No less an authority than Herman Melville once declared Redburn: His First Voyage to be “trash,” a work of commerce & not art. It was the fourth of the eight novels that Melville wrote in an eight-year period of immense creative output stretching from 1846 through 1853. Written after the commercial failure of Mardi, the book recounts the travels of Wellingborough Redburn as he ships out on a voyage to Liverpool & back. In it we see less of the wide-eyed autobiographical memoir of his first two books – Melville certainly is not Redburn, a supercilious young prig buffeted by the lumpen of the ship’s crew – but don’t yet find the majesterial wanderings of imagination that feed into Moby-Dick.

It is, in fact, the seams that I find most compelling in this book, which I downloaded from Gutenberg & popped as a PDF file onto the old Palm Pilot I still use for such purposes. Melville teaching himself to write is the much more fascinating tale here & anyone who has read Moby-Dick knows that the digressions are not just part of the story, but very much its essence as well.

Digression, of course, is as old as Tristram Shandy, even Don Quixote. It’s baked into the formula of the novel itself, regardless of whatever Saul Bellow & the other advocates of the invisible text might think. More interesting, at least here, are the other seams, for example Redburn’s character, which Melville struggles to separate from himself. Redburn comes away as pompous in that defensive manner overly serious young men can take on. In turn, what it tells us is that our narrator is both young & uncertain of himself. This latter part is tricky, since the tale is told retrospectively. To what degree are we to read Redburn’s callowness as an index of his youth, and to what degree is this a character flaw inherent in the man? And do we ever spy Melville himself peering through the veils?

One place would appear to be a trio of mentions of John Milton scattered throughout the book. The first two mentions are the sort of passing allusions one might expect from Buttons, as the other sailors call him, who takes his rural New York sophistication seriously, for example, saying of the drone of a particular Liverpool beggar that

it produced the same effect upon me, that my first reading of Milton's Invocation to the Sun did, years afterward.

The second occurs in the most magical passage in the entire book, Redburn’s flight of fancy in response to the hand-organ music of his friend Carlo, which invokes – among many other things – a door that “like the gates of Milton’s heaven … turns on golden binges(sic).”

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?