At his reading Sunday with Chris McCreary and Rosmarie Waldrop at the Painted Bride, Lewis Warsh referred to the stories in his Singing Horse Press book Touch of the Whip as poems, then stopped & corrected himself. Perhaps he shouldn’t have.

Poets’ prose is a glorious & little understood jumble. The genre(s) can be traced back through Burroughs, Stein & Joyce at the very least to Baudelaire & Aloysius Bertrand*, to the origin of the prose poem. I would invoke Melville’s Moby Dick not only as a further instance, but as a superb example of the ways in which poets’ fiction almost invariably move beyond the tidy constraints of what is normatively fictive (which I might then trace back, at least in the U.S., to Twain). Let me map out what I see as six distinct tributaries of this phenomenon.

First is the prose poem itself. It by itself has multiple manifestations. One is the closed, one page or less prose piece that can be traced back to Max Jacob, but which in the United States comes heavily through the pernicious influence of Robert Bly’s journal(s), The Fifties and The Sixties, abetted by George Hitchcock’s Kayak and the numerous books of Russell Edson.

The second, far more interesting mode is the lengthier poet’s prose that remains clearly poetry, which begins in American English with Stein & then Williams’ Kora in Hell, but which really takes off after John Ashbery’s Three Poems, Clark Coolidge’s “Weathers” & Robert Creeley’s Mabel. This tendency has important French cousins in the work of St.-John Perse and Francis Ponge. This is where I would put Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, or Beverly Dahlen’s A Reading or even Jack Spicer’s Heads of the Town Up to the Aether. Questions of the serial poem and the epic will eventually expand this category even further.

After the prose poem comes a mode of poetic fiction that would include Warsh’s marvelous Touch of the Whip, much of the writing by Carla Harryman, Creeley’s stories, the short fiction of Gil Ott, the narratives of Bobbie Louise Hawkins. And Samuel Beckett most of all. These are all writers clearly interested in the traditions and devices of fiction itself, but written with a poet’s sense of literary value. There are few (if any) moments where, say, character or plot, which may in fact be both present & pertinent, are more important than the pleasures & problematics of the words immediately on the page in front of the reader. I think that these may be the most difficult works of all for people to gauge, because they truly transcend either of their source genres. Where I think you can test my own work as poetry, and, say, Paul Auster’s as fiction, these writers clearly are on their own. This thus may be the bravest prose of all.

A close cousin to this intergenre prose is more truly what I would call poet’s fiction, works by poets that genuinely aim for the goals of fiction, but often employing many of the devices (& pleasures) of their home form: Gilbert Sorrentino & Toby Olson would be good examples. So would almost all the writing of the so-called new narrative: Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, Robert Gluck, Bruce Boone, Michael Amnasan. I would place Harry Mathews here, although I’d put the bulk of Oulipo fiction into the next category.

These would be those fiction writers who clearly identify as such, but who write as though their readers were going to be, if not poets per se, at least the readers of poetry. This is where Burroughs & Kerouac fit in (& Melville at his best also). Kathy Acker, Walter Abish, Lydia Davis, Sarah Schulman, Samuel R. Delany, Julio Cortázar, Italo Calvino, Joyce of course; one could make a case for W.G. Sebald, as for Carole Maso.

Finally there are poets who work hard to make a transition all the way to the values of fiction – the problematics of plot-centric narrative, for example – but whose prose still retains some surface features of their past as poets. Auster fits here, as I think does the later work Michael Ondaatje (tho his first works fit closer to the poet’s fiction category).

There are of course many other kinds of creative prose & fiction. These are merely the types that touch on poetry as a genre & tradition. None of this has to do with quality per se, but I do think that it has to do with certain questions of literary judgment. It’s a mistake, for example, to compare the prose of Lewis Warsh with the novels, say, of Paul Auster, or with the prose poetry of Clark Coolidge. Rather I suspect that over time, as we have more readers & writers and more works in each of these tributaries of excellence, we will eventually have a cleaving between the various categories far more decisively than we have today. In 2002, it is still possible to call both Russell Edson & Lyn Hejinian prose poets, Carla Harryman & Michael Ondaatje fiction writers. Fifty years from now, such clusterings will simply seem like nonsense.

* When is somebody going to publish Merrill Gilfillan’s superb collection of translations from Bertrand’s Gaspard  de la Nuit?

Patrick Herron almost always has something interesting to say, viz this note to the ImitaPo list:

The presence of the quotidian in verse seems to remain an essential and perhaps even distinguishing characteristic of what is commonly lumped and labeled as "American" poetry.  We can find it in Whitman, Pound, Eliot ("hurry up please it's time"), O'Hara (who expands it to regularly include personal names), Ginsberg, and especially Ron all over your work ("Nissan stanza" or "The beer can on the sidewalk had been crushed flat" as two of perhaps thousands of examples).  Alan too.  I was just reading one of Kasey's poems on VeRT and it was laden with almost paranoiac quotidian statements, statements that should be shocking but just aren't.  I find myself using the web for finding and co-opting quotidian text from time to time (similar to what is in Kasey's poem I'd guess).  But I don't understand why or what makes the quotidian poetic.  Is it in the nominal grounding of the abstract, perhaps as some sort of exalted discrepancy with a vast valley between the peaks of the particular and the general?

Shklovsky somewhere talks about how the aesthetic – I’m not sure if that’s how he identifies the category, but it is how I remember it – always moves to incorporate all that is on its fringe, rather like The Blob. Or imperialism. Put more positively: one of the duties of poetry is to continually expand what poetry can include & discuss.

For me, at least, this isn’t about theory. I’ve written before about the importance of William Carlos Williams’ poem, “The Desert Music,” in shaping my recognition that I was to be a poet. While, in retrospect, this is the most traditionally narrative of Williams’ poems, it was precisely its other elements – especially the depiction of the person sleeping on the bridge – that enabled me at the age of 16 to “get” how poetry was uniquely able to incorporate what Williams would have characterized as despised materials, but which I would have identified (then & now) as the “invisible,” the background, the details that in fact make up the surfaces and textures of daily life. It was exactly this capacity for what Patrick calls the quotidian that brought me to poetry.

I had been writing since the age of 10 in order, I realize now – I couldn’t have articulated it then – to bring order to my world. Like more than a few other poets, I was raised in a classically dysfunctional family – the 500 pound gorilla in our living room that went unseen & undiscussed was my grandmother’s mental illness – and writing gave me not only a place to escape (although it did that also), but critical tools I could not have found any other way as a pre-teen.

However, raised in a house in which the only creative work around were four-to-a-volume Readers Digest Condensed Novels, the idea of poetry, let alone all its possibilities, was outside my field of vision until I picked up that volume by Williams in the Albany Public Library sometime around 1962. At that time, I was writing dreadful teenage fiction. I was under the impression – and I’ve seen some of the responses to Patrick’s post on ImitaPo that reflect this position – that one was constrained to craft novels around characters and action in order to get to this “real” material, the so-called background detail. From my perspective, the so-called elements of the “narrative drive” of a novel were really just an excuse for enabling the author to incorporate what mattered most: these tiny elements at the margins. The idea of a literature that could raise the invisible up to the field of vision, in & of itself, was a revelation.

So for me, the quotidian, to call it that (I never think of it as such), is not about adding a layer of texture for the sake of enhancing a reality effect. The invisible or marginal is not adjunct to the work: it is the work itself. I want you to understand that dust bunny in the corner under your desk. The whole of human history can be found there.

But how that history is to be discovered matters terribly. One of the primary objections I have to the school of quietude is its grotesque sense of heroism, even when it’s a heroism of everyday objects. A trowel is not a trope. This always seems to me a fundamental dishonesty, a true violation of any pact with the reader, even with the self. It’s a betrayal of the world of objects & of the objective. Such poetry is founded on precisely the dynamics that render the most critical elements of the world invisible. So when I take exception to the writing of a Robert Lowell or a Phil Levine or a Linda Gregg or an Alfred Corn, it’s really an allegiance to that ten year old boy I once was to which I continue to stand fast. I won’t betray him by creating a false world, a poetry of lies.

Against this I would pose Francis Ponge’s uses of the object as exemplary. His use of soap, his elaboration of fauna. His insistence on the thingness of things. To this I would add the thingness of words, their literal immanence, which is what I get out of Stein and so much of the best writing of the past thirty years. This has very little to do with any grounding of the abstract. Rather, I see it as an issue of being present in my own life. This is how poetry matters.

I’ve made caustic comments here about a few poets whom I’ve associated with the tradition I’ve characterized (to borrow from Edgar Allan Poe) as the school of quietude, that tendency within American letters that envisions poetry in the United States as continuous with (& mostly derivative from) verse in the British Isles, and especially from the most conservative elements there. So the question naturally arises: are there conservative poets whose work I genuinely like?

The answer is yes. I think Hart Crane’s The Bridge a master work of American poetry. There are aspects of Wallace Stevens work that I like, even though he suffers from being so overrated by his advocates. Ditto the early Eliot, though the canonization process is not nearly what it was when I was in college, mercifully. I’ve been reading Jack Gilbert and Robert Hass with interest & even passion for over 30 years*, have always thought Berryman’s Dream Songs, Plath’s Ariel, John Logan’s Zigzag Walk and even Merwin’s The Lice admirable. There are elements in Robert Lowell’s best writing that suggest that he had the potential to have been another Frank O’Hara had he not been so horrifically dysfunctional, aesthetically as well as emotionally. Alan Dugan is a guilty pleasure. And Wendell Berry is a poet for whom the term conservative should be understood literally, in the very best sense. The values he espouses in his poetry & life seem to me to fit together seamlessly. So when I come down harshly on a poet such as Richard Wakefield, it’s because he writes so ineffectively: his sense of metrics could only be characterized as plodding and bungled.

On my desk is a manuscript for a book entitled Calendars by Annie Finch that Tupelo Press will be printing sometime soon. It’s a marvelous manuscript by a poet who could easily be taken for one of the New Formalists, in the Timothy Steele vein, but who is also, I would argue, a formalist in the tradition, say, of Bernadette Mayer & Lee Ann Brown. Which is to say: she gets it. Her commitment is to the language, even as the strategies she deploys are most often taken from oldest playbook there is. At times, as in the poem “Moon,” her work reminds me of H.D.’s sense of timing, so very deliberate & ordered:

Then are you the dense everywhere that moves,
the dark matter they haven’t yet walked through?

(No, I’m not, I’m just the shining sun,
sometimes covered up by the darkness.)

But in your beauty – yes, I know you see –
There is no covering, no constant light.
<![if !supportLineBreakNewLine]>
<![endif]>

That supplemental yes in the last couplet, the fact that the final syllable in each line articulates a phonemic openness, except for the last, even the use of the capital letter at the start of the final line (but not in the final line of the other stanzas), all demonstrate a control over the materials at hand that is extraordinary. That yes functions as though it were a sigh, modulating & redirecting  the timing of the work away from dialog & toward conclusion. It’s a device that I’ve often been suspicious of – Josephine Miles, another traditionalist whose work I take seriously, too often incorporated such asides just to even out meter or complete an end-rhyme. Finch uses it here to halt the flow of the text, to gather the language up into an expression of breath. It is no accident that every word in that aside uses exactly one syllable** or that there are no hard consonants there – the only moment in this six-line text where either of these conditions applies. I love it when someone can demonstrate such mastery in such a compact terrain.

I want to quote one other short poem here, my favorite, because of the way in which it blends an over-the-top sense of language’s lushness with a tone so soft it all but whispers. It’s called “Butterfly Lullaby.”

My wild indigo dusky wing
my mottled, broad-wing skipper,
a sleepy, dreamy dusty wing,
flying through my night.

My northern, southern, cloudy wing,
my spring azure, my crescent pearl,
a silver-spotted, sweet question mark,
sleeping in my sky.

A tiger swallowtail, harvester,
moving through my hours,
an eyed brown in the redwing dark,
wrapped softly in my words.

We haven’t had a poet so capable of combining control & excess since the young Robert Duncan.

* I have a theory that Jack’s animated & public distaste for langpo has to do with the fact that he himself, were he younger, would have been one. This is, after all, the man who once wrote (quoting from memory here): “Helot for what time there is in the baptist hegemony of death.”

** Shades again of H.D. and even of Lew Welch.