A Live Fish in the Hand: Soul Powers of the Prose Poem       A Review-Essay by Eric Ekstrand Joe Bonomo, Installations.      Penguin Books, 2008. Paperback, 62 pp, $16.00. Mary Ruefle, The Most of It.      Wave Books, 2008. Paperback, 80 pp, $11.95. Charles Simic, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks.      Ausable Press, 2008. Paperback, 120 pp, $14.00. When someone asks, “What is a prose poem?” he or she usually means one of three things: First, “What is its form?” Second, “What is its genre?” Or third, “What is its soul?” In this last case I mean, what is the emotional or psychological center of a prose poem; what is its reason for being? I’d like to address all of these questions in turn: the first two immediately, and the third—because it is the most complicated—I’ll consider in greater detail through a review of three recent books. The form question is the easiest to answer: prose poems don’t use lines. This is the only discernable “rule” of prose poetry, the only aspect of prose poetry that is incontrovertible. Considered in this way—as a form—prose poetry is relatively recent. It has only been around for about two hundred years, although Shelley might say it began earlier, in English rather than French, with the King James Bible. The form is nevertheless an adolescent compared to others that are still widely in use: for instance the sonnet and the sestina, which first appeared in the 1300s; or the villanelle, which appeared three centuries later. And while the prose poem’s progenitors are well-known—Bertrand, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Stein, Mallarmé, Wilde—the form wasn’t used widely in America until the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, culminating with the founding of a flurry of journals dedicated singularly to prose poetry, including The Prose Poem: An International Journal, and Sentence. Based on its prominence in late-twentieth-century America, one might think of the prose poem as an “open” form, because it does not use rhyme or traditional meter. Yet the prose poem actually emerged contemporaneously with Whitman, and its invention precedes the open forms of modernism by a century. The prose poem is therefore not an offshoot or subset of free verse, but rather a separate phenomenon that emerged alongside such open forms, out of the same nineteenth-century Western need for something radically new in poetry. But even if we don’t take this historical perspective, the prose poem remains distinct from free verse because even the most “open” poetic forms are still lineated. The prose poem’s recent prominence—the sheer volume of poetry written in this form—forces us to consider it as an entity all its own. But all this is relatively uncontroversial. The question of genre is much more problematic because the prose poem’s form—its lack of lineation—requires us to reconsider the distinction we typically make between prose and poetry. Russel Edson, an often-quoted authority on the form in America, said once in an interview that if it’s “not something else it’s probably a prose poem.” By this logic prose poetry does not belong to any genre, nor is it a genre unto itself; instead it is a language-thing that resists genre, or asks us to forget about genre entirely. What I mean is prose poetry is not a genre, but an anti-genre; it is both here and not. Many people have asked what the differences are among short-shorts, flash fiction, nano-fiction, prose-poems, novels-in-verse, micro-essays, etc. This is a question that can’t be answered, because to do so would be to apply the terministic screens of genre to deliberately de-genred writing. In Installations, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the 2007 National Poetry Series, Joe Bonomo includes an untitled poem that deals pointedly with the problem of genre, which is a central theme of the book. The volume is composed entirely (with one exception) of ekphrastic prose poems based on a fictional contemporary installation exhibit. Bonomo’s collection is simultaneously spare, like a museum wall, and strange. For practicality’s sake, I’ll quote from the beginning and end of the poem in question, although there is a whole poem in between that you should read: A large, well-lit, white-walled room. You walk to a red line painted on the floor. In the center of the room, a film projector rests upon a simple wooden table. The projector is missing its rear spool. A book rests behind the projector on a tiny table. Is it a novel? It’s large enough to be a novel. It’s hardcover. Is it non-fiction? Poetry? […] The small film repeats itself endlessly. And the book.  (7–8) The central question of the poem is this: “What is the art?” Is it the book (and is the book poetry, fiction, or nonfiction)? Is it what’s being projected (or not being projected, since the projector is missing a spool)? Is it the room in which all of this takes place? Is the art, in fact, what happens in your head as you stand at the red line and view this activity? Is it in fact the thing you are reading in a book called Installations, by Joe Bonomo? If it is, then what is that thing—a poem, fiction, or nonficiton? Or the question may more precisely be, “Does it matter what the art is?” Does it change what happens in the moment of experience? In that artful moment are you, the reader or viewer, consciously asking yourself “What is the genre of this thing I’m reading or viewing?,” even as the poem or installation directly asks you to? My guess is probably not. The question of genre always happens after the fact. And really, this question doesn’t have a lot to do with our understanding of the writing in the first place, except that we, as readers, like to know which set of rules is being broken: if Bonomo’s writings are flash fiction, then they break the formal conventions of fiction by behaving more like poems; if they are prose-poems, then they break the formal conventions of poetry by behaving more like fiction. We readers like these distinctions to be clear; we like to know which traditional genre is being referenced, even if we know the author is subverting that genre in particular ways. Categories are tempting for the conceptualizing/empirical mind, but the prose-poem doesn’t let us rest in any genre. The “prose poem” is not a genre at all, but an anti-genre, and so we cannot trust what genre is printed on the cover of the book. This is why I’ve included The Most of It, Mary Ruefle’s “first book of prose,” in this review, as well as The Monster Loves His Labyrinth, which is billed as excerpts from Charles Simic’s “notebooks.” I don’t mean to argue that Ruefle’s book isn’t prose, or that Simic’s book is actually not his notebooks—I think they are. But we can also talk about these volumes as collections of prose poems, and as readers we shouldn’t be limited by the genres printed on their covers. Monster contains what may sometimes be plans for poems, may sometimes be off-hand plans for nothing, or may sometimes be first lines, last lines, and middle lines of poems. In general, the volume contains the detritus of a brilliant poetic mind, the individual pieces of which are not really useful except in their collection. The Monster Loves His Labyrinth is a spirited book, uncontrolled and funny, employing the quick turn to achieve its effects. In this way, it deals with cognition at an elemental level: it directs the mind, then redirects it. The individual parts of this volume are not prose poems by name, but they may be in spirit. It isn’t respectable to talk about such things as “spirits” or “souls” of poems; to do so is very romantic, Romantic, insubstantial, and not sufficiently rigorous in any academic sense. In study, the fashion is to trust the empirical, observable, and conceptual—souls are none of these things. But since an empirical study of genre doesn’t get us very far with de-genred writing, souls are really all we have to go on. The same is true for The Most of It, Mary Ruefle’s recent collection from Wave Books. What we know empirically is that the book is labeled “prose.” Fine. But the imagistic and emotional impact of these writings seems much more in keeping with Ruefle’s poetry than with most prose; we find her characteristic sense of play, closeness, and melancholy. Last year I had the pleasure of hearing Ruefle read from this volume, and the event was confrontational in the best way: very large, but untheatrical, like this book. Before reading, Ruefle waved her hand and said something like, “I am going to read prose or poems; and in the end it doesn’t matter what you call them.” Having read this far you might ask, “If prose-poetry is an anti-genre, how can it be tagged to any work of art with any kind of certainty?” It can’t; there is no certainty. This process of identification is less like noting phylum, species, and class, and more like reading auras. So you’d be right to ask next, “If genre doesn’t help us understand the written work, why should we care whether or not something is a prose-poem?” And the answer is you shouldn’t care much at all, although the term “prose poem” exists in our language, so it must have some real conceptual presence, however tenuous. If the prose poem is (however vaguely) here in the world of poetry, as poets and readers we should probably talk about it… but only a little bit. And while we cannot talk about the rules of a rule-breaking thing, we can talk about the inconstant powers of the prose poem’s restless soul. Prose poetry itself is often considered a paradox; and, as I see it, the essence or soul of the prose poem can be divided into two paradoxes: completeness/incompleteness and death/humor. These paradoxes are deeply interwoven but I would like to consider each part on its own. All-Together Apart One soul power of the prose poem is completeness. Prose poetry, in form and often in content, leaves less of a “gap” than lineated poetry typically does. We are simply told more on the literal level in a prose poem; less is left to suggestion. More concretely, there are no line breaks in prose poems to suggest periodic caesuras, or gaps in speech or thought. This lack of line breaks is a visual reminder of a move toward more completeness, more of “the most of it,” and less of the “the less of it.” The poet wants to bring the reader closer, in certain respects, to herself, or to life—to make a complete circuit between the writer and reader. This is necessarily awkward, rocky, and forceful, and so we leave the prose poem with a sense of unease. This is what the prose poem wants, not love but “counter-love,” as Frost would say. The prose poem wants the reader to be repulsed, in a certain sense, by how close it brings you; like someone with bad breath whispering a secret to you. At the same time, the prose poem seems to want the reader to live her life more presently by defining it against the poem, and therefore love the poem because it has moved the reader back to her life. This quality of unsure intimation between the writer and reader seems crucial to Simic, where we feel like we are intruding on his private thoughts—the contents of his diary—which were not meant for publication. In Ruefle’s poems we are shown the ugliness and tenderness and confusion of her mind, which, through the act of reading, is also our mind. What else is reading but one mind inhabiting another? By both, we are repulsed. Consider this excerpt from the end of “Snow,” which begins Ruefle’s collection: … I love watching it snow on graves, how cold the snow is, even colder the stones, and the ground is the coldest of all, and the bones of the dead are in the ground, but the dead are not cold, snow or no snow, it means very little to them, nothing, it means nothing to them, but for us, watching it snow on the dead, watching the graveyard get covered in snow, it is very cold, the snow on top of the graves over the bones, it seems especially cold, and at the same time especially peaceful, it is like snow falling gently on sleepers, even if it is in a hurry it seems gentle, because the sleepers are gentle, they are not anxious, they are sleeping through the snow and they will be sleeping beyond the snow, and although I will be having sex while it snows I want to remember the quiet, cold, gentle sleepers who cannot think of themselves as birds nestled in feathers, but who are themselves, in part, part of the snow, which is falling with such steadfast devotion to the ground all the anxiety in the world seems gone, the world seems deep in abed as I am deep in a bed, lost in the arms of my lover, yes, when it snows like this I feel the whole world has joined me in isolation and silence.  (14–15) This passage conceives of the world as a community of loners. Everything is covered and made to be one complete, white whole. In a snowscape there is only one thing: a snowscape. However, the poet is alone and the reader is alone, and they are together in the poem; even when we are in each other’s arms we are alone, and certainly when we die we are alone. There is something blank, snowy (perhaps a Melvillian white) that connects us, or at least reduces the gaps, and in the above poem this is linked with love. Or as Simic writes, “Imagination equals Eros. I want to experience what it’s like to be inside someone else in the moment when that someone is being touched by me” (77). Spontaneous Non-Achievement We’ve already considered one of the soul powers of prose poetry: completeness. Here is another: incompleteness. When reading Monster, one has to wade through a lot of Charles Simic to get to Charles Simic. Not everything in the notebook is of value in the conventional sense, but passages that might seem vapid are often vehicles to moments of the sublime. This might be considered an aspect of prose. It is an aspect of some poetry, and most prose poetry. Part of the value of Simic’s Monster is that it isn’t meticulously edited so as to make its contents something other than what they are: unfinished snatches of the mind. There is deliberate excess. Prose poems are gross, in the sense that they are excessive, total, and whole, but also fat and disgusting. The prose poems in The Monster Loves His Labyrinth sometimes move, and sometimes don’t. Take this passage that I can do without: “I love the saying ‘No two eggs are alike.’” And this, which I can’t do without: “Metaphor proves the existence of Heaven and Hell.” Can do without: “It is the object I’m watching, the fork, for example, which sets up the rules of its visibility.” Can’t: “Poem: A theater in which one is the auditorium, the stage, the sets, the actors, the author, the public, the critic. All at once!” These all come from the same page (47) and are complete poems in and of themselves, but if we look at them as organs of a single organism then we can see the oscillation between registers of the mundane and the inspired, or perhaps the less hierarchical classifications, “prosaic” and “poetic.” Although I like some passages more than others, to select too much when compiling a collection of prose poems—to have leanness—would miss the point. Rough edges and spontaneous non-achievement are the editorial principles here. “A sweet disorder in the dress,” we might say. Prose poetry is happy to remind us not to be too ordered, too complete, because this, of course, is apart from our messy lives. If prose poetry were too ordered then it would have some ambition: to moralize, to teach, to point, instead of to be some weird thing on our nightstand. So this incompleteness (by which I mean that the work seems unfinished) is a result of completeness (by which I mean that the work is including, full, immediate, and untrimmed). Like Simic, Ruefle also plays with leaps of registers and tones within her poems. “My Search Among the Birds” is a poem in diary entries, which reminds us of Simic’s Notebooks. Here is a portion: … Sept 1   Early this morning a cardinal appears out of nowhere, looking like Santa Claus. (later) Suddenly it occurs to me this just might be the birds’ Christmas—I must do something quick, something special. (later) Went out and bought six paper bags of French fries, carefully arranging them in the Frisbee so their ends were up (later) A dove comes, a pale gray soft dove, smaller than the pigeons but larger than the wrens. Doves are lovebirds, how can they come in anything less than a pair? My medium dove must be a heartbroken one. My French fries are eaten by the medium heartbroken dove. Is there anything sadder than the sight of a medium heartbroken dove stuffed with French fries on Christmas morning?  (40) We begin this poem in humor and end in sadness, which is itself humorous. This rub of contradictory tones is the disjunctive element. Conversely, though, we are pulled closer and closer to the speaker, to her inner life, as we begin to understand her psychological projections onto the activities of the birds—in other words, the gaps are closed between the speaker and reader, between the speaker and the birds, and between the tones of humor and death. So again we can see the relationship between completeness and incompleteness. I should say, here, that I realize these shifts in tone and register happen in lined and unlined poems alike, as well as in novels, and film, and dance, and painting, etc. But it seems to me that these leaps happen very frequently in prose poems—in fact within and between most of the poems in these three books—so much so that to not mention this play and quick movement as a crucial feature of prose poetry would seem a severe mistake. The Thread that Unravels the Shirt, Proving the Shirt Was Never There to Begin With The next soul power that deserves our attention is death. I am using “death” here in a very broad way to mean the taking-apart of anything, from ideologies to cars. The prose poem pronounces the death of the line first and then goes on like a whistling coroner to pronounce dead just about anything one can think of. It unfixes prematurely every seemingly fixed thing. The final poem in Installations, again untitled, unfixes the self, the boundary between receptor and art, and traditional dichotomies like man and woman: A large, well-lit, white-walled room. You walk to a red line painted on the floor. If you step across you will vanish. If you step across you will metamorphose. If you step across you will articulate. If you step across you will assemble. If you step across you will arrange and rearrange… If you step across you will eliminate like or as. If you step across you will awaken in the middle of a magic trick. If you step across you will pregender. If you step across you will become a child with an old man’s heart. If you step across you will become an old woman with a child’s heart. If you step across you will see inside. If you step across you will fuse, and for the purposes of comparison     you will become one.  (61) And it continues. This could be a prose poem of one-sentence paragraphs, or it could be a poem in verse (which is not a redundancy, thanks to the prose poem) using long end-stopped lines. So in his final poem, Bonomo aims to unfix whatever fixity we have come to assume even about the prose poem as a form. The poem in this way adds a second layer of ambiguity. It also attempts to break the fourth wall by pulling the reader into one of the installations, so that all perspective, sense, and conception begins to break apart in a lyric unspooling, the shutters of the grave flung open. And we realize with joy that these things were always dead and so don’t have any power over us. This is the end-result of paradox: we feel unlimited. “This morning I want to talk a little about killing,” says Ruefle. “You know it is never easy. There can never be enough killing. It is the biggest earthly part of time yet we are often shy of it.” This is how Ruefle begins her darkly funny soliloquy delivered to the young oarsmen of Camp William. She continues: When I was a child my father often took me to visit various military installations, and to enter each one we had first to pass through a little gate where a guard waved at us and we were expected to wave back. […] If two strangers can express such unspoken goodwill toward each other, how much more so must take place when we are killing! For the greatest acts of killing take place between strangers, strangers for whom there exists this wonderful capacity for intimate connection.  (16) Violence is an interaction. The interaction between poet and reader, or if you like, poet and poem, can be violent—the poet grabbing you by the lapels and saying, “Listen!” When a poem is good it dismantles something in the reader. “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry,” says Dickinson. The prose poem does this by dismantling conventional language (and the conventional conceptions housed in that language) until—clip!—your scalp pops open. Then there is some space, some lightness; we do not have to be so frightened of death, which becomes a place where we find some connection, although not the kinds of connections we may be used to. After all, we have “passed through a gate” and entered an “installation” (it is a happy coincidence that Ruefle uses Bonomo’s word here), and things cannot be the same. The “connection” in a prose poem can be very literal, physical: fist-on-face. Or the fist-on-face could be a perversion of the desire for a more tender connection between people clouded by some neurosis, neurosis itself being something that connects us all. For the purpose of this essay I’m using the most self-referential and abstract of the poem’s possible meanings, although I admit this is a bit of an imposition: the connection between writer and reader when they meet as two death masks, knocking together in the space loosened by the poet’s violent approach to language. Language is inherently compartmentalizing and hieratic, the stuff of which identities are composed. The prose poem has the potential to lift these entrenchments away, uniquely among other kinds of poems, because of its slippery tendency to behave like a live fish in the hand. When these entrenchments are gone it is a kind of momentary death for the reader. Watch out, the prose poet is trying to kill you. Laugh Riots: Blown-Out Storefronts and Bellyaches The final aspect I’d like to address, which is common in most prose poems, is a fascination with iconoclasty—the punk’s urge to fuck shit up—which comes from an acknowledgement of everything’s ultimate demise. If there is no self, then we can’t take our selves seriously, and so this soul power might best be called humor. We are all destructors; there is some childlike joy in seeing dog shit burn on a stoop. This is the same joy we feel seeing such old and reverent institutions as Poetry or Literature burn. Ruefle’s and Simic’s books flirt with this laugh-as-it-burns mentality. Simic seeks to tear down conceptions of self, nation, and god. He writes, “Rushdie’s case proves that literature is the dangerous activity, not literary criticism and its currently fashionable notion that literature is merely the propaganda of the ruling ideology” (74). Even more to the point, he writes later: It’s the desire for irreverence as much as anything else that brought me first to poetry. The need to make fun of authority, break taboos, celebrate the body and its functions, claim that one has seen angels in the same breath that one says there is no god. Just thinking about the possibility of saying shit to everything made me roll on the floor with happiness.  (70) This says it all. One virtue of disorder and of irreverence is that they remind us that everything is continuously falling apart around us, including our own bodies, and that this is a great joy because we realize, finally, that we don’t have and never have had anything to lose; at once there is extreme giddiness and extreme sadness. Edson defines humor as “that gaiety that death teaches.” The soul-power of humor, which may be the most central of the soul-powers, is ultimately a realization of nothingness or death that is the source of all laughter and play. This is not just the condition of prose poems, but also the human condition. So laugh it up. Humor is one of the things that separates humans from the rest of the animal world. Of course animals play and feel light-hearted, we can see that, but irony is lost on most. So it is no surprise that poets are so fascinated by humor; poets who are fascinated by the human. Although Ruefle finds much humor in the animal world and in her own animal desires, there is a tinge of melancholy in it—an embarrassment at having said too much—and self-deprecation. This is a much more personal humor than Simic’s, which is more of a public performance. Look at Ruefle’s “Peek-a-Moose”: … And I knew somewhere deeply recessed, ‘away from it all,’ the real with-it-all took place; there, in the undulating mists, a moose eating the dark green mosses was barely seen through the pines, which were repossessed in the animal’s eyebrows (do moose have eyebrows?) … and in the glarelight of the pizza parlor I chose anchovies which I did not like but seemed ancient and suffering, such small animals, and I took the pie home with me and ate it with my mouth gaping, painfully aware I was not a moose and had never been a moose and would never be a moose, but I had loved you in such an eerie and unnatural way.  (52) There is a ridiculous and sad non-relationship between the grazing moose and the grazing “I” in this poem. And a silly sympathy for the anchovies mirrors the ridiculous and sad non-relationship between the speaker and the interlocutor (I love you like a moose) who appears in a characteristic eleventh-hour turn, a gesture favored by Simic as well. But there is also something not-so-silly about these relationships. Imagination here is an instrument of love. The uncompleted volley of love from the “I” to the “You” is redeemed in the complete love between “I” and moose and “I” and anchovy. That this love is imagined and interspecial does not make it unimportant. Though funny, this love is also serious because it is an enactment of one of the highest possibilities of humor and poetry: to dissolve boundaries. I don’t mean to make the joke seem too noble—of course sloppily eating brined fish pizza is first and foremost grotesque—but it is a paradoxical grotesqueness that easily contains opposites. This grotesqueness is the lighthearted destruction of cell walls where “I” mixes with moose in the same way that the laugh mixes with the sob. A Possible Ending By demonstrating the soul powers of the prose poem, I do not mean to suggest that a work lacking any of these characteristics should not be called a prose poem. Far from it. These are simply trends that I notice in the prose poem’s production in America so far. The main feature of all poems—and especially the prose poem—is possibility, and the truth is: a prose poem can be anything, and most likely will be something very different not too long from now. American prose poetry is already very different from its French predecessors. Simic’s poems are different from Ruefle’s, which are different from Bonomo’s. And it’s my wish that most of what I’ve argued here will be irrelevant and untrue for the prose poems yet to be written. If it were any other way, then the prose poem’s work would be finished; it would mean that there was nothing else possible for it.