schuldt’s interview with Karen Volkman². She’s gone well beyond any School of Quietude roots in her reading & thinking, & yet both she & Schuldt both seem to imagine that language poetry didn’t show up until the 1980s, if not later – in fact of that list of langpo magazines two paragraphs above, only Poetics Journal was primarily a creature of the ‘80s. When Karen Volkman, who is currently teaching the likes of Rae Armantrout, Harryette Mullen, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge & Elizabeth Willis, says of language poets (she mentions myself & Lyn Hejinian by name here) working in prose that
already by the 80s, there were major works . . . – they just weren’t known to a larger poetic community until more recently
what she’s really documenting is the degree of isolation in which she was then working. In retrospect that seems ironic & sad, given that Volkman’s exactly the sort of lively, interesting reader one would want to have, but I suspect that it’s not at all uncommon for somebody who grew up in the
So it’s good to imagine a journal like Cue working to overcome that isolation itself. Given that the journal is physically located in
¹ Which of course I will concede to having.
² The issue however includes none of her work, unfortunately.
